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Two weeks back we looked at how you can compete with Aliexpress, ebay and other giant market places which included “7 Tips for Creating A Better Customer Experience”. This week I thought I would keep it short and sweet and provide an easy to follow check-list that you can come back to when ever you need. Remember this is just the start, their are so many more things you can being doing to make your brand a stand out. Nathan made a very relevant point over a coffee the other day as we discussed branding and distinguishing ourselves from our ebay competition
” Asking yourself ‘how do I compete with ebay?’ is asking yourself the wrong question. You should be asking yourself ‘how do they compete with me?’ “
You see we were discussing the fact that we offer free shipping and unique policies and procedures that protect and focus on our customers, rather than ourselves. During this chat I mentioned that our ebay competition will never be able to offer the same level of service as their margins are just not big enough.
So now I ask you guys:
“What are you doing for your brand that makes it impossible for your market place competition to compete with you?”
Hi, I am interested in importing a product line into Australia. It is a niche market with low competition. I have ordered samples from the manufacturer and plan to take these around to the specific shops to ascertain their interest in purchasing the range. (Have spoken to a retailer already who is interested. I don’t know quite how to price the item. I believe it will sell for a certain price but don’t know what to charge. Should I ask for 50% of RRP? Do I ask what they believe it will sell for and ask for 50% of this price? I believe the product will sell for 10 times the cost of manufacture, so am confident of at least making 100% on outlay. Can you please advise?
- Thank you Belinda
This week we have another question from you guys that we loved! Jonas wrote to us asking;
How can we compete with Aliexpress?
Hi, We have considered staring an online business. We really don’t have an excuse not to give it fair go as we design and create websites including shopping carts. I know it is more involved than that to have a successful online business but at least we can save on that expense. We have thought of a few different products that we possibly can sell. What makes me unsure of this adventure is how do we actually compete with for example Aliexpress? I know they say Aliexpress is a b2b retailer but when it comes down to it I reckon they are as much a b2c retailer – as anyone can buy products from them at low quantities. How do we, that what to run an ecommerce site and most likely get our products from Aliexpress compete with them after we have added our mark-up? Would be very interested I hearing your views or thoughts on this or if you have heard anything from any of your users that might have expressed similar concerns. Thank you for a good website with some useful information
Kind Regards, jonas
Totally agree that Aliexpress is becoming more and more B2C, and that you shouldn’t try to compete with them. We were in China on an Alibaba/Aliexpress panel last year, and along with everyone else on the panel we stated our concerns about how B2C Aliexpress was becoming. They politely took notes, unfortunately it does not appear that the suggestions will be taking place. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use them to get started however, and two of the key things to remember when launching an online business (or any other business for that matter), is that you will always have competition and there are different kinds of customers. When we first started, we sold products on ebay, that we now sell for 2-3 times more on our website. The products are the same, but they are presented and packaged differently, we offer more services and add-on’s with them and they are sold to different customers. The value to the customer has increased greatly and the profit margin for us has also increased creating a win/win.
As some of you might recall, when I began my niche site experiment, I mentioned that I was going to play around with using expired domains. At the time I had two particular avenues I was going to go down. Firstly, I was going to try to find a suitable expired domain to use for my actual site, and secondly, I was going to try to find several expired domains with high Page Rank and Domain Authority, and use them as a private blog network that I could then link back to my niche site to increase its rankings.
Before I continue, I can already hear Tess yawning, and I realise that some of you are probably scratching your heads wondering what I’m talking about, so before I get into my early conclusions, I’ll give you a bit of background to what expired domains are and why they might be useful.
Expired domains are simply domain names that were once owned by other people, and used for their websites, but at some point they no longer required or wanted that website, so they let the domain name expire, and shut down their website. So why would we be interested in their scraps? Well, just because a website has been shut down, and no one owns that domain, doesn’t mean that backlinks to that domain have disappeared, and with those backlinks come some authority. One of the difficulties when starting a brand new site is gaining backlinks and authority, so if you could start the site with years of backlinking and authority already there, then that would be a big bonus.
Most of you know this but it never hurts to re-cap!
So I thought I would share some tips to help you get your posts seen…..12 of them in fact!
This requires asking your fans to make sure that they have selected ‘Show In News Feed’ which they can easily do by clicking on your like button and selecting from the drop down menu.
Feel free to download and use this image to tell your fans how to get notified of your latest posts.
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How To Make Money Online With Niche Ecommerce