How not to get lost in deals business: simple recommendations for newbies

Over the years of Getsocio existence many different customers came across. Some of them were successful in their business, some had unique ideas, but were not able to bring them to life, some of them did not even have a clue of what they want to achieve.

Being an e-commerce service provider, we observe the life cycle of each business powered by Getsocio.
In the set of posts we would like to share our views and recommendations for business runners.

This post is devoted to deals business newbies.

Usually it starts with a dream to create own online deals business. Beginners look for an appropriate tool and once it is chosen, they start customizing it. But at some point it may arise that there is no clear understanding at what to do next.
For the e-commerce beginners to put their business on a next level we gathered the following recommendations:

1. Find your own niche. This is the first and most important thing you should take care of. This will be your business basis and you need to spend significant amount of time to study a market, check what your possible competitors offer and how you can be better. Do not try to copy somebody, try to be creative.
2. Think over your strategy. Even if you already have an idea of what you will be doing, you should think of details - what you will offer, who your audience will be, how you would make money on this.
3. Prepare your business plan and a long-run objective. Your business plan would be a success criteria for your business. There you will calculate all possible expenses and the expected income. Thus you can be sure you will not go out of your pocket.
4. Find partners and investors. You will need to have a certain budget to start and keep running your business. Do not consider deals website to be easy-money. This business needs investments as any other, so you would need to spend money to get it going.
5. Take care of marketing. A good promotion makes a good business. Customers will not appear out of thin air, you will need to attract them to your site. Different businesses need own marketing strategy, so what is helpful for a local bakery may not be applicable for your deals site. There will be quite a lot of the advertising expenses especially in the beginning.
6. Start with a small. It is better to start running your business in a small area. This way you can be confident about the market and audience. Trying to grasp more locations than you can control is the wrong way. You will be able to expand later when your business is stable and trusted.
7. Strike while the iron is hot. You should not waste the time on unnecessary changes for your website, this is not the time to be a perfectionist. You can focus more on the design and some functionality later. If you already have everything required to launch your site - do it!

To be continued in the next post: How not to get lost in deals business: simple recommendations for growing startups