Selling Online Q&A

An online toy store might seem to have a lot in common with a retail toy store, but success in one does not guarantee success in the other.

The things they have in common are:

• Business management (legal, financial, HR, customer service)
• Distributor and wholesaler relations
• Branding

What's going to be different:

• Marketing
• Customer face-time (the actual selling)
• Reach
• Competition

With physical retail, people already have a reason to enter your store, even if it's just curiousity. It's all about location, and if you put yourself in a place with a lot of traffic, people will come in.

The equivalent of a good location doesn't exist on the internet, because you can be everywhere at once. In the physical world, a toy shop might be next to a newsagent, or a gift shop, and you'd benefit from passing traffic. However in the digital world, there are no neighbours. There is no free advertising. Your web domain is similar to a store's street address on a technical level, but every store is in its own desert when it comes to location. No one is going to randomly find you.

The flip-side to this is the Reach I mentioned. Instead of the thousands of people that might visit a shopping center in a day, you've got millions, or even billions of people able to see your goods, if you can get noticed. 

The slowest, most expensive way to transition to an online presence would be to have a website built by experienced professionals, using ground up SEO marketing over several years, with multi-pronged content-creation strategies that enthrall people once they arrive via paid advertising. This is also how you will have the most control of your business, and the most upside in revenue. You're selling a story rather than a commodity, and you can name your price (with reason).

The fastest, least expensive way to transition to an online presence would be to hop on to what other's have done, and this can be done in two ways. 

The first is a sort-of middle ground, where you use a site like shopify or etsy to create a store-front. There are limited tools, and their websites are usually poorly optimised (i.e. slow), but they're significantly cheaper than building your own e-commerce site. If you pay for quality design and SEO, and do some advertising, you should do okay and may even thrive. You will have control over your store but not over the backend. If you do well enough here you should be able to transition to a proper site of your own, so it's a good way to test the online waters before fully commiting to your own site.

The second cheapest way to get online from a brick-and-mortar store is to become a seller in marketplaces. Businesses like Ebay, Amazon and Kogan have built up large online presences and draw a ton of traffic, which you can leverage at the cost of losing your personality (branding). In the case of Amazon and Kogan, they initially only sold their own products, but now allow people to sell through them, just like Ebay has always done. These days when you buy something from Amazon or Kogan, you might still be buying from the retailer, but you could instead be buying from a physical store who listed that item for sale. Those people are the ones who will post the item to you, branded in the site's packaging. All three of the sites will handle the payments and will pay the seller the asking price minus a fee. 

These online marketplaces are the closest equivalent to shopping centers in the online world, but they're still prone to over-crowding. It's still on you to figure out what's worth selling and where to source it, but if you're overburdened with stock and your store is empty, those are your best bet. You'll have little control over your branding or selling power, but there's nothing to stop you creating your own sites on the side, with the added benefit of not needing to worry so much about getting paid. If someone has been running a brick-and-mortar store for years already, he can utilize the upstream distribution channels and contacts he's built to his great advantage, and this would be the easiest point of entry for a transition to online selling. It's like taking the plug out of one outlet and plugging it in somewhere else.