Starting An E-commerce Business in Nigeria can be daunting and tasking for any newbie. In Africa, most people pay on delivery and sometimes they cancel at anytime.
Some E-commerce business agencies have lost millions just chasing people who showed interest and never turned up to collect the business they ordered, others start arguing on price of something they previously ordered online, a third set, simply switch of their mobile phones.
That said, starting an e-commerce business while very profitable comes with a myriad of challenges you must navigate and overcome if you’re going to be successful. There is a common among among E-commerce business owners that the business isn’t for the faint-hearted.
Let’s look at 6 things you know before starting an E-commerce business in Nigeria or any other African country.
1. You must understand your customer.
Ideal customer
Ideal Customer
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”.
–
SAM WALTON – TRAVIS BIGGERT
Understanding your customer is truly the gold of marketing and sales. If you can understand what makes your customer remove his hard-earned money and pay for a product or service, you have the key to selling anything on earth.
But when it comes to e-commerce in Nigeria however, understanding the customer helps you just as much as them. Customers can be very wonderful. After placing and confirming an order, on transit to the delivery point, the customer can simply switch off his mobile.
This has happened times without number, other time, on getting to the delivery point, the customer simply beings to negotiate on price. Understanding the customer helps you to develop the much needed patience and fortitude required to prosper in the E-commerce business in Nigeria.
2. You must understand the product
” Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers.
–
SETH GODIN
Products
What does your product do for your customers? What are the angles you can use to market your products? Who would be attracted to images of your products? What different ways can you use your product? What are people already saying about your products?
Knowing your product inside out is one secret that will help you to be able to convince your customers in your sales pages and make them know why they must get that product and get it today.
The better you understand your product, the easier it would be to market it.
3. Your pricing
Pricing
Pricing is one of the most important things to take seriously when starting an e-commerce business. This is because it would determine whether you make profits, break even or losses.
You’re into business to make profits and you’ll easily run out of funds if you don’t replenish operational funds used.
Some things that affect pricing that you must consider include
• Advertising cost
• products cost
• delivery cost
• profit margin
• management expenses
Understanding all these would help you know how much your pricing should be.
Pricing will also help you determine what type of products to sell us some product you can actually sell 2X, 3X or 10X the original price, while others would only sell at 1.2X or 1.5X the price.
4. Choose The Location You Can Comfortably Cover
Location
Like everything else, Delivery within Nigeria has its troubles. Most startup E-commerce business do the same mistake of attempting to deliver nationwide without first understanding and putting in place systems to ensure efficiency.
This usually leads to undue stress on the business and the business person pulls out. In Nigeria some areas are not easily accessible and require a higher amount to reach. By attaching a fixed price to all products as delivery fee it might not be enough to cover for some specific areas. This definitely means you will start to run at a loss or money will be deducted from your profit.
When starting an e-commerce business in Nigeria, choose a suitable geographic area you can cover comfortably. This would definitely be less stressful and would help you understand the profitability of the business before attempting to scale.
5. Choose a singular role – outsource the rest.
Choose a singular role
A big mistake most e-commerce business persons do is trying to do everything by themselves and get all the profits. This is the surest way to lose the business.
Trying to do everything yourself with where you can and the purpose of doing the business becomes defeated.
The best thing to do is to divide your business into functional parts and understand the number one rule you should play in your business for you to be profitable and for the business to continue and outsource every other thing.
You could decide to manage a business and outsource call the other component parts such as delivery, product sourcing, packaging, and advertising. Doing this enables you to stay longer, endure less stress and effectively run and manage the business.
Never attempt to do every part of a business by yourself.
PS if you are looking for an e-commerce expert to help you run Facebook or Google ad, I’d recommend Sean B Samy
6. Learn directly from The Experts
Learn from experts in the industry.
Most people wake up and decide to go into a coma without any prior training or understanding the perks of the business. This is one surefire way of losing money.
When attempting to go into an e-commerce business in Nigeria and show you learn from an expert or someone who has been there and been successful. Like a mentor once told me “there are some things you can never learn on Google”.
Learn from experts, buy trainings and YouTube. The more actionable, practical knowledge you have, the less mistakes you make.
Click here to learn more about starting a profitable E-commerce business in Nigeria.
Now that you know exactly what to do to start your e-commerce business I wish you great success.
What has been your down experience in e-commerce. Kindly tell us in the comments section. We are dying to hear from you.
Facebook advertising has been around for a while now and still reigns as the simplest as well as cheapest online advertising platform today. Even though it has gotten more difficult to advertise on Facebook, it still remains one of the best platforms with the largest reach across varying demographics.
Different advertising platform
While there are hundreds of other advertising platforms such as Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, TiKToK and a host of others, Facebook and Google are the most dominant as of 2022.
So if you’ve been wondering how much and if at all you can make any money from Facebook ads, we created this post to show you three awesome ways for you to make money using Facebook advertising in 2022. Let’s dive right into it.
1. Sell Products with Facebook Advertising
These could be physical or digital products; either way selling products using Facebook ads is one really awesome way to make a ton of money.
Selling physical products requires you to have a store or study suppliers as well as spend a lot of money finding buyers. You also need to have a delivery system in place as well as a payment system.
Some products you can sell range from clothing to adults toys to food and health supplements as well as electronic gadgets. With the demand for products increasing every day the e-commerce market has only started to Bloom. According to the Statista it is expected to grow by 50% to 7.4 trillion US dollars by 2025. This is definitely a market you should not ignore.
The digital product market is not left out of the selling boom. In short the sales of digital products have quadrupled since the onset of the covid-19 and and man’s search for actionable results oriented knowledge has only increased. This has made more people want to invest in knowledge and gaining of practical skills that could be used to up their income or provide some other sort of results such as wellness, weightloss, travel, and others.
Having knowledge in some practical area that has provided results for you and probably a few close friends, you can decide to package this knowledge and sell it as a digital product.
The process to selling a digital product is a little bit more complicated than e-commerce products. Firstly you have to establish authority and credibility as fast as possible. Most people will only buy a digital product if they trust the author.
E-commerce growth by regions of the world.
One way to create such trust and get people buying your digital product is what is known as lead generation. This process involves getting people who are interested in the topic you are trying to sell and nurturing them over a period of time to build trust and to build your authority as an expert or a highly knowledgeable personnel in that field.
For e-commerce which uses direct sales techniques the sales/conversion rate is usually between 1 to 5%, however using lead generation techniques for digital products you have sales of up to 25%. Some tools for carrying out lead generation include email Marketing & WhatsApp marketing. These two tools are used to build what is known as your email or WhatsApp broadcast list depending on which of the platforms you use. It is also worthy of note that you could integrate both platforms.
While selling physical products can make you a lot of money it can also be very tedious especially when it comes to making deliveries full-stop digital products on the other hand require a much longer time to build expertise but once built you can continue making money from the same email list over and over.
That being said with digital products you can fix the price of how much you wish to sell it and you can sell it to anybody around the Globe because you do not have to do deliveries, this is therefore one major advantage digital product has over physical products or e-commerce products. Another advantage is that you don’t have to fear about the product being damaged during delivery or getting lost or stolen. You also do not have to worry about storage space.
So which one should you start? Well that depends on you. Both models will make you a lot of money if done right. To learn more about starting a profitable e-commerce business click here while to learn more about creating your own digital products are making a lot of sales click here.
2. Advertise for clients
Another relatively easy way to make money with Facebook ad is to start your own one-man advertising agency. You can advertise for businesses starting from as low as ₦5,000 naira to as high as 10 million or more. There really is no limit : it all depends on your ability to position yourself and get the right types of clients.
Starting your own advertising agency requires you to have basic knowledge of advertising, copywriting, Facebook ads, web design and analytics.
Alternatively you can build a team to handle the technical aspects while you can simply handle client-hunting. This is far simpler than handling everything yourself. The pitfall here is that you have to be good at people management and putting together a team that have a common goal.
The best way to position yourself is by finding a niche and dominating it. For example you could choose to become a Facebook ads agency for brand growth. This basically means you and your team focus on growing different business brands and getting more followers and potential customers for such businesses.
By choosing and focusing on a specific niche you develop a higher credibility, authority, and an ability to demand higher prices. As an icing on the cake, you can easily choose who you want to work with. You are seen as an expert. Remember a jack of all trade is a master of none.
You can learn more about Facebook analytics here and how to advertise profitably on Facebook here.
3. Build and Monetize a following with Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads could be used to build a following online around a topic you are interested in doing business in and then later monetizing that following. This is very similar to building an email list.
This is a slow process and it consumes a lot of money and time however the end result is usually very much worth it.
Building a following is similar to lead generation. It involves dishing out value over an extended period of time to people who are interested in a particular topic or niche that you operate in. This could be done organically but would take over a year to get traction going. You can hasten this up using Facebook likes ads or engagement ads.
These ads are there to help you build your brand image. Using these types of ads, you can build a huge following quickly and start monetizing it using seminars, coaching classes, selling of different products and the likes.
When your page or community reaches a certain number, it starts to grow exponentially on its own and you no longer need to run ads. The algorithm starts recommending your page to people to follow in larger numbers.
Now you should note that you can only run ads on a page, how ever you can run ads to grow a group if you prefer a group than a page. For a group anyone can contribute (depending on settings you choose) and grows ways faster than a page where only you and authorised admins can contribute.
So there you have it, 3 awesome ways you can make money from Facebook Ads in 2022. Want to learn more about Facebook Ads, click here.!
The greatest gift you can ever give a business person is more customers
Every business wants to have more customers because more customers mean more money and means more profit for the business owners.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew 3 simple hacks you could exploit to get more customers running to your business?
In today’s post, I’m going to give you three simple things you could do right now that are guaranteed to get you more customers and more money in the long run.
These work irrespective of whatever business you are and whatever industry or country you are located.
Let’s get into it, shall we?
1. Put Your business on Google
Google My Business
Ever heard of Google My Business? Google my business is Google’s free tool for helping businesses find more visibility and helping customers or potential customers know exactly where certain businesses are located that are close to them when they search.
For example, when someone wants to find a Barbie salon close to them they can simply open their Google and search by typing “barbing salons near me” or ” barbing saloons in Ikeja”. This will simply bring out a list of all the top listed barbing salons in that area.
This is simply free advertising as businesses that are on Google can easily get found and get more customers on average than businesses that are unlisted.
To learn more about Google My Business or how you can put your business on Google click here
2. Use Twitter Spaces or Facebook’s AudioRooms
Twitter Spaces
Twitter space is a free tool from Twitter that allows you to create a room similar to a podcast. It’s the same as Facebook’s Audio room where you can discuss with other people pertaining to any topic of your choice.
You could create a space around your business where you can get other people to come and share their business stories or business activities.
What this does is help you create visibility and make people know more about you and your business. Is a very simple hack to get traffic and as well build an authority presence around your brand.
By coming up to share information in a place like Twitter space or Facebook Audio rooms you create an authority figure around yourself making people who have never heard of you know, like, and trust you.
To set up an audio room on Facebook simply log into Facebook and click the sign that shows audio rooms and invite as many people as possible. For Twitter, you can simply schedule space and Twitter will advertise it to all your followers automatically.
3. Create a blog.
Blog
Having a Blog based around your business is a powerful tool for generating traffic that can be turned into paying customers. This is so because blogs build very powerful authority figures around the writer of such blogs.
If you own a soap-making business, for example, you could start a blog about skin health or soap making and simply post content once or twice a week. You then link the content to your website or any other means by which customers contact you.
By simply posting content there and linking it to your products people see you as an authority in that industry and who doesn’t want to get the best from an authority or an expert?
So here are my three simple hacks for getting more customers to come and visit your business. If applied well this can lead to you getting more customers than you can handle.
PS: Click here to get the best e-commerce Facebook ads manager if you want to successfully scale your e-commerce business
