What's the best way to expand with eCommerce outside of Dropshipping? (6)

As the question goes...
Hope to get some insights

Company building.

There are loads of options.

Here are some examples, which are all based in holding your own inventory. Which is pretty standard for most ecommerce companies.

So you start building up your own inventory and:
- Start selling to local customers from your warehouse or some sort of store front
- Start selling to other resellers / pro customers
- Start selling on marketplaces, such as Amazon

Ideally, you would combine that with building your own brand at the same time.

And with building a brand I only mean this:
- Name + logo + style
- Brand registration (also on marketplaces like amazon, once you have an account)
- Consistent way of doing business in the way that you have decided to do business (like lowest price, best quality). Be consistent in your execution, so you predictably deliver on your promise.

And voila, you've got yourself a recognisable brand

What you would do is start with a hypothesis, such as:
"This is our bestselling product, which sells at X volume on Amazon, so we should be able to sell Y units at Z price, deliver Q in profits"

You'd focus on the right mix of:
- Difficulty of execution (easy or hard)
- Expected impact in $ (big, small, ideally expressed in a real figure, say $x.xxx etc)
- Timescale (how long will it take for you to execute / implement)
- Expected level of success (the more experiments like this you do, the better you'll get a judging this accurately)

This is the framework that is often used in growth hacking and gives you a growth model to work with, not just some flavour of the month approach.

When you look at your business, you'll get ideas and opportunities on a frequent basis.
By using this model, you'll have a great way of sorting these to get your business where you want it to be.

Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by pekadis

There are loads of options.

Here are some examples, which are all based in holding your own inventory. Which is pretty standard for most ecommerce companies.

So you start building up your own inventory and:
- Start selling to local customers from your warehouse or some sort of store front
- Start selling to other resellers / pro customers
- Start selling on marketplaces, such as Amazon

Ideally, you would combine that with building your own brand at the same time.

And with building a brand I only mean this:
- Name + logo + style
- Brand registration (also on marketplaces like amazon, once you have an account)
- Consistent way of doing business in the way that you have decided to do business (like lowest price, best quality). Be consistent in your execution, so you predictably deliver on your promise.

And voila, you've got yourself a recognisable brand

What you would do is start with a hypothesis, such as:
"This is our bestselling product, which sells at X volume on Amazon, so we should be able to sell Y units at Z price, deliver Q in profits"

You'd focus on the right mix of:
- Difficulty of execution (easy or hard)
- Expected impact in $ (big, small, ideally expressed in a real figure, say $x.xxx etc)
- Timescale (how long will it take for you to execute / implement)
- Expected level of success (the more experiments like this you do, the better you'll get a judging this accurately)

This is the framework that is often used in growth hacking and gives you a growth model to work with, not just some flavour of the month approach.

When you look at your business, you'll get ideas and opportunities on a frequent basis.
By using this model, you'll have a great way of sorting these to get your business where you want it to be.

Hope this helps.

Dropshipping makes sense when starting a new store, however diversifying into products customers can't find anywhere else is going to involve your own research and development.

I can understand if you are sourcing products from a major supplier, it may not make sense to hold inventory, however, there are often benefits that come from purchasing in bulk, such as a reduced cost of each individual item.

@owen / moneytrain

I meant having inventory in stead of just drop shipping from the manufacturer (I would not want them to know my trade / pro customers).

The physical location could be your own warehouse or a third party.

We are currently considering going from our own warehouse to outsourcing our whole logistic operation.
Few reasons:
- easier to scale up
- no need to keep people busy when it's a slow day
- focus our energy on growth
- more freedom to choose a new location for our offices

Now, to the decision as to hold your own stock (independent of where it is), that's a business decision.

Think about who you want your customers to be, find out what's important to them and then deliver on that.
Different customers have different needs, you as a business will have specific strengths.

Find where the intersection is and you'll know what to do.

Let me know if you need more info