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5 Pricing Strategies for Savvy Ecommerce Sellers

Unless you’re required to sell a product at a specific price point, like the MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price), then you’re in charge of the anxiety-inducing task of setting your prices in your store. It’s not easy, considering all the things you have to factor in: competitive pricing, customer expectations, how product costs and shipping impact your bottom line, and other operational overhead costs.

You have to find a sweet spot that doesn’t impact your sales or profit.

If you price your products too low to beat competitors, then you might win more sales, but your profit margins will suffer. You have to hope those losses are made up in volume.

Aiming for the middle ground will leave you to compete on similar price points with everyone else. This may balance profit and volume, but you’ll need to find more ways to make yourself stand out, which means you might have to put more money and effort into your marketing efforts.

If you price too high in hopes of making your product appear more valuable to high-end consumers, you could attract an audience willing to pay more. By doing so however, you turn off audience segments that are price-sensitive.

There are a few different strategies you can use to decide how to price your products without negatively impacting your margins. These pricing methods will help you determine whether you’re pricing for high or low volume, trying to find that perfect middle ground, or leveraging psychology to move your products at any price.

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5 Ways to Make Your App Sell Itself

Apps have never been more popular than they are today, and no wonder: they add convenience to our personal and professional lives, entertain us, and provide mobile access to websites, services, and other products.

As more consumers jump on the mobile bandwagon, the app marketplace continues to swell with everything from business to entertainment applications. In the Google Play marketplace alone, there are more than 2.2 million apps.

Launching a new app that will get seen and downloaded by mobile users is no simple task in such a crowded market. App developers need to add marketing and promotion to their skillset, or outsource these tasks, to get any kind of visibility for their app online.

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Bootstrap or Bust: 10 Tips for Building a Business Out of Your Own Pocket

Managing a startup is hard, and funding it can be even harder. Despite these challenges, there are a surprising number of startups that rake in enough cash to get off the ground without ever turning to venture capitalists or angel investors for seed funding and startup capital. In fact, only about 3% of investor capital goes toward businesses in the startup phase.

When you consider that over 500,000 new businesses are launched every month, you’ll see that only a tiny number of startups get outside financial support. The rest are putting up their own capital and bootstrapping their way through launch.

The odds of getting funding as you work on launching a new business are extremely slim, so if you’re completely dedicated to getting the ball rolling for your business, then you’ll need some careful strategizing and financial management skills. Bootstrapping a startup isn’t easy, but what’s more rewarding than knowing you launched and grew your business out of your own pocket, with few resources to start with aside from your own skills and sheer determination?

Not to mention the satisfaction of retaining 100% of your equity.

In this article, I’ll cover ten ways you can simplify the road to launching while bootstrapping a startup.

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5 Tips for Using Corporate Sponsorships to Drive Brand Visibility

Companies large and small spent more than $20 billion on sponsorships in 2014 in the U.S. alone, with global figures surpassing $55 billion. The majority of sponsorships come from sports, where athletes team up with brands to turn an athlete’s followers onto the brand and expand visibility. Other sponsorship categories include: high-end electronics, television brands, entertainment, arts, social causes, festivals and international events.

Establishing a sponsorship is only the first step though. You need to know how to leverage that sponsorship and market it to get a boost in visibility online as well as through traditional marketing channels.

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The 7 Key Elements of an Effective Personal Brand

Building a business isn’t easy. Success comes from intensive, hard work and a great deal of learning. Any entrepreneur will tell you that it’s important to love what you do, leverage your passion, work hard and most importantly — never stop building your personal brand.

That’s because people like to do business with other people, not companies. Building your personal brand lends credibility and authenticity to your business, especially if that business is you. 

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The 15 Best Podcasts for New Product-Driven Entrepreneurs

It’s an age-old debate: are true entrepreneurs born with a certain spirit and mindset that drives them with a need to create something and succeed from their own endeavours? Or can anyone become an entrepreneur with the right training and mentorship?

No matter what side of the fence you’re on in that debate, one thing is for certain: no entrepreneur begins their journey with all the knowledge they need to launch a product and grow a business.

There’s always more to learn, new ideas to share, and different paths to try. Thankfully, entrepreneurs don’t have to subject themselves to textbook studies. There is a wealth of podcasts putting out regular content to help dodge pitfalls and grow your business successfully.

To help get you started, I’ve compiled a list of the 15 best podcasts for any entrepreneur launching or growing a product-centric business:

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Ebay, Etsy and Amazon: Where and How to Expand Your Ecommerce Empire

If you’ve considered expanding where you sell products, beyond your current ecommerce store, now is the time to do it.

Ecommerce continues to grow in profitability as more and more consumers turn to the web for product purchases. Online Consumer spending grew by more than 13 percent between 2013 and 2014, and again between 2014 and 2015 by 14.6 percent. Sales are projected to keep climbing, and by some estimates, ecommerce sales will hit nearly $500 billion by 2018.

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How to Use Your Procrastination Habit to Your Startup’s Advantage

You’ve read countless roundup posts and expert advice on how to be more productive and get the most out of your day. Some tips sound great while others made you recoil with a resounding “nope!” But despite all that reading, you still can’t kick your procrastination habit.

Stop beating yourself up or feeling guilty. Procrastinating is more beneficial than you might think – even the most successful entrepreneurs are prone to procrastinating sometimes.

In fact, Pies Steel, a human resources (HR) professor at the University of Calgary’s Haskane School of Business, found that 95 percent of the population procrastinates at times, and one out of every five people are chronic procrastinators.

If you haven’t overcome this habit yet, here’s how you can use procrastination to fuel your startup’s growth.

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7 Businesses That Prove 2016 Is the Year of Social Entrepreneurship

“It’s better to give than to receive.”

That seems to have long been the mantra for philanthropists of all shapes and sizes. Words that were echoed by my own parents during childhood.

But those words represent a very dated approach to charity. It’s a concept that is swiftly succumbing to change as industries evolve and social entrepreneurship grows. Today, young startup founders and incumbent businesses are more rapidly changing the model; make a profit while making a difference.

Of course, there has been pushback; Dan Palotta spoke to this problem during a 2013 TED Talk on the matter, emphasizing just how skewed perceptions can be.

“You want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it,” Dan said. “We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you’re considered a parasite yourself.”

Despite the discontent of some, social entrepreneurship is evolving into a world of its own.

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How to Boost E-commerce Conversions (Without Spending a Year Studying Optimization)

So much of marketing (SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing, and the rest) is about getting visitors to your site.

But when it comes down to it, that is not the most important goal of e-commerce – it’s sales.

No matter how much web traffic you get, problems on your website that limit conversions ultimately make your marketing efforts futile.

Luckily, you don’t need to spend a year studying optimization to get more sales. Read on to learn how you can start boosting your e-commerce conversions today.