Where to sell? Website, Facebook, Daraz.pk, Ebay or Amazon?

Every model has pros and cons, however being a Pakistani merchant, your best bet is still going for Amazon FBA. And you will have to learn the art and science of building your Amazon FBA business from scratch to something massive which is possible as long as you learn 5 stages of this business.

There are few common questions that come from many people. For example, ‘Is our time and effort worth working on an Ecommerce Website?’, ‘Is there a charm for building an Ecommerce website? or Shopify?’ My answer to these questions is very simple. If you are working on shopify/website where exactly are you going to bring the traffic from? Either organically by working on ranking of your keywords on google or through google AdWords.

Now our next question is. ‘Is there enough traffic on google for people looking to buy products?’ Ask this question to yourself. Would you go to google.com and type “I want to buy an iPhone” or “I want to buy a marker?”

In other words, E-commerce’s specific traffic on google has been shrinking for decades and could be an estimated 10% right now and remaining traffic is all gone to giants like Amazon.com, eBay, Walmart and Sears etc. Buyers are more comfortable buying from marketplaces than a website because they feel safe buying from the marketplace and they feel unsafe buying from a website. God knows who owns this website and if they are going to ship my order on time or not.

So where is the traffic then? You want to work hard on building google AdWords campaigns and bring traffic to your website/shopify store? You want to work hard for this 10% traffic? Why don’t you focus on the 90% traffic source instead?

Alright so if you think you should be focusing more on marketplaces then you have a choice to go to daraz.pk in Pakistan or go to international marketplaces like eBay or Amazon. If you don’t know how, you can open Amazon or eBay as a Pakistani citizen. Please go through other videos to learn that part.

So let’s decide which one to choose? As we know Pakistan’s e-commerce economy is USD700A Million for 2017 whereas the United States Ecommerce Economy is US Dollar 209 Billion. So decide yourself which marketplace would bring you more orders and more sales?

If you decide to go to the United States marketplace now, you’ll have a choice of EBay or Amazon as a marketplace, so there are some numbers for you to choose from. USD187 Billion is the last year sales of Amazon.com which is almost close to 50% of total ecommerce sales in the United States. In other words, Amazon is a 200 Pound gorilla sitting among others right now.

Where to sell? Let's compare. eBay is more of a flea market /Saddar bazar type market and Amazon is a high end shopping mall.  eBay is also very small compared to Amazon and Walmart, Sears are even smaller of course.

So if you decide to go for Amazon now, you have to learn the difference between selling as an Amazon merchant or selling as an Amazon FBA seller. Being a merchant you become nothing but a corporate slave of Amazon trying to please your customer’s day and night and work hard every day to fulfil your incoming orders and keep pleasing your customers so they don’t abuse you.

These exasperating customers will abuse you anyways and you will keep giving them free replacements and refunds and keep handling customer queries and keep working hard day and night to keep your business running. Because the moment you make a few mistakes, Amazon gives you a death sentence instantly and you have no chance to stand up again.

Another model would be Amazon FBA ( Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) ) and that means, you buy inventory and ship into Amazon’s warehouse and let Amazon take care of your inventory. Let Amazon do pick, pack and ship for you and you do nothing but focus on building your brand, identifying niche products, rank them to page 1 of Amazon and let Amazon take care of pick, pack, ship, returns and refunds for you.

Every model has pros and cons, however being a Pakistani merchant, your best bet is still going for Amazon FBA. And you will have to learn the art and science of building your Amazon FBA business from scratch to something massive which is possible as long as you learn 5 stages of this business.

1. Get your ID setup through individual or through a legal entity

2. Product Hunting

3. Product Procurement/Logistics and Branding

4. Launch Pad/Ranking to page 1

5. Integration of Amazon FBA with your eBay/Shopify stores for additional sales

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