What Is Connective eCommerce? Not a Scam, But How Reliable is it?
Starting an eCommerce business from scratch is a daunting task. You have to consider multiple areas, such as website development, inventory management, marketing, and advertising.
However, you don’t have to follow the cost-intensive method of starting an eCommerce store.
Imagine an online strategy that helps you launch and grow your store without paying upfront costs. You don’t have to hire a website developer, handle inventory, and run paid ads!
Read on to learn how to use Connective eCommerce to start your online retail business with little investment.
Let's get started.
What is Connective eCommerce: A No Risk eCommerce Strategy?
Connective eCommerce is a new online-selling strategy that provides solutions to the three major risk areas while selling products online.
They include:
- Website development.
- Inventory storage and fulfillment.
- Product promotion.
When people think of eCommerce, they tend to follow this pattern. Find an online business idea, hire a website developer, find suppliers, buy inventory, pay for warehousing, and advertise your products. However, this pattern is not cost-friendly for starting online entrepreneurs.
Cortney Fletcher, a college dropout, developed Connective eCommerce to help new and female entrepreneurs start an internet business quickly and effectively.
Here’s How the Connective eCommerce Strategy Works.
- Eliminates the need for e-Commerce business owners to hire a web developer to design their online stores. Instead, they rely on free eCommerce website builders to build the shop without technical experience.
- Holding inventory and doing order fulfillment for your eCommerce stores is tasking. Instead, Connective eCommerce can source quality suppliers for shipping and keeping inventory items, and delivering orders.
- Connective eCommerce encourages using free methods like social media to drive traffic to your online store instead of paying for ads.
The major difference between traditional online selling and Connective eCommerce is cost. Connective eCommerce folks use it as a low-risk tactic for starting and growing their online stores.
However, this business model is only suitable for starting your eCommerce business. In the long run, you will need a better understanding of how to run a full-blown online store.
Connective Ecommerce Step 1: Create Your Store Website
Setting up an eCommerce storefront is necessary for starting a profitable online store. If you have little or no experience designing a website, you will have to hire a web developer. Problem solved, right? Wrong, hiring a web developer can be pretty expensive for a new business.
Connective eCommerce provides you with cheaper alternatives. You can use the best eCommerce website builders to create your online store without design experience. Simply choose and edit custom templates that suit your eCommerce brand.
Although having an online store designed like an Amazon-style marketplace is excellent, it is not necessary for selling online. You can start small with a simple website design. As your business grows, you can scale your website design.
Best Website Builders for Your Connective eCommerce Beginnings
Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix are the 3 best eCommerce website builders for online business owners on a budget.
- Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce website builder that provides over 170 customizable templates and a comprehensive app store to help your business grow.
- Squarespace Commerce is an AI-powered website builder that helps you build beautiful online stores through templates and offers a free custom domain.
- Wix eCommerce is a reliable platform that helps small businesses build attractive online stores and sell physical and digital products.
Connective eCommerce Step 2: Start with Dropshipping
As an eCommerce newbie, buying too many goods is risky. If you don’t know the product demand and purchase more than you can sell, you risk incurring losses. Instead of holding inventory, you can start with dropshipping.
Starting a dropshipping business does not require inventory. Instead, when a customer orders, a third-party supplier fulfills the order on your behalf.
Picture this: If you sell a T-shirt for $20 and buy it at $15, you make a cool profit of $5 on every shirt sold. Since your supplier is responsible for delivering the T-shirts to the customer, you spent $0 on order fulfillment.
Note that dropshipping’s profit margin is lower compared to when you buy and keep inventory. However, it is a cheap way to test products for your target market.
Imagine you have a buyer from China and you are in the US. How do you deliver the product? If you add shipping costs to it, your buyer can find cheaper alternatives in the competitive eCommerce space.
Dropshipping saves inventory costs, but it is far from easy. You must find the right suppliers, strike favorable deals with them, and then attract customers to your eCommerce store.
Benefits of dropshipping to individuals creating eCommerce businesses include:
- Opportunities for market research and testing of new products.
- Zero inventory costs.
- You can offer a wide range of products.
- Easy to scale.
Connective eCommerce Step 3: Attract Free Traffic to Your Shop
eCommerce advertising is necessary for running a profitable online store. Running ads helps you to drive traffic to your store.
As an eCom starter with a tight budget, limit your sponsored advertisements. Using paid ads will consume a large part of your business capital. If you have little experience with paid ads, you can easily make a costly mistake that can ruin your eCommerce business.
There are many non-paid traffic techniques you can use instead of sponsored ads to drive organic traffic to your store.
They include:
- Organic marketing on social media channels such as TikTok and Facebook groups.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
- Direct Outreach (if you are targeting B2B buyers)
TikTok – Best Organic Traffic Generator
TikTok is a popular social media platform with over 800 million active users monthly. Many brands are using TikTok as a free way of driving traffic to their store.
Create Engaging Video Content
The best thing about this platform is that you can easily go viral as a new user with zero followers. By creating innovative and engaging video content consistently, you can easily reach new customers.
Use Relevant Hashtags
Adding trending hashtags to your videos helps you reach a larger audience. However, ensure you pick hashtags that are relevant to your video. Remember your goal is to convert free TikTok leads into paying customers.
#3 Optimize Your TikTok Bio
Another way to drive traffic and increase sales is by adding a link to the bio of your TikTok profile. The link in your bio is one of the few places where you can naturally add your website’s link.
If you are using other social media platforms, you can connect them to your TikTok account. Plus, you can use the TikTok live feature to spread your brand’s message.
Facebook Groups – Best Non-Paid Traffic Technique for eCom Babes
Facebook Groups can help you drive free traffic to your store. Facebook is the largest social media platform with over 2.96 billion monthly active users. You are missing a serious traffic source if you are not leveraging Facebook’s massive audience.
Join Facebook Groups
There are millions of groups on Facebook you can join for free. However, not all groups are worth the struggle. Why join a group that has a large number of people but only a tiny fraction of your target audience?
Only join groups that are related to your eCommerce niche or have a large population of your target audience.
Post Informative and Helpful Content
Joining the right Facebook group alone will not attract free traffic to your website. You have to engage with posts on the group.
When a group member asks a question, help out with helpful answers. What you are doing is that you are positioning yourself as an authority on that topic.
At regular intervals, post informative and helpful content on the group. You can post about your product or business as a solution. However, do not be overly promotional. It can get you banned from the group.
Is Connective E-Commerce a Scam?
Connective eCommerce is not a scam. It is only an over-simplistic way to start a low-risk eCommerce business without little money. Cortney Fletcher, the brain behind the eCom babes course, developed the strategy.
The goal of Connective eCommerce is to help you start an eCommerce business quickly and effectively. New online entrepreneurs record success stories using this strategy.
They spent little money on creating an online store, inventory management, and advertising. However, the potential revenue is not as promising compared to other eCommerce growth strategies.
Is Connective eCommerce Reliable in a Hyper-Competitive Market?
The answer is NO! Relying on the connective eCommerce strategy for growing your business is not enough. Yes, it is the cheapest way to start an online store. But it makes it super easy for your competitors to crush you.
Picture this: You create a fairly-god website on a cheap web hosting plan, get a good supplier, and then attract free traffic. Your competitor invests in a powerful eCommerce website, spends money in creating better products, and uses sponsored ads. Who can offer better value?
In our hyper-competitive market, you can’t place your hope on me-too dropshipping products and free traffic. You will struggle to gain a share in the eCommerce field.
Optimizing every eCommerce area is the only way to win in the long run. You have to find top-quality products and continually maintain their quality. Leaving your e-Commerce orders in the hands of a third party can cause sales losses.
Your sales funnel needs to effectively warm up your prospects and lead them into making a purchase.
Free ads can only bring limited results. Paid advertising will increase your ad effectiveness. Imagine you are using a free graphic design tool and your friend is using a paid one. Who will create the better design?
The bottom line is connective eCommerce is a great way to start your store without having to pay a fortune. However, as you grow, you need to develop better strategies to compete against other brands.