Numbers from Statista say the number of ecommerce customers in the UK will reach 62 million by 2025. These numbers promise huge return for your reselling business with an online store.

A brick-and-mortar setup can’t keep up with competitors that combine online reselling and physical stores. You must establish a space for yourself on the internet.

Here, we’ll discuss how to run a successful reselling business via ecommerce. We’ll also examine the strategies for operating a successful online reselling business in the UK.

Onsite Strategies to Improve Your Ecommerce Business Profitability

Like with a walk-in store, you must cover two main aspects of running an ecommerce business. The first entails how you prepare the shop for customers and attend to them as they come. The second involves what you do outside the store to get customers in. 

This section covers the elements you should incorporate in your online store to make your reselling business successful and profitable. 

Implement Search Engine Optimisation

81% of your customers will start their online purchasing journey on a search engine.

The typical first-time online buyer journey often goes like this. An individual wants something; they go online and type it into a search engine. The SERP then brings a result page showing the item and where they can get it. 

They click the link closest to the top that catches their attention, get on the page and make the purchase.

Of course, it’s not always that simple, but that analogy captures how it all happens. It all begins with a search. Hence, you must optimise your online store for that search. 

Search engine optimisation involves setting up your online store to show up higher in search engine rankings. The easiest approach to SEO is to devise a content strategy that involves using the right keywords appropriately in the information you display on your website. 

It’s also a good idea to use high-quality images and videos that’ll let your web pages load quickly.

However, keep in mind that these are only the fundamentals, and SEO involves a lot more. You must develop and implement a comprehensive SEO strategy for your ecommerce business. That’ll give you a higher ranking on the SERPs and a better chance of getting customers.

Optimise Your Store for Satisfactory Customer Experience

It’s one thing to get customers into your store; it’s another to get them to buy something. Customers will likely browse your online store before deciding whether to buy. 

If they encounter any challenges during this period, they’ll most likely leave without making any purchases.

So, ensure your customers have a satisfactory experience while shopping on your website. Consider the following ideas for that. 

Keep the Design Simple 

A popular design maxim is that simplicity is the best approach. You don’t need unnecessary additions just for the sake of aesthetics. Prioritise functionality over needless aesthetics to avoid complicating the setup for visitors. 

A characteristic of simple designs is the absence of clutter. You want to ensure your online reselling store stays easy on the eyes and doesn’t feed the customers with too much information at a time. 

An excellent way to achieve that is to use menus. Menus provide an efficient way to organise all your items. 

Note that keeping them simple is essential to avoid confusing the customers. You don’t need to make the menus super specific; you can still use broad terms to group the products.

Use an Effective Navigational System

Another way to help visitors enjoy their time on your online reselling store is by making it easy for them to find anything they’re looking for. For that, you need an efficient navigational system.

First, you should start by adding a search bar. That will enable visitors with specific items in mind to quickly find the products instead of having to browse throughout your store for them. The goal here is to save visitors time going through all your categories for a specific good.

Secondly, you should create a navigation bar displaying all the essential buttons and links to other pages. Primarily, your navbar should contain links to product categories, shopping carts, account information and other pages customers usually look for. 

A link or button to the categories page will make it easier for customers without a specific item in mind to look through all your products. A link to the Shopping Cart pages lets customers see everything they’ve selected and quickly make their final purchasing decision.

Use Detailed Product Descriptions

Visitors can’t physically see and examine the products you sell on your online reselling store. They rely on how you describe items to decide whether they want them. Hence, you must provide the most accurate product information to help potential buyers make the best purchasing decisions.

Therefore, ensure to make the product description very detailed. Mention all the features and specifications of the goods. If possible, also talk about the current condition of the items and leave nothing out.

It also helps that you provide high-quality images of the actual products. Don’t just use pictures you find online. You can even hire a professional product photographer to take highly detailed snaps of your goods. 

Alternatively, you can go for a video showing the items and a detailed description of their features. One good video can equal several images and a lengthy description text. And remember to optimise all visual elements, so your online store loads fast. 

Simplify the Checkout Process 

One of the highlights of physical stores is that customers can quickly check out their purchases. Buyers will pick goods from the shelves and walk up to a counter where the cashier helps them with the payment. 

You don’t have a cashier in your ecommerce business store. Instead, you have a checkout page. And just like the physical shops, you must make it easy for the customers to complete their purchase. It’s best to simplify all they’ll need to do on that page to select their preferred payment options and paying. 

You want to eliminate unnecessary steps in the process. Up to 50% of online shoppers will abandon the process if checkout takes more than 30 seconds. Each additional step in the checkout journey increases the chances of the customer abandoning the transactions.

The key here is to only ask the customer for information essential to processing the order — their billing information, name and shipping address. More importantly, only ask for information once! 

Accept Multiple Payment Options

Not all your customers will have or want to use a Visa or Mastercard for payment. Some may prefer to use other credit card services like Discover or American Express. Then, you may have others who’ll choose alternative payment options such as Paypal or Apple Pay.

It’s a bad move to run an ecommerce reselling business that only accepts one payment method. Instead, make provisions for as many payment options as possible and let the customers decide which ones they prefer.

Encourage Users to Create a Profile But Don’t Force them

Most buyers want to get through the shopping experience quickly. They want to pick their goods and check them out in a few clicks. Hence, making such people create a profile before completing their transaction is not the best idea.

As such, you want to enable a guest checkout option that allows customers to complete transactions without creating payment profiles. Of course, you should still encourage them to create a profile, as that’ll simplify things for them in subsequent transactions.

Offsite Strategies to Run a Successful Ecommerce Business

As we mentioned earlier, two main aspects influence your online reselling store’s growth and profitability. After setting up, you need to get people to visit your shop to make sales. 

Consider the strategies below to get organic visits to your reselling business.

Have an Ecommerce Business Plan

Several people jump into ventures without a plan. They don’t take time to evaluate their ideas, research the product and the markets, and consider their profitability opportunities. 

They simply walk into the business because it seems like a good idea.

Don’t be that kind of entrepreneur. Create a business plan before starting an ecommerce business. A business plan is a roadmap that brings your ideas, thoughts and projections together. 

A business plan helps you identify your priorities and the best avenue to reach potential customers. It highlights your strengths and the best opportunities for profitability. 

While writing a business plan may not directly influence your profitability, it helps to connect all your processes. And that’s an essential element to running a successful ecommerce business in the UK.

Find and Maximise the Marketing Avenues That Work for You

Marketing gives you an excellent opportunity to expand your ecommerce reselling business. Advertising helps to extend your reach; it exposes your store to potential customers and keeps the existing ones coming back.

You need marketing to generate traffic and get people to visit your online reselling store. The secret to this is finding the right channel that works best for your products and maximising it till customer acquisition becomes automatic. 

Below are common marketing approaches for your ecommerce business.  

Google Display Ads

Display ads are those sometimes annoying and irrelevant items you come across when browsing through blogs and most free web services. While web surfers often find them infuriating, they’re also very effective in driving publicity and traffic to ecommerce stores.

Ads are very effective in targeting all manners of web surfers. You only need to get them on display on as many platforms as possible. 

However, your display ad’s effectiveness depends primarily on how good your copy and offer are. Hence you must create compelling copy and enticing offers to lure random web surfers into clicking your ads.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the most popular means of digital communication. It provides a direct channel to reach people with your message. And that’s why it’s a very effective marketing avenue. 

While display ads may increase your reach and impressions, email helps boost engagement.

• The typical email marketing process starts with you obtaining the targets’ email addresses and building an email list. 
• Each prospect’s email address you get goes on the list.
• The next step is for you to curate promotional messages to encourage the targets’ patronage. 

Email marketing can be pretty technical and frustrating if you don’t have the proper knowledge to pull it off. But of course, you can always learn it or outsource the responsibility to professional email marketers.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are the best places to meet several random people with similar interests. For example, people with similar tastes in music follow the same musical genres and musicians on social media. This preference also extends to general items and brands.

Social media is an excellent place to market to a large group of individuals with similar preferences. It’s also ideal for driving engagement and getting visitors to your online reselling store. 

For example, you can quickly achieve massive publicity for a product launch with a few posts on Instagram. You can promptly educate thousands of people about your offers with illustrative content on your Facebook page. Additionally, you can effortlessly attend to customer complaints and resolve issues via Twitter. 

You can also send promotional offers, create opinion polls and other engagement-driving content on social media. Social media lets you have all types of communications with your customers and prospects.

And since you are just starting, social media is an excellent place to announce your arrival to the market. You can also build your brand following on social media. So, it’s not only suitable for customer acquisition, but it’s also effective for customer retention.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is excellent for establishing credibility with potential followers. Many people trust brands endorsed by celebrities and other notable online personnel more.

So, having someone with a robust online presence, like celebrities or influencers, endorse your reselling brand will make your legitimacy claims more believable. However, it would be best if you got influencers related to your ecommerce business industry to make this strategy effective.

For example, if you sell surfing gear, onboarding a fashion model influencer who doesn’t surf or show any particular interest in the sport will only do a little for your sales.

Prioritise Customer Retention

Each one of your customers is important to your success as an entrepreneur. So, you can’t afford to lose any of them. Many resellers prioritise getting new customers over retaining the existing ones. 

It costs less to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Secondly, retaining a customer is easier than acquiring a new one. As long as they enjoyed their previous business with you, they won’t mind patronising your reselling business again. 

The easiest strategy for customer retention is providing excellent service. Ensure you satisfy buyers every time they do business with you. That’ll give them sufficient reasons to come back every time they need something they can get from you.

Furthermore, rewarding customers can encourage them to keep patronising you. For example, you can give discounts or loyalty bonuses to customers when they repurchase from you several times.

Encourage Referrals

Aside from continually encouraging customers to do business with you, you should also influence them to tell their friends about your online reselling store. 

Word-of-mouth referrals can give more credibility than influencer marketing. That’s because most followers know that you influencers receive incentives or payment for the advertisement.

In the same situation, you’re more likely to trust your friends than a celebrity.

• People will be more inclined to tell others about your business if they enjoy the products you sell to them. However, you can still encourage referrals by giving incentives.

• Referrals increase when you improve the general customer experience with your brand. It’s easier for customers to tell their friends about you when they enjoy their interaction with your reselling business.

Other Ecommerce Tips to Failure-proof Your Reselling Business

We’ve considered the fundamental tips for ensuring your ecommerce business’s success. In most cases, applying the above points should be sufficient to cover all the basics. However, there are a few more considerations you must factor in, to further failure-proof your venture.

Source Inventory from Reliable Suppliers

Just as much as your customers, the people you get your goods from can make or break your business. For example, a supplier may not send you sufficient inventory, limiting your ability to meet demands.

In another scenario, the supplier may send you inferior products, which may affect customers’ satisfaction with your goods. 

Additionally, the supplier may arbitrarily increase the item’s price, forcing you to increase your selling price. Needless to say, that may cause you to lose some customers.

Lastly, the suppliers may suddenly decide to discontinue business with you. That’ll force you to start looking for other means of getting inventory. All these factors can negatively affect your success opportunities. Hence, you must find and work with reliable suppliers.

Create a Recognisable Brand Identity

Your brand is what people imagine when they hear about your reselling business. It’s the image of your ecommerce business people interact with. Hence, you must develop a unique brand identity that people will easily recognise and distinguish from others.

Branding considerations are essential when starting up an ecommerce reselling business. Don’t wait until your venture matures before working on a unique identity. Create the identity and let the business grow into it.

Establish your business name, logo, slogan and other elements of the brand identity right from the beginning. It’s easier to build the brand with the business than play catch up after the venture has a foothold in the industry.

Have All the Important Licences.

Having all the essential licences for operating an ecommerce business will save you a lot of trouble. The UK has several regulations guiding how entrepreneurs should run ecommerce businesses within its borders. Get the relevant permits and do all due diligence to avoid legal problems. 

Grow Your Reselling Business Through Ecommerce

An online store is a great way to get sales for your reselling business. The results are even better when you know the best items to stock, when to sell, and the best prices to maximise your profit margin. 

These are the boxes Crept Chief Notify will help you tick. Plus, we’ll deliver industry-leading monitors and access to an expanding community of individuals just like you!

Join us today.