How To Do Product Sourcing For Your SME part 1
We’ll kick-off the series “How to Source Products For Your SME†with one of the essential aspects of every business success – understanding the industry.
The meaning of product sourcing is simple – to find products that you can sell. Hence, this means buying products at wholesale prices and selling them online or in your shop for profit. With the rise of online shops and platforms like Shopify, it’s no surprise why product sourcing became a foundation for a successful online business.
How can product sourcing help my online business?
Among other benefits, the Internet became a vast commercial place where we are being sold without even knowing it. The commercial aspect of the internet gave us the E-commerce Market. With a proper website or a profile on Amazon and eBay, you can build a business without spending thousands of dollars.
Nevertheless, many entrepreneurs that start an online business are still not aware of what kind of product they want to sell. That’s where product sourcing comes in. If you do your product sourcing process right, several benefits for your online business can happen, including:
- You can earn the highest possible profit margin of a product;
- Because of the flexibility of the E-commerce marketplace, you can sell many different products to your customers;
- You can compete with other online businesses by offering better products and a better pricing system.
The Internet as a marketplace is highly driven by prices. If you don’t do your product sourcing process, you will face the competition that can beat you in price and in product choice. Because eventually, someone will offer the same product online for a much cheaper price. Thus, understanding the industry – your marketplace is important in order to understand how the whole process works.
Understanding the industry
The first step for a prosperous product sourcing process is to understand your industry – the marketplace. This is a step that can be of high value for your business. Why is that?
Because of the information. Information is everything in the business world and the only way to acquire solid data is to do market research for the industry. By doing industry research, you can tell whether your product is on Amazon, eBay and what are the possible technical specifications of the product that you want to sell.
By knowing your competitors and the big players in your online marketplace you can see the bigger picture. You can also find out what products are the top-selling products. Also, here are the online product reviews from satisfied and dissatisfied customers. Customer reviews are practically a gold mine of information. Above all, if you research and read honest online product reviews, you already know what the target market wants to shop online.
Conclusion
To sum up, the outcome of researching the industry should always be to understand the marketplace. Second, you have to see what the competition offers, what are the product standards and what the customer wants to see in the product that you want to source. The next step that you need to undertake is looking for a credible product manufacturer, and it will be discussed in detail in part 2 of this series.
To have progressive growth, arguably you need a great product. However, for a great product, you need a stable and reliable supplier. Making a mistake at this point can be devastating for your business and reputation.
With BizzBee Product Sourcing, you give us information about the product you want to source. And we will provide you with information about the right manufacturer. In the process, we will establish communication with many manufacturers. We also compare them based on several criteria and facilitate the selection process. You will significantly reduce the complexity and communication overhead from the process as a result.
This article was originally published on BizzBee Blog.