3 Avenues to Profit Online: #2 Product

The second way to make money online is by selling a product.  This is pretty straight forward.  You produce and sell or resell something.  The trick is doing it.  Getting a well functioning shopping cart service and interested buyers can be very challenging.

The fact is anyone, anywhere, can sell products online.  Auction services like EBAY are full of people that have made a business or hobby out of reselling products they procure.  However, I’m going to be focusing on businesses that are selling product from their own site or have some kind of store feature through EBAY or Amazon.

Traffic comes into play again as you have to have marketing tactics that will bring people to the site that are interested in the product.  Some of these can piggyback on EBAY or Amazon.  Those sites have significant traffic and will let vendors list their products on the site.  There is nothing at all wrong with this, the problem is that it’s hard to build up your business in this way.  Buyers are usually oblivious as to who they’ve bought from and it severely limits ongoing relationships and return buyers.  In Amazon’s case many users are unaware that the product was not bought direct from Amazon.

So the alternative is developing your own e-commerce solution.  The challenge is flipped here.  You have every opportunity to build a relationship and manage the buying process, getting people to the site can be more of a challenge.  There are many tactics to choose from, some examples being, pay per click ads, organic search engine optimization, email marketing, direct mail, advertising, etc.

Assuming that you drive traffic to the site, making a business thrive on product sales is often a challenge in streamlining the buying process.  People need to be convinced to buy, feel secure that the business is credible, and confident that they will receive their item in a timely manner.  Testing plays a big part in optimizing a shopping cart to suit all these needs.

Obviously there is a lot to talk about on product but as an overview, anyone that has a product to sell or resell can leverage that to make money on the internet.