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The e-com space is heating up. More and more people are being motivated to set up an online store to sell products and lead a happy life.
While it sounds cool, there’s more to e-commerce success than just picking any random product and selling a container load of them.
Whether we like it or not, when we buy a product online, we go through a lot of mental processes and thoughts to make a decision and get stripped of our hard earned money.
What role does the product play in this decision-making process?
Let us dissect these key features.
The product must appeal to a large market
If you want to sell something that only a small group of people are interested in, be prepared for sales that are related to the size of the niche. In other words, short niches usually mean short selling.
Just remember, it takes just as much effort to launch a product online, whether it’s a large location with thousands of sales per day or just a handful of sales per day.
So armed with this knowledge, the product must have a key factor data. And the data we want to extract is demand.
Now there are many tools to ascertain the demand of the product. Google Trends is a good place to find out about demand for a product. As an example, if you type in Fidget Spinners, you will see in the graph that when this craze was going crazy, there was a huge increase in demand.
Depending on where you’re selling online, each specific marketplace such as Amazon, Shopify, and other online marketplaces have tools to measure demand.
More importantly, you can’t sell a secret. You need a niche with a solid amount of search volume per month.
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You must tell the consumer about a big brand
To fully understand the branding characteristic of a product, we must first define what is a brand and what is not.
First of all, a logo is not a brand. A logo is just a graphic element that has no real meaning. The brand element is a person’s perception or feeling about a product, service, experience or company.
Now I will say that what a brand is has many meanings. But when you think of your favorite brands, they are usually associated with a particular sentiment of yours.
As an example, consider Apple. People can think of Apple brand and feel or perceive the brand as good products, innovation, well designed, easy to use etc.
Back to the logo, if people have a strong impression of your products or organization, the logo becomes a visual reminder of those feelings.
So, let’s tie this back to our e-commerce product. The brand of your e-commerce products should help communicate a certain sentiment to the people who view it.
Everything from your images, design, copy, marketing and personality needs to paint a picture in the mind of the individual. They should feel good when interacting with your brand or what they believe you want.
You should be all right, but what’s more important in e-commerce is to have a brand that people can feel they trust. Why? Because when people are going to spend money with you online, they need to feel comfortable.
So the biggest thing here is to brand like a billion dollar company. Make people feel good and gain as much trust as you can. Make sure there are no friction points to check out at the end when they add to cart.
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Your product must be unique
The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is something you will want to spend time on while developing your product. It’s the number one thing to get right in order to give your products the best chance of success.
The reason why the USP is so important is that when people are buying things online, they are only thinking about themselves and their needs. As they scan the page looking at each product offering, they’re making mental astute judgments on what they see: It doesn’t suit me, I don’t like that pattern, I want something bigger, this Looks very small and so on.
So with your USP, you need to design your product in a way that allows the person to think, wow, this is clever, or oh, that would make my life easier.
The mental subtle decision that the consumer needs to make about his product should be positive. This will help you stand out in the mind of the customer.
Here is an example to embed this learning as it is important.
Let’s say you’re selling cups of coffee. You’ve taken a look at the competition and you’ve noticed that a coffee cup doesn’t have a handle.
You decide whether to add a handle to your USP that makes drinking coffee more comfortable because people’s hands won’t burn.
So, imagine your new coffee cup with great USP now joining the online competition. Consumers are making all those mental and subtle decisions. They come to your product and think, Wow, that’s cool. I love my coffee and want that handle or I get it, I hate burning my hands.
Can you see where I’m taking you? I want your product to solve problems, make life easier, convenient and easy to use.
All this great USP will turn the mental micro decisions you make about your products into positive ones. Those positive thoughts will give you a much higher chance of converting clicks into sales.
In short, you want the customer to feel as though you have thought of them and all of their needs when they see your product. If you can get over that feeling, you will give yourself the best chance of winning.
If you don’t have a great USP, you are just another me product that will get lost among the crowd.
The next time you buy something online, look at the ideas that pop into your mind. Look at the product you bought and ask yourself this simple question: Why did I buy it?
You will find that the answer covers just about everything you need.
If your product has these qualities, you are giving yourself the best chance for success. E-commerce is a tough game. If you get the simple things right, you may find yourself scrambling for money to meet demand.
Just remember, you can’t sell a secret, you must have demand, brand like a billion-dollar company to convey trust and design your product in a way that solves problems Go.
Make people feel that you have thought of them and that they easily identify their needs with your product.
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