business-plan, lean-startup, e-commerce, yc-how-to-start-a-startupI am going to launch a mini software house where I will provide the following IT related services. Along with IT related services I will have a shop for Laptops and Mobiles . I want to start ecommerce website for my laptops and mobiles selling , but one thing which is stopping me is ecommerce good for local business ? I mean my business will be limited to a some cities so is this a good idea to start locally an ecommerce website? And also how can I take a start easily.
PS : I am new to startup stack exchange so if I have asked something wrong forgive me for that.
E-commerce business can be good locally, and can also be fruitless - totally depends on the market and the location.
However from my personal experience, it’s difficult jumping into e-commerce without prior knowledge of e-commerce and online marketing. Based on your question - I would say you should do a lot of research on online marketing and e-commerce marketing (Google has a lot of educational materials)
With any online marketing and online business, the most important thing is to measure everything and make that data count. Based on that you know how to better target your marketing (who & where are your best converters etc..)
And one more thing about local online business: You can target ads very specifically, so yes it’s possible and can work (if like with anything else, effort is being put into making it work)
How to:
if not sure how to build platform and use payment gateways, you can test the market using some platforms like Shopify, which take care of all the work for you, but also eat up your margins.
Cheers!
E-commerce for local customers is very common. Local food shops are getting orders online and delivering foods every night. You need to have an e-commerce site that can take payments and a digital marketing campaign that brings local customer to your site. If you want to avoid a Google AdWord campaign, then just enlist your site in directories and a shop in Google Map. Google AdWord has many features to support local business and these are used by millions of businesses globally.
I do not recommend spending time on learning both e-commerce and digital marketing if these are peripheral to your core activities. You can ask someone to create an e-commerce site for you and some AdWord agency to promote your site locally. You can get both done at any freelance website. Just ask for proposal to your tasks and you shall get many replies.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.