Week 3 E-Business

Two years back before entering SIM UB, during a huge break that I have after my A'lvls, my friend and I set up a small blog shop to sell accessories that we made ourselves. It didn't turn out well, as in the end we only got to sell one item...

One main concern that I had was publicity and advertising. There are tonnes of blog shops out there, and what makes me think that people out of the blue will stumble upon this blog and buy things from us? And at that point of time, I did not know anything about advertising online or how to even conduct business over the internet. In the end after a long while, we advertised on two shopping directories online.

As we were planning, I realise that partnership is also important. Collaboration with your partner involves distribution of work, handling money, planning of the website, delivery, getting the products together, and the list just goes on and on.

Another concern that I had was the prices of the goods. There are a lot of shops out there, and the prices that we quote must be able to compete with them. This is a tricky issue as we are selling accessories that are handmade by us, the materials that are used are not cheap if bought in small quantity. Unless if we have a steady business going, there is no point in buying the materials in bulk. Hence our items were priced rather high to cover our cost. However, given that we do not have to pay rental, bills or any other cost to set up the shop, all the more the price needs to convince people that they are buying quality goods and persuade them to buy.

The last concern that I have was our goods. Do we have enough goods to sell, does our quantity and quality of goods show that we are credible and reliable. How do we compete with other people who are setting up similar blog shops and how can our products stand out from theirs?

In the end the shop was left there as it was not profitable, since we only sold one item and we had our own commitments to school. Time is also a factor, whether or not do we have the time to maintain such a business on the fast moving Internet?

Now that i looked back, I realise that the issue was not as simple as it was. Insufficient market research was done to see what consumers wanted. My goods were made according to my style and capabilities. To market our own style takes a different approach than the commercial marketing of goods to make profit. Hence there is a conflict of the nature of the product, and the way of marketing.

Then is the outlets that we used to publicise. Our target audience is young teenagers to women of early twenties. The two directories that we used were not exactly places teenagers would visit to know what kind of shops are there online. We should have used blog advertising, which is going to blogshops online to advertise our own blogshop so that people visiting them would get to know about us.

Then was our own capital. We do not have a start up captial to get our materials, which in the end was our own pocket money, which is very limited.

Also, we limited our payment mode by bank transfer. As we didn't have the expertise with internet credit and eligibility to have our own credit card. Hence it limited our scope to customers who can pay by bank transfer.

Lastly, the problem of our business is that it lacked the foresight. We did not have a clear idea of how long and how big our business is going to be. There was insufficient planning and clear targets of our e-business.