Hi there guys! I'm DangJu from Singapore!
I'm not too good with English, so pardon me if I make any mistakes while writing.
I would like to share something that I have learnt the past few months while I started selling Korean Snacks online!
Fellow Singaporeans that are looking for some nice Korean Snacks can look us up @ DangJuShop or Follow us on Facebook @ KoreanSnackMarket
I'll fit them into the 5 Ws and 1 H, where we learnt from in school.
5 Ws and 1 H consist of : Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.
Before that, let me share with you why we decided to start an online shop just to sell snacks.
We started off as a traveler that brings back items for requesters/buyers in our country to cover some of our expenses while travelling, sounds cool isn't it? It sure is! A trip to Korea helping to get back requested items, covered about 15% of our expenses!
As there are a number of people requesting for the same item, we thought that we should open up an online shop to help them out even more as they could pre-order if we were to travel there again! Also, as we have friends living in Korea as well, we would be able to get them to ship the items to us when we are not travelling to Korea. About 4 months into our creation of this shop, we have a total of 235 followers, 160 likes on our Facebook page and total sales of about $9500 as I'm writing this post.
Before I bore you guys, lets get into the things that I've learnt from this!
Things that I have learnt :
- What items would be profitable?
- Who are my expected audiences?
- How can I reach out to more people?
- When would it be a good time to start a sale?
- Why would people choose our shop over other competitors?
- Where would I be able to source for the cheapest goods for sale?
What items would be profitable?
We did a check and found out that there are certain snacks that is hardly even found at the country that it is sold at, which makes it harder for overseas snacks lovers to miss out on it! With basic assumption of higher demand, less supplies and some further checks on the prices that people are getting locally, we are safe to mark the item as profitable. Ultimately we need to see how much the item costs when bringing it in and how much supply/demand there is in your country and would your price be reasonable among people that are selling it as well. One item would be this Calbee Haitai Honey Butter Chips where its really hot and popular around the globe since launch!
Who are my expected audiences?
As I'm selling snacks, the audiences I need to reach out to is basically everyone that are interested in snacks! Having said that, I started off with targeting buyers aged 18-30 as I believe they are more into snacks and have sufficient spending power. You would need to know exactly what kind of audiences you're intending to target, this would save you plenty of time researching and also bring your sales to a higher level. My targeted audiences changed as I was getting more sales and found out that I have quite a number of aged 13-18 buyers together with aged 31-50 buyers, this is when the next part comes in.
How can I reach out to more people?
As stated above, now that I have known more about what audiences I have to reach, I started off with joining pages on Facebook with "Sell" tags to promote my page and also my shop. I can easily reach up to 300 people daily just from sharing my post. Another way I did was to use Facebook Ads to promote my page and shop, which I could choose the targeted audiences. Since I have the data above that tells me I should reach out to aged 13-50, I placed my targeted audiences in this range and Facebook will advertise based on who I want to reach. Also, we can add in #tags to make the targeted audience more specific, which for my case, I used #honeybutterchips #popular #snacks. Its related to what I'm selling and what is popular.
When would it be a good time to start a sale?
There are 2 ways for starting a sale, one is to start a sale together with your Facebook ads and the second is to start it right when you started to sell your items. I would recommend the first one as its killing two birds with one stone. Also, do note that when running a sale, you would like to be selling it at the same price or slightly lower then your competitor's pricing. To make it more attractive, price up your items by about 50% and do a sale, so that it would appear that you're running a 50-70% sale. Its been proven that with sufficient marketing, people will buy your item for $3.65 instead of the previous $3 before your sales. Because all people see is, "Woah! There is a sales ongoing here!". Most human have such a mindset that when something is on "SALE", it would be definitely worth the buy. Which from my experience, I would say that its definitely not every time.
Why would people choose our shop over other competitors?
Have you seen minimarts and supermarkets selling the same products? Some is about the same price while some costs more than the other? This is perfectly fine! People can choose where they want to spend their money on but how can you make them divert their purchases to your shop?
Firstly, lets talk about availability. Are your items available anytime they need it?
Secondly, shipping. Are you able to ship the items to them within a certain time frame? Hours/Days/Weeks.
Thirdly, attitude. Are we able to serve them better than what they are already getting? We can look into packaging, service response, incentives (Discounts/etc).
If your answer YES to all 3 of the above, I don't see why most of the people won't choose you over the other competitors. Know why I didn't mention about pricing? Its because like I pointed out earlier, people that have the spending power will decide on their own where they want to spend on, some would rather get Item A for a more expensive price from Shop A instead of Shop B due to it's availability or due to its location or even due to the shop's rating.
Where would I be able to source for the cheapest goods for sale?
Lastly, to increase our potential earnings, we definitely need to find a cheaper source of goods to sell! How can we do so? For my case, I would go to the country where the items are produced, check the pricing of the items and compare to online sellers/local suppliers. I'll then pick the cheapest possible goods from whoever I can get from. If you're on a bigger scale then you can directly go to the manufacturer from the country and discuss about importing them into your country at a certain rate!
That's all I have to share for now! Hope it helps!
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