You may not think your service can be sold online, but here are 3 reasons you could be wrong!

We’ve all seen how quickly e-commerce has taken over, but many service-based small business owners and entrepreneurs are still shy about taking their business to the next level online.

Whether you’re selling a physical product or providing a service, you could benefit from online sales.

In this post, we’ll look at the barriers e-commerce presents to service providers and how many perceived barriers are easily and cheaply addressed by planning your approach like a pro (or with one) and using third-party tools that make everyone easier process.

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Here are 3 common barriers business owners face when contemplating adding eCommerce to their business tools:

1. You do not sell a product

Many companies sell a service that cannot draw a clear line between the user and the service.

Whether it’s consulting, speaking, coaching, or any other industry where you’re the product, the perception is that e-commerce is not something you should be pursuing.

You actually sell something, but you’ll have to be an innovative thinker if you want to use e-commerce to build your business and personal brand.

Are you a consultant? Consultants tend to adapt to the project and use their experience to guide business owners or other service providers through a long process that evolves as problems are discovered.

Sometimes constant problems are encountered and that is where you will see your opportunities.

If you see business after business hitting the same wall and have helped previous clients get over it, then that solution may be a product you can sell.

Be creative! Many successful applications started because someone like you saw an opportunity that no one else was addressing and jumped on it.

This can also be said for other service industries. However, it is not the only approach; if you are a trainer or a speaker, you also have potential for e-commerce.

Speakers and coaches often underestimate themselves. Your value is clear to many other companies that have hired you, so understand that your personal brand packs a punch.

Take that knowledge and monetize it!

Write a book, print t-shirts and mugs, or find any other way to turn your knowledge into tangible items. These could be promotional items or anything else you can think of.

So you will not only earn money through sales, but also build your brand at the same time.

The great point here is not to limit yourself to your service and to recognize the potential of your knowledge. If you’re having trouble with this, we’ve got a great mentoring program that can help you uncover the hidden potential for eCommerce that your brand has to offer.

2. You don’t have time

This is the main reason most people don’t get involved in online sales.

Setting up, maintaining, and eventually shipping the product seem like significant time commitments.

The new reality of eCommerce for small businesses is that these things take very little time.

Setup can be quick or time-consuming, and the barrier will actually be you. Being too picky about fancy design elements or functionality always holds businesses back.

Always put the emphasis on your business being at the service of the user.

Really, all you need to do is make sure that your website can take and process an order and that the information and products are clearly presented with as few steps as possible for the user to complete their purchase.

Maintenance can vary, and it’s often a good idea to start things yourself and then hire a third party or freelancer to take care of the maintenance.

Sometimes it doesn’t take much more than logging in a few times a week, though once you see everything working, you’ll probably be inclined to check all the time (in a good way).

Shipping is as easy as applying an app to print shipping labels and then picking the item up for delivery or taking it to the post office.

Look at your potential profit margins and see what the sale could mean for your business. You’ll be surprised how much income you’re missing out on!

3. It is too expensive

This is a big hurdle for many service-based businesses because they have seen how expensive it used to be to get into e-commerce, but not anymore.

We analyze the barriers, how to make your service viable and how time can influence. Both indicate lost revenue for the existing business if you split your time and start an eCommerce.

It’s actually incredibly cheap to start selling online.

Whether you choose Woocommerce https://woocommerce.com/ for your WordPress website, open a Shopify store https://www.shopify.ca/, or opt for BigCommerce https://www.bigcommerce.ca/, no it has to break the bank to get going.

With Woocommerce, the expense is whatever your professional web developer costs. This system is powered by WordPress, so if you’re already running WordPress, your cost will either be the time you try to set it up yourself or the cost of doing it professionally.

Shopify and Bigcommerce make this much easier, but they’ll also need to be installed as a subdomain of your existing website or you’ll be setting up an entirely new one.

These two have almost identical prices starting at $30 per month and this includes your hosting. They take care of everything, like credit card processing, and there’s no shortage of apps to handle functionality that isn’t native to their platforms.

However, taking this approach will take a long time.

If you hire a professional developer for any of these systems, make sure they really know the platforms beforehand because they differ so much down to the programming languages ​​they’re built with.

Of course, there are many other options to consider, such as 1ShoppingCart or even Infusionsoft and Magento, which are considered high-end options for large-scale stores.

Ultimately, the short answer to the question is: no, it’s not too expensive. This is because the price range starts with FREE.

The real cost is your time and the only risk is wasting it.

If you choose to explore e-commerce as an option, spend a lot of time planning. Not just a day of brainstorming, but weeks of spitting balls and brainstorming.

Look around you at what others in your industry have done and, more importantly, what they haven’t done and plan everything properly.

Hiring a professional business mentor to guide you may be the best decision you’ve ever made. You’ll overcome the typical setbacks and obstacles and be on your way to launching your eCommerce project much faster and with much less effort.

More and more service-based businesses are seeing the potential of e-commerce, so the faster you get on the bandwagon, the better. For many, e-commerce even becomes the main generator of income.

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