How To Sell A Product Online And In Stores

November 17, 2013

Many people on my apps write to me and ask how can they sell some product. Sometimes the product is something that they make on their own, at home. And sometimes, they are trying to sell a product that is created by another company. In this article, we will cover the nuances of how selling is different in cases when you create the product on your own, or resell another company’s product. And we will explain all the great ways to can sell your product.

Types Of Products To Sell

Products people sell vary greatly. They can be food products, pieces of clothing people make, uniquely designed items, any many other kinds of things. Selling a food item is obviously very different from selling a widget you made. So as you read this article, try to think of marketing strategies that I outline would work for your type of product.

Options For Selling Your Product In Stores Offline

If the product is something that you create, you can approach local stores to see whether they would sell that product from their stores. That can be done with food products as well as physical items you create such as clothing or anything else. Here is a more elaborate article for how to do offline marketing.

If you do not create your own product, it is more difficult to resell that product in stores because often they would either prefer that you are the creator of the products, or the actual creator of the products has already approached the major stores to sell their products.

But there is an option that can work for all kinds of products, and that is to sell the product at flea market, or from carts, or the street. I realize that does not seem glorious at all, but it can result in revenue, and most importantly, when you try to do that actual sales, you get to see how people react to your product, and hear some of their feedback on it. That is invaluable because if you get direct feedback from your potential customers (which you would not if you sold your items only from stores) you can then take that feedback and use it to improve your product until it is something that customers absolutely love.

Selling Your Product Online On The Web

Here is a full tutorial for how to do online marketing.

On the web, you have many options for selling your product. You can sell from your own website, or sell your product from numerous other websites such as Amazon.com Shopping.com or Etsy.com depending on what type of product you have.

To sell from your own site, you can easily set up a WordPress site and begin selling from it in as little as one or few days. The challenge with that approach is that you will need to bring lots of traffic into your site.

The other approach is to sell your items through last existing stores such as Amazon.com and others. That is a great option because it does not require you to create your site. It also requires you to do much less marketing. The negative sides of selling your products on the big sites is that they take a percentage of the sales. Additionally, it is up to the algorithms of those sites whether your items will be easily discoverable there.

So what you want to do is diversify how you sell online by selling through your own site, and reselling your products from the big sites. If you make your own products, you can resell from Amazon, Etsy, Fab.com, eBAY and similar sites which allow you to sell items you have created. And if the item that you sell is created by a different company, you may not be able to sell on some of those sites.

Marketing Your Product

If you need more help promoting your product, we have a series of YouTube videos that have tutorials on every marketing strategy imaginable with over 7 hours of video tutorials. You can view them all here.

Further Business Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app. Additionally, here is the iOS fundraising app. And here is the Android fundraising app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.