Winning Strategies For Selling Online In Nigeria

If you have never sold anything online, you may not believe this.

But it is true.

Many small businesses are selling online in Nigeria.

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven more customers to purchase items they normally buy from physical stores to online marketplaces and eCommerce stores.

In a bid to adapt to this change, more small businesses are opening stores and listing their products and services online.

But the problem is that they are doing all that without any strategy or applying the winning strategies that have been proven to work for online sellers in Nigeria again and again.

So, if you want to succeed at selling your products and services online, keep reading as we share some winning strategies you can adapt to win at selling online in Nigeria.

3 Winning Strategies For Small Businesses Selling Online In Nigeria

1. Leverage Trusted Platforms

Nigerians find it difficult to trust people.

This lack of trust poses a big challenge to small business owners who sell online.

To establish this trust, smart business owners chose to leverage existing eCommerce platforms customers have come to trust over time.

This strategy helps customers to extend that trust to your business too, even though they don’t know you.

So instead of starting by building your online store, you can leverage existing online marketplaces like Jumia, Konga, Selar, etc. to sell your products or services.

Of course, you can choose to build a stand-alone eCommerce store, but it may succeed if you’ve already built trust offline, or you’re ready to spend enough money and offer incentives to gain customer trust.

2. Sell Great Products/Services

The quality of what you sell matters.

As I explained earlier, gaining the trust of your customer is critical to your success.

A great way to gain that trust is to ensure that the quality of what you’re selling is at least up to par.

You may succeed in selling a few poor products, but you would not be able to build an online business based on selling fake or substandard products.

Customers talk, and if your products are known to be of a poor standard, it would devastate any chance you may have of selling successfully online.

3. Online Marketing

Effectively marketing your products and services is important to drive leads to your store (s).

You cannot just create an eCommerce store or list your product on a marketplace and expect to start making sales immediately.

You have to promote your store as you would like a physical store to create awareness of your products and drive leads to buy.

Furthermore, you can do this in different ways or a combination of different ways.

• Google advert: you can advertise your products or services through Google to drive customers who search for your products to your eCommerce store or page.
• Marketplace Advert: you can also advertise your products or service within the marketplace, your products are listed to be well-positioned to attract the traffic that they attract.
• Social media marketing: you can utilize your social media accounts to promote your eCommerce stores as well.

4. Optimise your store/listing

The more optimized an eCommerce store is, the more chances it stands of making sales consistently.

This is why things like the store’s presentation, sales copy, and social proof are important.

• Store Presentation: The way your store is presented matters a lot. By presentation, we mean the quality of pictures and information you post. The better the quality of your pictures and the product information you provide, the more chance you stand to sell to customers.
• Sales Copy: It is not enough to upload quality images and product information which is the minimum requirement. You should also be conscious of the words you use and how you use them. The words you use and how you describe your products can be the difference between selling out and not selling.
• Social Proof: Adding social proofs to your store can help your customers trust you enough to at least try out your products. You should always add customer reviews to your eCommerce site to provide the necessary proof your customers need to buy from you, but you may not be able to do that if you are selling on a marketplace.

There is a race to capture the rising number of customers who are looking online to buy goods and services.

Small businesses that can follow the strategies we’ve shared in this article would stand a better chance of winning at selling online.

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