How To Sell Your Products Online?

E-commerce is gaining pace! Research firm eMarketer predicts that2003 will see online sales reaching US $58.2 billion excludingtravel. According to Forrester Research, another reputable research company, business to consumer e-commerce will hit US $230 billion by the year 2008. While offline retail sales are staggering and will continue to do so in near term, online retail sales will show a hefty 19 percent consecutive year over year growth! And by the same year, two third of all US households will buy some kind of products and services online. In 2003 alone 97 million consumers will make some kind of purchases through the Internet.

If you are selling products and services offline, you should seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk loosing significant portion of your business to your more proactive competitors!

Is it difficult to start selling products or services online?

May be, in the beginning of Internet era, this was a daunting task, but today, with proper planning it is fairly easy.

- Choose the products or services that are viable to sell over the Internet

- Build an online presence

- Create an online product catalog

- Choose payment methods

- Promote

Select products or services to sell

Although, some products are easier to sell online, contrary to popular believe, most of the products and services are, actually, marketable on the Internet. At present, books, electronics, information and travel related products are selling better online. But, that does not mean that there is no room for other products or services. As a matter of fact, you can sell just about anything over the Internet! It depends more on the market segment you choose, and how good you are in marketing. As you know, traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery store were not doing very well on the Internet. However, that is going to change very soon! According to Forrester Research many of today's slow categories are poised to significant growth as oppose to early online sales leaders like travel and electronics, which will experience market maturity and slower growth. Prediction is:

Food and beverage category will grow at a rate of 49 percent, reaching $18.2 billion by 2007. The home products category will grow by 42 percent over five years, from $7.3 billion in 2002 to $42.0 billion in 2007. Flowers, cards, and gifts will grow by 41 percent, from $951 million in 2002 to $5.3 billion in 2007.

That's not all! By the year 2008, today's best selling product:books will have a mere 3 percent share of total business to consumer online sales.

So, if your products and services can generate offline sales there should not be any problem in selling these items online.

Build online presence

You can choose to build an e-commerce website either yourself by hiring required experts, i.e. web programmers or by appointing a website developing company to do the job for you. In both of the cases, you have to be prepared to spend a significant amount of money. E-commerce site is a very broad terminology! Depending on you demand, it can cost you from a modest US $800 to any where over a million US dollar! That's not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerabletime on it, as well. Writing the technical scope, choosing the appropriate design for your site and creating proper content for your site will take a lot of your time. And there is no guarantee that you will do everything right!

That's why, if you are new to e-commerce and do not want to spend a fortune in your first endeavor, you should think about making your online presence by choosing one of the available, on the Internet, Web Store services. There are enormous advantages of using these services:

- You can build one for a fraction of the cost, needed to create an e-commerce website.

- You can choose the design of your web store from numerous available templates.

- Simple editor allows you creating your web store all by yourself.

- You can be up and running within days.

- You can choose a merchant account from the one offered by the service provider.

There are many Web Store service providers on the Internet like Yahoo! Store, Bigstep, Rusbiz, etc. Compare and choose the one, which best suits your requirement. As an added advantage, some of the Web Store service providers will integrate your store with a shopping mall or e-marketplace free of charge. This will instantly expose your web store to a large targeted prospective customer audience.Create an online catalog

If you sell only one or couple of products and do not add products or services often, you don't require an online catalog. However, if you have a product line of over 10 products and you constantly add or change products, you should consider a web store with the facility of an online product catalog. This feature of a web store service allows rapid developing and maintaining of you electronic catalog without spending large sums on creating one by yourself.

Look for a web store service provider who offers wizard or form base product adding method to the electronic catalog and use some kind of standard product classification codes. At later stage, if you choose to sell products through e-marketplaces, this will allow you to integrate your products to e-marketplaces and make sales offers with ease.

Choose a payment method

If you are planning to sell ebooks, reports, whitepapers etc. I would suggest you to consider using clickbank's marketplace. That way, you don't have to worry about getting a credit card merchant account.

Around 90 percent of all sales transaction occur online are by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment over the Internet, you must first have a merchant account. A merchant account allows a vendor to process credit card transactions. If you built a web store online with one of the web store service providers, you will see that they offer gateways to one or several merchant account providers and have partnership with them. In general, you get a better deal with them. However, as charges vary significantly from one merchant account provider to another, make sure you shop around before committing yourself to one.

Promote you site

To sell your products through your site, you must draw traffic. There are number of ways of promoting your site on the Internet. This includes:

- Search engine submissions

- Adding your site to different online directories

- Opt-in email campaign

- Link exchange

- Banner and link ads

In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as many offline and online promotional methods you can come up with. The more traffic you can generate the better chance you have of selling more products from your Web Store.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business.You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com, http://www.rusbiz.com

Amazon has begun taking pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S III, a handset that will become available in Europe at the end of this month. The offering has caused some head-scratching: If this were the newest iPhone, the rush to get one might be understandable. However, the unlocked Galaxy S III smartphone will cost an eye-popping $799.99, and it won't be fully compatible with any U.S. network.

Google has officially closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. This could transform the search engine giant from a software player to a maker of hardware: smartphones, tablet PCs and even set-top boxes. More importantly for Google is gaining control of Motorola's patent portfolio, which could help it fend off lawsuits from rivals such as Apple and Microsoft.

Apple filed a motion for an injunction against a familiar patent sparring opponent Friday, requesting that Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 be banned from sales in the U.S. The company made a similar bid last year as part of the ongoing and many-faceted legal battle between Apple and Samsung.

The European Union's antitrust ax is about to fall on Google, but the company can still avoid the worst repercussions. That is the essence of the message from EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia. After a year-and-a-half investigation into Google's activities in the market, there are four areas of concern that need to be rectified, he said.

The x86 data center revolution has been a tale of industry standard upward mobility pressuring and displacing traditional systems. In essence, continually evolving x86-based systems and complementary technologies -- particularly virtualization, memory and I/O -- have provided hardware vendors the means to develop systems capable of challenging and beating traditional enterprise server platforms.

Personalization sits at the very heart of marketing performance improvement in B2B as well as in B2C companies. The latter camp has made enormous strides in recent years in being able to present customers and prospects with relevant content, offers, recommendations, and other types of messages via online channels, including the company website, in an automated and systematic fashion.

No one could accuse Facebook of having beginner's luck on Wall Street. The company's initial public offering on Friday was delayed by two hours due to a glitch in Nasdaq's trading system, prompting many traders to cancel orders because they were not sure of the stock's price. The day, in general, was arguably a disappointment for the social media giant, with its per share price ending only slightly above the $38 starting price.

Five major cable service providers in the United States are teaming up to allow their high-speed Internet customers access each other's metro WiFi networks. The five are Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable. The agreement will create a chain of more than 50,000 hotspots.

Yahoo will sell half its stake in Chinese e-commerce heavyweight Alibaba back to the company for about $7.1 billion, setting in motion a deal that will send cash toward Yahoo shareholders. The deal will take place in multiple stages. First, Alibaba will purchase about 20 percent of Yahoo's stake in the company.

Mediafly is a startup company that delivers cloud-based applications for content management and distribution on mobile devices for Fortune 500 companies. Through the Ariba Network, Mediafly gained insight and control over its cash flow and found new means of managing capital and in aiding its ability to support ongoing operations, as well as to drive future growth.

Silverpop has been on the vanguard of old-school digital marketing providers -- that is, email marketing firms -- embracing social media. The company has released a slew of products designed to integrate the two disciplines. Given that history, it is difficult to imagine a subsector or market constituency that it missed in its earlier product rollouts, but apparently Silverpop has found one, and it has set out to rectify the omission.

Over the next few years, the growth in online retail sales in markets such as Western Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America is expected to outpace U.S. growth. Given this increase in cross-border e-commerce, many retailers are rushing to reach new markets. However, the unique circumstances of international shipping call for unique systems and process capabilities.

For all the anticipation leading up to Facebook's initial public offering, opinions about how it performed are decidedly mixed. Clearly, though, the market didn't think the stock, which started at $38 per unit, was a grand bargain: Facebook ended trading on Friday just a few cents over its opening price.

As Facebook launched its IPO on Friday, it was hit with yet another class action lawsuit over its practice of tracking of users even after they had logged out of its website. The amended consolidated class action complaint was filed by Stewarts Law in a San Jose, Calif., federal court.

Samsung overtook Nokia to become the world's top cellular phone maker earlier this year, shipping more than 92 million handsets in the first quarter. The company's Galaxy S II smartphone had stellar sales, reaching 20 million. The third time might be more than the charm -- it could be big on an intergalactic scale, with some 9 million pre-orders reportedly placed for the upcoming Galaxy S III, which will debut in Europe on May 29.

Wearing his trademark hoodie, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg virtually rang Nasdaq's opening bell from Silicon Valley this morning to kick off the start of what will be a very interesting Friday. This is, of course, Facebook IPO day -- the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated initial public offering of the social media giant.

HP is planning significant layoffs with the aim of increasing efficiency and focusing on new products, according to a recent report citing an anonymous source. The company could lay off more than 30,000 workers, or nearly 10 percent of the company's total workforce of 324,000. The large-scale cuts are reportedly part of CEO Meg Whitman's effort to rebuild the company.

This spring has seen a raft of software company events and announcements, and they've been good meetings full of real news and important new developments. It is as if these companies bided their time during the worst of the recession, building new product, thinking about the future and how customers will use their technologies.

In the U.S. market, the percentage of broadband households owning and connecting at least one product besides PCs to the Internet has increased 45 percent between 2010 and 2011. Today, approximately 40 percent of all U.S. broadband households own at least one Internet-connected device, with game consoles accounting for 75 percent of these products.

Twitter has made an important overture to privacy advocates: It is giving users the ability to opt out of being tracked on the service by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser. Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, broke the news at an industry event Thursday morning in New York. The company later confirmed it in a message on Twitter.

The image-based social networking site Pinterest has raised $100 million in a financing round, and this brings the value of the company to around $1.5 billion, an unnamed source told All Things D. Rakuten, one of Japan's biggest online retail operators, led the round of financing. It was joined by a group of investors including venture-capital firms FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

Verizon will reveal a new shared data policy this summer and end its unlimited data option, according to CFO Fran Shammo. Currently, the company allows customers who had a $30-per-month unlimited data plan before Verizon's switch to tiered plans last July to keep their unlimited plans when they upgrade their phones to LTE devices. That option will soon be eliminated.

Google is extensively updating its search function with the rollout of a new Knowledge Graph. The heart of the Knowledge Graph is a database Google has compiled, via its own research and through its acquisition of MetaWeb Technologies, of 500 million people, places, things and points of history.

There's always a danger of reading analysis by others that matches your own personal experience and then simply using it to build up the foundation of what you know and believe. But hey, danger can spike adrenaline, and I like adrenaline, so check this out: Information technology research firm Gartner released a report about its worldwide tablet sales projections for 2012.

Customer service is a crucial part of the customer experience. That seems immediately obvious. And customer experience is the big buzzword right now, so companies are going bonkers revamping their customer service operations. Right? Would that it were so. Almost paradoxically, many businesses are still stuck in the mode of tweaking with utterly defective customer service processes.