Whether you’re selling clothing or hardware, home accessories or local services, there’s a lot you can learn from big e-commerce companies such as eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. These giants, which have amassed together in 2014 well over $120 billions in revenues, have all been small e-commerce websites once.
In a recent post on Entrepreneur, Wix.com founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami has highlighted three lessons that the super-successful e-commerce brands above can teach budding e-commerce businesses like yours. We liked Mr. Abrahami’s post so much that we felt we had to share the crux of it with you.
eBay — Create a Solid Sales Structure and Use Real World Sales Techniques
eBay, the popular online auctioning service, has helped millions of people all over the world buy and sell products at a lower than retail price, influencing many online marketing platforms and becoming one of the e-commerce behemoths. One of the key factors that led to eBay’s success is the real world sales structures and techniques it has used ever since its founding in 1995 to create a successful and sustainable online business model. eBay is also a great example of how to simplify shipping, make products easy to find in a large catalog, and effectively handle ecommerce inventory management for a huge catalog of products.
Etsy — Launch the Right Product or Service at the Right Time and for the Right Audience
The online platform that has become synonymous with DIY commerce, Etsy provides crafters and vintage sellers with the tools they need to promote and sell their products online. More than helping to popularize accessories, jewelry, and a wide variety of other handcrafted goods, Etsy makes DIY goods look cool.
Etsy quickly rose to fame in the mid 2000s, by becoming a convenient hub for the growing DIY online culture. In 2014, Etsy had total sales amounting to $1.93 billion, of which $195.6 million in revenues from its sale commission tax and other on-site revenue streams. Whatever e-commerce business you have, try to make the most of Internet culture and trends, like Etsy did and still does.
Amazon — Reinvent Yourself and Stay Open to New Possibilities
From a humble online bookstore to the world’s largest retailer, Amazon is a wonderful example of how an e-commerce business can transcend its original business plan, branch out into new sectors, and make online shopping not only cool, but in many ways more convenient than traditional shopping. Like eBay, Amazon has also found a secret recipe to making ecommerce inventory management work for them.
Today, Amazon powers popular products such as the Kindle e-book reader, the Amazon Web Services cluster of remote computing services ranging from cloud-based online storage to application services, and Audible.com, the world’s largest producer of downloadable audiobooks. Like eBay,
In the end remember that there are powerful web-based eCommerce inventory management solutions and forecasting tools for small businesses that can help you put these lessons into practice and take your small e-commerce business to the next level. DataQlick is one of them. Find out more here.
