Retail Stores and Online Stores – Best of Both

You might be a running a Mom and Pop shop. May be an antique stores in a small town and wondering how to expand the business beyond the boundaries of the neighborhood, town or city or even country.

Amazon, Ebay, Shopify – Your gateways to the online world

You can sell the same items you are selling in the stores in online stores also and ship to customers when orders are received. Online marketplaces like Amazon, Shopify makes it easy to list hundreds of products with good images and sell them to customers. For less than hundred dollars a month, you can have the online stores up and running. Also to set up the stores, it does not need any programming or software knowledge. You can just take pictures of the items that you are in your stores and upload them to Amazon and start selling. Check this article on why Amazon is the largest marketplace to sell your products.

Inventory Management is the Challenge

While selling the items in the online stores could be easy, managing the inventory across multiple locations could be difficult. Let us say you have listed a product in Amazon that you are selling in the stores also. You may have limited inventory on stock and as soon as a sale is made in your stores, you want your online stores to be updated of the current inventory. Otherwise if a customer orders online, it will become back ordered and reduce your seller rating in the online stores like Amazon.

Software to manage your Ecommerce business

There are many Ecommerce apps that are available in the market that can automate your Ecommerce business. For example TPSynergy is an app that can list products automatically in amazon and synchronize inventory and also ship customer orders. Similarly Vendhq is a point of sale software that can be used to manage the retail stores sales.

Learn the ropes

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the next process you will be looking at once you have setup an online shop and started selling few items. There are lot of resources available in the internet on how you can make your online stores more popular. However, if you are having a niche product, say antique items from a specific state, it can create a niche market for you and you will be able to sell through word of mouth and Face book likes and reviews.

Conclusion

With very tough competition given by online stores to retail business, retail stores have started taking their share out of the online business. Setting up an online stores is not as difficult as it appears to be. Very less technical skills are needed to start and run a successful online Ecommerce business.