How To Start An ECommerce Business In India

The E-commerce industry is witnessing tremendous growth in the country This is due to increasing smartphone and internet penetration in tear two and tear three cities.

One of the companies I own is actually an E-commerce business. It’s one of the most successful ventures that I am doing right now. And, we were doing millions of rupees of business every year.

And actually, We are one of the few E-commerce companies in our city. So, when it comes to E-commerce maybe you’re thinking about starting an e-commerce business, but you need to know where to start. Today I want to give you three lessons I’ve learned during this time.

Before I tell you the lessons I’ve learned, you need to know How to start an E-commerce business in India.

Starting up an eCommerce business in India

Until you will gonna sell books or other GST exempted goods online, you do not need any kind of registration initially. But If you want to sell goods that fall under GST, You need to register for a GST number.

Now you can sell goods in any marketplace like Amazon, Flipkart, and Meesho. You can also build your own E-commerce website.

Three things you need to know

Number one, when it comes to E-commerce, conversion matters a lot. Conversion matters a lot. So, you should be constantly measuring your conversion rate on different pages. Your bounce rate, means people hit your homepage. Where are you seeing people exiting from your site? Where are you losing people?

Now, one of the things that we noticed in our E-commerce business was that we were losing a big chunk of the customers right at the checkout page, we’re losing a big, so they like the product, they click the product, they add to cart by the time they get to buy, we lose a whole lot of people.

So, I was saying to myself, okay, this is not good. What could we do? So, then we added a lot of different things. For example, we added actually testimonials during the checkout process.

We streamlined it and simplified the checkout process. So, in the beginning, back then I didn’t know, we had a multi-step process. And then, we changed all of that to make it much shorter.

They see the product, they click, and if they are added to the cart, they continue as a guest,

and that’s fine. Instead of that many steps, we shorten it to this many steps. And, we noticed sales dramatically increased. So, conversion matters.

You have to measure everything. You’re looking at data, you’re looking at your pages. You have to know exactly what is going on. It is not so much just about the product.

It’s about your customer and visitor’s behavior.

And when you have got some products that are selling well, make sure you feature those on your homepage. That’s key number one.

Number two, you need to have a content strategy as well as a paid strategy. So, we were running a lot of ads on Google, and Pay-Per-Click, we were spending a lot of money. But, in the beginning, especially no one knows why they should come to our store, online store. So, we were just doing a lot of that.

But then, later on, we also spent quite a bit of money optimizing our website for search engine traffic, just organic traffic. So, we were creating a lot of pages and ranking certain keywords in Google so people could find us just organically.

So, in the beginning, what’s interesting is 90-somewhat percent of our sales were coming from paid. Pay-Per-Click, we were spending a ton of money. To get some traction. But later on, a few months afterward within the company, the revenue, then it’s almost 60-40. 60% of our sales were coming from organic, free traffic.

Well, I wouldn’t say they’re entirely free because we do invest time and money in creating content for them. But, only 40% comes from paid. So, to do E-commerce I believe if you have your own store, meaning you’re not selling through Amazon ’cause Amazon already has all the traffic. But let’s say you’re not selling through Amazon, you have your own E-commerce store.

I believe you need to have a very good organic strategy as well as a paid strategy.

And, the last lesson I want to share with you about E-commerce is that inventory kills. What would kill you the most is you have way too much inventory of products that you don’t sell.

Depends on what kinda products you sell, do they expire?

Assuming your products don’t expire you’re gonna sit on a lot of products that don’t sell. And, you’re sitting in a lot of cash, right? So, you’ve gotta be very, very careful when it comes to inventory management. Now, before I sold the E-commerce company, we were sitting on millions, millions of dollars worth of inventory. Now, I’m glad I could sell all of that. And get all that money back, otherwise, if there’s any problem, we would have been sitting on a bunch of dead inventory.

So, be very, very careful, very mindful when it comes to inventory. I would suggest you should start with fewer products in the beginning. Test it out to see what your customer, your marketplace likes, and whoever your audience is. See what they like first, before you go crazy

and have so many SKUs have so many units and products.

Don’t be like Oh, I’m gonna buy 1000 of these, 2000 of these because you’ll be tempted. Wow you know, if I order way more, my cost per unit goes way down. But, what you don’t think about, you don’t consider, factor in is, what if it doesn’t sell? Now, you’re sitting on thousands of something that it doesn’t sell. It becomes a big problem, so inventory kills.

You should develop your high-income skill first before you go out there and start that scalable business

I am sure this article will help you start An E-commerce business.