What’s worse than finding that your only way to make ends meet — your eCommerce business is slowly diminishing to the lowest. Knowing that you start being corny, doing random stuff to revive your dying eCommerce business but hardly it works or doesn’t work at all.
In tough times, the only idea that can revive your dying eCommerce is bootstrapping your eCommerce business. You actually need to look into the key problems of your eCommerce business to get to know what exactly is going wrong with your business.
We at Tekki Web Solutions Pvt. Ltd. strongly favors that bootstrapping can be incredibly helpful in reviving the eCommerce businesses. In order to make your business sustain in the market, we are sharing some of our full proof, working methods, that we follow to bring any eCommerce business back to its life.
Table of Contents
What is Bootstrapping in eCommerce Business?
Bootstrapping simply means getting something back to life with your own funds. It is a way to get out of a situation by utilizing your existing resources. Bootstrapping in eCommerce refers to creating a business with existing resources, hard work, and the cash coming in from the first sales.
A large number of sellers prefer the dropshipping business model of doing eCommerce. They get a relevant audience to their store and let them buy the product they like. Be it a custom product or imported, It needs to be sent to the buyers at the end. The one common problem that all eCommerce entrepreneurs face after some time, is slowing down the sales or no sales at all. It creates a compulsion of being failed in their minds. Bootstrapping e-commerce is a way to take them out of the situation with professional help.
Is e-commerce saturated with lots of competitors?
If everyone in your niche trying to sell the same product, competition becomes true to some extent. But businesses who are visionary and don’t rely on a single product, find e-commerce quite easy as compare to others.
What are the popular types of E-commerce?
The popular types of eCommerce are listed below:
- B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
- B2B (Business-to-Business)
- C2B (Consumer-to-Business)
- C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer)
- B2G (Business-to-Government)
Things to Avoid While Starting an eCommerce Business
The biggest mistake most startups do is, starting an eCommerce business without knowing about the future scope and potential. E-commerce is large, with thousands and thousands of products available to sell, one can easily fall into the trap of choosing a highly competitive product.
It might be helpful in the beginning. But your current winning product might not be winning your customer later. The only thing that stamps your business to run in the long term is your business idea and implementation plan. Although lots of people do plan their eCommerce strategies, they lack to foresee the advancement due to their nomad business mind.
There are myriads of mistakes done by eCommerce entrepreneurs, many of their mistakes are minor and barely they get caught by the owners. Some of them are:
- Poor research about the market and customer behavior.
- Less knowledge of consumer psychology.
- Not following a future-oriented approach.
- Pouring uncalculated time and money into unnecessary things such as frequently changing logos, colors, sections, navigators, and all the “good look” things.
- Low understanding of data gathering and analysis.
- Expecting far from the actual reality.
— Have you also joined this club?
A countless number of points can be listed upon checking the complete portfolio of your eCommerce business. For that, Hire a Digital Marketing Expert to get your eCommerce report ready.
You may also like: How To Start a Profitable Drop Servicing Business
Roll Up Your sleeves
You can predict an eCommerce business to be leaning toward the end if your profits reduce continuously for more than 3 months. This is an indication either your niche is being saturated or your marketing strategy is not performing well. There could be hundreds of possible reasons making your e-Commerce business less sustainable. If you can’t figure out the limitations of your e-commerce business. Your audience is going to forget your brand soon. It needs thorough research of your store to find out the constraints of your e-commerce business. take a look!
Validate it with the public
The product is the biggest factor of your e-commerce business. Hence, the first role that an e-commerce business should play is validating the product with the audience. The famous adage “change is the only constant” fits properly here. Your business might have been going well just with your one product. But remember that your winning product can start backfiring at any time. Just because you think your product is “cool” doesn’t mean that your audience also carries the same perception.
In most cases, the winning product that was working fine till yesterday gradually decreases the return and puts you in losses. Thus, validating your product according to customer demand is the first and foremost approach to go for.
Open Up your Wallet
After validating your e-commerce product with the audience, if you find that the market has been stuffed with the same product and customers are neglecting it, then you need to bring the new product to light. Remember finding a new product takes time, effort, and an immense amount of research. It shouldn’t be like that, if your competitor shifts their focus to another product, you also choose the same. You need to do thorough research from scratch to find a new product.
After getting the product you need to open up your wallet to throw some cash on additional research and testing. You can use the previous saving that you generated through the sales of your product. Taking on big debt is a bad idea for bootstrapping your e-commerce business.
Pro Tip: The only secret that keeps one e-commerce business ahead of another is the testing capability. You need to have your pocket full with sufficient money to test the product.
Make a plan
This is the most crucial step on that all your previous and future hard work will pay off. Making a successful business plan consists of planning, research, recruiting, implementation, and partnership with people. Your bootstrapping plan should be briefly reflecting the new undertakings and previous mistakes, that you are going to avoid now. Running an e-commerce business plan based on a dropshipping model needs to go in a structured way to layout your thoughts and ideas. Get the detailed report on:
Who are your competitors?
How much money you have to spend?
What unique marketing steps you are going to take?
Plan to implement the process.
Changes in the marketing plan.
Understanding of analytics etc.
A similar list of some of the most important future factors can be made to eliminate future uncertainties.
Target right audience
To bootstrap your dying e-commerce business, you need to do robust research to find your targeted audience. For doing this, take the help of Amazon marketplace, Itsy, Alibaba, Facebook newsfeed, and review sites to check what your customer talking about the product. You need to conduct well research to find out their interest, habit, likes, and behavior, etc. This task seems to be complicated until the internet of Behavior rolls out completely for all users.
Consider running Facebook ads to get a better understanding of your audience’s taste. The analysis and engagement on your paid ads show the significance of your selected product. If the results are good you can continue targeting your audience by putting in more budget else, you can hire a digital marketing expert to further enhance your ROI.
Marketing is an art, not to be taken lightly
After Selecting and defining the right targeted audience, another important matter to be looked at is the marketing of your new product. Not only Ecommerce Website Development but Several marketing channels are also available to market your product. Be it content marketing, social media marketing, paid marketing, and search engine marketing. All are highly efficient to deliver you impressive results. But you need to get a strong knowledge of all to save your time and money. Marketing looks simple, yet complicated at the same time.
Without a deep understanding of customer psychology, one can easily waste his hard-earned money without getting any profit. Making it simple, Hiring an expert is what, most successful e-commerce giants do. They will be finding an effective way to sell your products that will ultimately revitalize your e-commerce business.
Value proposition
The biggest loss a business suffers by not putting the value of their product to the customer’s subconscious mind. A future-oriented business always took the sheds of branding and pours it in the customer’s mind that the particular brand is best in value providing. You should be doing the same to tell your audience about your brand uniqueness so that they can value and be your permanent customer. Changing customer perception toward the betterness of your business is a long term profit-oriented approach. Upon convincing the audience that your brand provides value, your audience tends to become your loyal customer.
The Final Outcome
Making and managing an e-commerce store takes a lot of effort. With the ever-changing customer behavior and preference, you can’t sit peacefully thinking that your business will be performing the same. If your e-commerce business is performing less than your expectation, buckle up and follow the bootstrap tips to revive your business