What am I going to sell? Who am I going to sell it to? With what business model?
No experience? We offer you tips from those who do.
Well, in case you were still not aware of it, let me tell you: you can’t set up an online store in a month. Simply, you can’t: do the market research, find a business model, find suppliers, ask them for a quote, ask them to send it to you, renegotiate with them so that you can settle the accounts, draw up those accounts, hire the technology provider…
There are three kinds of business models… which one do you bet on?
Okay, you want to sell touch screen pens, but how? High-end? Are you going for a price? After doing the market research, on a napkin (for the sake of cliché) you write down these three models, which when you start the project are the only ones you can think of:
MODEL A
It would be called www.tulapizdigital.com: it’s a store selling stylus pens and replacement stylus pens at a good price. You think about bringing product from China, taking 6-7 models and testing them.
MODEL B
You would open a store that you would call something like www.bamboomanía.com. It is a brand-distributor store model. In this case, of Japanese Wacom products. You have searched for a quality product on the market and you have found that the reference is the Bamboo Stylus, and you have asked the sales contact to explain to you what the conditions are for their distributors. It may make sense to distribute online this product and others of the same brand. Your target: customers with high purchasing power and graphic artists.
MODEL C
The last model would be to sell accessories for tablets and mobile devices and focus on a niche: children. The store you would open would be something similar to www.babytablet.com, a tactile products store for kids: colored pens, pens for parents, leads for apps, cases and screen protectors. Focusing on the customization of these products. The difficulty would be to make it known, but…
What would an expert say?
The expert would comment that “model A would not work as it is a single product, with little demand. It would not have enough customers to make it viable. In addition, it does not have, in the end, enough margin”.
“B falls down for the same reasons. The problem with these two models is that it’s a small universe.”
C, however, could work. Why? “There’s a boom in tablet penetration in households. And the snobbery of parents is now being transferred to children. It would work well with blogging and social networking strategy,” he says. Also, whoever has a tablet has reasonable purchasing power.
