Business Tips: How to build a profitable online store for your business

The secrets of building a reputable online store revealed

It is very clear that there is a big opportunity in owning an efficient online store in Nigeria, this isuildi because of Nigeria’s  population which is about 160 to 170 million people, and about 80 to 90 million are under the age of 20 which simply makes Nigeria largest consumer market in Africa generating huge demand for internet enabled devices like mobile phones,laptops,personal computers,and other mobile gadgets that would enable easy access to internet and shop online.

It can also be clearly seen the likes of jumia, konga, hotels.com,wakanow are leaders in online business having attracted over N200billion worth of foreign direct investments in Nigeria within a short period  of time.

Some online store wind-up few months after coming into existence as a result of their failure in understanding the underlying principles relating to the success of the above mentioned online business leaders. But do not worry I would explain to you the reason behind their success.

There are some basic questions you need to answer in other for you to be able to run a profitable online store. These questions are

• What is your product: you have to be certain about the product you are to sell, in other words  you must be certain about your niche market when starting an online store, i.e focusing on a particular or set of similar products for example hotel.ng  deals with hotel booking, DealDey focus on discounted products, wakanow focus on travels like wise so many others with a definite niche market.

For any product you want to start selling, be it digital products(e-books,video tutorials,etc) or non-digital products(physical items), you should have in mind that there are other locations where those products can be acquired, so you must be simply technical in running your online store in such a way that you have a better compelling reasons why your customers should buy from you. These compelling reasons can easily be achieved by solving the target customers pre-purchase problems, by educating them with outstanding contents or let me say orientations.

What I am trying to say in essence is that you have to really identify the problem your target customers  are facing, so as to enable you provide or proffer a solution in form of writing or maybe manual on how to use the products or even explaining your product quality to them. Although this problems may vary, so it is your duty to identify whatsoever problem the target customers are facing. 

With that you have closed the sale and can even charge a premium, but let me remind you that before you would  be able to charge a premium you must have done what other competitors are not doing.

• Who are your target customers:  when starting an online store you need  that customers, differs, Mr.A is different from Mr.B, so yu have to be realsiticand note thatall customers are different. Therefore you must identify the following,

a.What are the passion of your target customers, you must identify the like or preference of your customers and offer products and value relating to the passion of that customer, for example, when selling clothes you might want to know the color the target  customer prefers before offering the customer any clothes for purchase.

b. Try to know the problems facing your target market or customers,  if you can profer solutions  to your customers pressing issue on your online store, then it’s a jackpot for you,  your online store is bound to hit its peak in a short while, wakanow books fliht  online, one of there target customers are individuals who have tight schedule and would not be able to  go to the airports to get flight tickets, this class of customers  use their smartphones to book flght online which saves them time they never had, you would see that wakanow  must have provided a good payment platform that would make it easy for such category of customers.

c. Put into consideration the sex,age and location of your target customer, because it will definitely have a dramatic impact on your online store.

d. Mode of payment: you have to integrate an efficient payment gate way thwt will allow yor customers pay at ease with theeeir debit or credit card as well as make other payment options like cash on delivery,pos terminals, bank deposit ,etc.  available because like i said earlier customer differs, mr.a might like to run cashless transaction and mr.b would prefer otherwise.

e. Mode of transporting the product  to your target customers:n this is a major problem that is affiliated with online store, because you have to really plan on how to handle shipping and delivery of your products by carefully analyzing the following

• Will you charge cost of delivery?
• What is the charge for product delivery?
• Will you consider offering free product delivery?
• How perfect can you carryout product delivery?
• Can your business absorb the cost?

NB: this questions will help you satisfy your customers when properly answered