In this blog post, we share an e-commerce strategy from which we know at Baldwin that it really works. It’s based on several e-commerce cases, experiences and of course, it’s based on our own strategy, where we chose to focus only on e-commerce and not on apps or websites, and that helped us grow!
Step 1: Choose a niche and sell unique products
It’s not easy to find unique or niche products but it can be the way to be successful. We know that for a lot of costumers it’s tempting to sell as many products as they can, but we see that it’s wiser to focus on a specific range of the market they are in. Go deep in a range not broad.
Instead of selling, for example, all the types of clothing, you could choose to only sell shoes, and instead of selling all types of shoes you could focus on selling sports shoes or only children’s shoes, or only sports shoes for women…
You can define the niche market yourself, just make sure it has an added value and always take the needs of your clients into account for the specialized offer you want to create.
This enables you to offer a better range of products to your customers in a certain segment and to compete with the big players that offer everything and do have the capital to do so.
The stock was expensive for traditional retail, for e-commerce that cost is the same. Choosing the niche strategy can help you manage that cost, although you should realize that keeping a lot of stock of your specialized range of products can create a similar risk.
However, what we have noticed is that products that can’t be easily found on the market are those who sell best, so if you deal with your stocks in a clever way, you can really manage this risk.
Step 2: Enlarge your expertise
Bigger players like Zalando or Amazon chose a huge amount of products and they try to sell as much as possible. The largeness of the scale creates their profitably (small %, big €). However, this implies that those players can impossibly build up product know-how, simply because there are too many of them. The information they offer on their websites is good but limited.
If you position yourself as a specialist, you can show your expertise and give so much more profound information on the products.
For example, you can use video tutorials, blog posts, manuals, client reviews, your own reviews, etc.
This approach gives you 2 great advantages: lots of relevant content that generates visitors and your status as an expert in the viewers’ minds.
These visitors will perceive you as an expert, give you their trust and for those specific products they will come back to you.
To conclude
The easiest to manage web shop is the one that sells 1 type of product. It’s always a good idea to imagine yourself selling only one product online. What implications would this have on my business? How much easier does this make all the actions in the back office? How much can it reduce the costs of running and maintaining the business?
Long tailing is connected to e-commerce, just don’t underestimate the costs it implies.
It’s just not good for everybody. Check the results of those big e-commerce players. Most of them still aren’t profitable.
