Selling Hard Goods

From Theresa Coffey, TNT Editor...

The type of hard goods that could be sold on the Net is limitless. This infinite variety is one of the major advantages for online shoppers. And your ability to reach that worldwide audience is a huge bonus for you. Your online e-tail operation could reach the world via your art studio, workshop, greenhouse, warehouse (or garage!)... even from your offline retail store!

The possibilities of what to sell are limited only by your ability to either...

• make products of value to consumers, or...
  
  
• source interesting products, presenting them in a way that visitors will buy.

Use the following product opportunities as creative springboards to launch your e-tail business...

#1) Make your own products (ex., artist, woodworker, manufacturer, etc) and sell "direct-to-end-user" through a Web site.

#2) Source your products (the Net is a great way to do it) from a third party, the original producer. Either develop an exclusive arrangement to be that party's online vehicle (ex., an online art gallery for a talented artist) or represent that party on a non-exclusive basis and aggregate with complementary products from other artisans (ex., seaside crafts).

#3) Source more widely and create a unique store. Find a wide range of interesting products that fit within a single niche (ex., golf sculptures and figurines from fine sculptors, crafts people and manufacturers from around the world). In a sense, when you "aggregate" a unique collection of products, your "product" becomes the store.

Jim Nelson (jugglenow.com) is a wonderful SBI! hard goods case study. He started off by building interesting, high-value content about juggling. Then, as traffic grew, he started selling juggling balls that were hand-knit by his grandmother. Now he sources hard-to-find, interesting juggling paraphanelia and books from around the world, and sells them from his SBI! site.

#4) Open an e-tail version of your offline shop. After all, you have already set up much of the "system" and infrastructure (from sourcing to inventory to warehousing/ storage). An e-store is a powerful way to leverage what you have built offline. You can increase sales, build new clientele (far beyond those who enter your physical store), and "go global" at near-zero extra expense and effort.

#5) Take action. Like the idea of selling something? Move forward from the "merely thinking about it" phase. Selling on the Net is far less risky, and easier to set up than an offline retail store. Not sure what type of product to sell? Choose a category or topic you love and brainstorm from there.

The key is not to get caught up into the "immediate, instant, now" gratification of getting a site up, getting that shopping cart and collecting money. That is the easy part. But it is also totally without any purpose because there is no traffic generation, the lifeblood of any business. The time and money, and opportunity cost of that "instant gratification" turns into a very expensive failure down the road.

Follow the Site Build It! process outlined in the Action Guide. It takes some work upfront but that work pays off later, on an ongoing, evergrowing basis.

It's all about...

• doing your homework -- creating or sourcing a great product to sell
  
  
• carefully picking your approach/theme of your site
  
  
• building content before you start "collecting the money." Of course, while hardgoods may be your primary monetization model, you need to plan what additional revenues can be added (Google AdSense, affiliate income, services, etc.) ahead of time, so you can work towards those ends.
  
  
• building future traffic right into your content, from the ground up, as you create that content.