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Find your own niche and become its expert

One of the key factors crucial for ecommerce store to succeed is the choice of an adequate niche. The biggest stores offer a great deal of various products. Therefore, what is favorable in smaller stores, is their curated selection of goods, so that the items they have in stock meet customers' demands and are of really high quality. Take Lamps&Co. for example – it offers only original, handmade products for children prepared by best designers and manufactures. Of course, founding a business as a niche does not have to exclude expanding its assortment in future.

Lamps&Co products

Human customer service

Because of a large scale of the biggest stores, they remain anonymous in relations with their customers, whereas in smaller shops it is much easier to reply to all the e-mails you get, talk with the users and listen to them in social media.By keeping in touch with your customers not only will you gain crucial knowledge, but it will also help you build relationship with them, which may prove fruitful. Always remember to be positive and personal in communication with customers - you will not sound like a robot then. In terms of the best medium - offer as many as you can.Livechat has become more and more popular in the last few years, but email and traditional phone support ensure that everyone can communicate with you how they want to. If you're wary about providing phone support, an online answering service like PATLive may be the best solution for you.

Better product descriptions

In the majority of large ecommerce stores the descriptions of products are copied from wholesalers' catalogs. Unique product descriptions will enable you to optimise your store in search engines so that it is more visible and consequently visited more frequently.

Your own products

Preparing your own products gives you a guarantee that the goods you sell are unique and that the only place where customers are able to find them is your store. It helps you achieve a higher margin, since users do not have a possibility to compare your prices with other stores. Moreover, customers are more likely to pay more for things which they know are unusual.

An exceptional store history

Another advantage of your store may be its history – let your customers be the part of it. A way to emphasise the uniqueness of your store is to attach a deeper meaning to sales, for example by donating to some foundation or selling only the products with a fair trade mark. An instance of a store with such unusual history is business run by two sisters, Martha and Anna, whose grandfather was a tailor and they are still sewing and selling dresses together.

Manufacturing at Szyjemy Sukieki

The owners of small stores strive to be like the large, popular brands instead of taking advantage of the superiority they have over their competitors. What is your strategy to compete with large stores?