The Joys Of Selling Online

So you have a retail store. You have been happily trading for years, welcoming your customers old and new into your shop. Everything is great.

Then BAM. Lockdown 🙁

So from years of doing the same daily routines, you are faced with a dilemma. How am I going to survive? What will happen to all my stock? Will I ever be able to trade again?

What a nightmare.

Many of you have considered going online, but how will you do it? You may not think you have any tech skills. Where will you find the time to learn it all?

But guess what? Now is the most amazing time for you to delve in and give it a go. You have the stock, you have the product knowledge, you have the potential customer base waiting to spend money with you again PLUS you now have the vital ingredient…..time!!

And now, you have the chance to sell your products on Facebook and Instagram too! What an amazing opportunity to jump in and give it a go. What have you to lose?

Selling socially

Over the past few weeks, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and Instagram has released news of a great partnership with eCommerce leader Shopify, to give everyone, even restaurants and takeaways, the chance to relatively easily set up an online shop, plus have the great feature of your products being integrated within the 2 most powerful social media platforms, where the vast majority of your current customers are hanging out, virtually every minute of every day!

Plus there’s the chance of attracting a brand new audience, who once things are ‘back to normal’ should hopefully become in-store shoppers too.

Obviously, there’s much to do, but come on, you’ve set up a ‘real’ shop and been trading successfully, so you’ve obviously got a good business brain so there’s no reason at all why you can’t master how to be successful online too.

The Easy (ish) Guide To Selling Online

• List down your product categories (minimum of 6 products for each)
• List down 6 products for each category
• List prices for each product
• Take at least one good photo for each
• Give each product a unique title, including brand, colour, style etc
• Write a couple of sentences to describe each product
• List quantities of each product

This gives you great foundations for your product catalogue and at this stage is the most time-consuming activity, but once it is done, you can breathe a huge sigh of relief!

Next, you need to start thinking about the following:

• What is the website domain going to be ( www.yourbrand.co.uk). You can go to https://who.is/ type in any ideas and see if they are available
• Have you a logo? If not, maybe try creating one using an app like www.canva.com
• Who is going to build it (me, me!!) or maybe try to have a go yourself at www.shopify.com

If you can achieve the above, you are well on your way to being able to set up your online store. Yes, there’s a lot of work to do, but the rewards could be life-changing.

I am more than happy to advise on the next steps, so feel free to reach out to me for a chat.

Just go for it!