Marketing Plan For Furniture Business Could Still Be Profitable – Ecommerce Can Help You Out In Hard Times
Is pretty obvious that in the last 20 years the World economy and the way to do businesses have changed forever. It continues to evolve and progress to protect itself. Internet has opened new doors for all kind of companies. And the risk to set up an online company is ridiculous. This means that you can spend some money on an idea and see what happens, if it doesn’t work you just move into another direction, you don’t end up broke. See the potential? See why I say that the way to do businesses have changed for ever? Anyone can set up a site, a blog, offer some services or products that don’t even have to be yours and promote them. It could be a small business. Now, think big and think about the big companies, they are doing this too. How this “affects” the Marketing Plan For Furniture Business, one of the most lucrative businesses since ancient times?
Let me describe three reasons why the Traditional Furniture Business alone is not such a good idea nowadays:
Traditional Businesses Are Expensive to Run: The real estate market is bounded to the furniture market, basically because you need furniture for your house, it’s that simple. When the furniture market goes up, so does the Marketing Plan For Furniture Business. Now, when the real estate market goes down, so does the furniture market. Also, maintaining a store is not cheap, you have to pay taxes, rent, employees, etc..
Zone Of Influence is Limited: The influence that your traditional furniture can have depends on several factors. On of them is the relation between quality and price of your products. Good quality and good price are an unbeatable and an appealing opportunity for shoppers that can recommend your store to others. But, how far can you get with this mouth to mouth method? There are physical limitations. Also, the location of your store is the second most important factor. The more “potential shoppers” out there on the street the better. But more exposure in zones with high traffic of people means more money to spend. Also, do you ship your products? That makes a big difference too.
Opening Hours are Limited: If you have a traditional store then you might have an opening time from 9 AM to 6 PM for example. But from 6PM to 9AM you are not doing Startup Furniture Business. In today’s World economy it actually means you are losing money.
Now, Internet opens a world of possibilities for your Marketing Plan For Furniture Business. Let’s review the above items having the Internet model in mind:
Online Businesses Are Not Expensive to Run: Getting a hosting account to put your site only costs a few bucks, let’s say you can get a hosting account for $10 per month. Then a.com domain also costs another $10 but this time is an annual payment. Then get a blog from WordPress or Blogger for free and you are ready to go. Get your digital camera and take some pictures and shoot a video as the owner speaking about the quality of your products, enter prices, descriptions, contact information and you are set. You can also sell online by getting one of the many free open source cart solutions out there (just run a search in Google for “free cart solution for WordPress”), and you can use PayPal standard version that is free to take care of all the payment transactions and invoicing. As you can see, we are not even spending $11 per month.
Zone Of Influence is Unlimited: the World is your “potential” zone of influence. The more you promote your online business the larger your zone of influence. Promoting a site online is also free, though there are some techniques you will need to learn if you want to do it yourself. You can always outsource the promotion, but I won’t cover the paid methods because we are trying to run an online store as with the minimum amount of investment required.
Opening Hours are Unlimited: your site will be working all day for you. Probably not many people from US will be shopping or browsing your site at 3AM, but in China and India you will have “potential” customers browsing your site. It’s a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week 365 days a year, it’s the perfect scenario and dream of any merchant.
As you can see, the benefits of having an online store are huge. Now, I’m not saying here that traditional stores are over. Ideally, if you already have a store then getting into the online furniture business world is the next logical step for you. And if you don’t have a store then setting up an online store sounds like an interesting idea, doesn’t it? Obviously, there are shipping costs that we can cover in next articles but just let me say that what most online furniture stores do is to add the shipping cost to the customer. And most of the times the customer agree with that because there’s no other way they can get that beautiful bed they saw on your site, so they are usually willing to pay shipping costs for it. Also, the online e-commerce platform will let the customer know exactly how much money the shipping will cost. Everybody ends happy because is a great deal for all.
