What Does it Take to Sell On Line?

That’s easy: Money. Lots of money. (Having a few bushels full will help.)

Seriously, selling dive gear on line cannot be done on a shoestring. It takes either a lot of money, or a lot of time — generally both.

Just setting up an effective online sales site will require well into five figures (or the equivalent number of man hours). And that does not address the additional investment in inventory you will need. Let’s break this down further so you can see what we mean:

• To start, you will need shopping cart software and web hosting. Figure around $70/month for that. (Yes, there are free and low-cost alternatives — but you have to be a very savvy web person to use them.)

• Next, you are going to need the “full” version of Photoshop (figure close to $700 for a legit copy) and someone who is very good at using it. Why? Because, for every item you sell, you are going to need clear product images — usually in three different sizes. You may be able to get some of these from manufacturers; others you will need to shoot yourself — and then use Photoshop to knock the background out of the photo.

• You are also going to need a killer copy writer (these products will not sell themselves). For every product you offer, you are going to need a concise description and a list of features and benefits in bullet-point format. And it is not enough to just lift this info off the manufacturer’s website (assuming they even have something for you to lift). You need to present product info in a consistent format so that consumers can easily comparison shop similar items

• Finally, you are going to need hundreds of man hours to set everything up. It takes time (a lot of time) to learn a shopping cart system and then manually enter all of the photos, text and data on colors and sizes.

Start totaling up the cost of everything listed thus far. If you are honest about the value of the time involved, you will realize that you could probably buy a Subway franchise for about as much. But wait — there’s more!

The inventory challenge »

::: TOP ::: CONTACT US ::: ABOUT US :::