Social media had been a big part of our life since the boom of Facebook; however, with the recent events of the NCOVID-19, Social media is recently becoming more famous as a means to further market businesses across communities and territories.
Additionally, people being confined at the comfort of their homes made online shopping more famous due to its convenience and safety.
Therefore, if you too have a business or want to start a business, then learning how to start an online business is currently the best way to help your business grow and earn.
Choose Your Platform
Same with knowing who your target market, you also need to know what social media platform suits your business best. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more are some of the available platforms you can utilize to build your online store.
Understand the user demographic of platforms, their uses, and narrow down what best suits your product, services, and your branding.
Source Reputable and Trusted Suppliers
If you’re not familiar with social media; Bad reviews and news spread like wildfire on the internet — and a bad product reported by a customer, can affect the image of your business tremendously.
Ensure that your products and suppliers can sustain you with quality and true to picture products. Nothing can hurt your business more than hundreds of customers complaining that what you advertise is different from what they are receiving.
Learn How to Take Great Photos
Social media heavily relies on what people see on the image. Low resolution, blurred, dark, and grainy images can contribute to the loss of sales.
Know how what angles make your product looks best. Ensure that all forms of media you use (e.g image, video, audio, etc.) are clear and look interesting.
Make use of the people’s innate reaction of stopping and scrolling back when they see something interesting. Put your products’ best shot to generate interest and eventually sales.
Sell Products and Services through Online Shops
Two of the most famous and trusted online stores in the Philippines are Shopee and Lazada. Setting up your online store through these platforms, on top of marketing yourself using a social media page, can enormously help your online business boom.
Selling through these shops can help you and the customers give a sense of security since you both have the protection of the platform when having undergoing transactions.
Set-Up Your Mode of Payment
Before the marketing, branding, and supplying, one thing you should layout is your mode of payment. There are tons of options available to pay for a product purchased online, and each of these modes of transactions has perks and cons.
Find out what suits you and your customer demographic best. To give you a quick rundown, the following are some of the most commonly used modes of payment in the Philippines:
- Cash on Delivery (COD)
- Gcash
- Online bank transfer (BPI, BDO, etc.)
These are just some of the basics online businesses need to consider when starting their online selling. There are numerous ways you can do to reach your customers further; However, these Online Business Start-Up basics are something you shouldn’t miss to establish to create a smooth buy and sell system online.