Building an e-commerce enterprise from Scratch in India without Funding

Everybody wants to create a job for himself, everybody is making strives for being his/her own boss but everybody is not reaching there. They all are passionate and they all have the qui-essential talent to be there but what makes them fail is their approach towards their dream business. They all start with enthusiasm but end up being sad and depressed.

The famous quote

‘Entrepreneurship is a way of life’

is a cliché now. People are plunging into entrepreneurship like never before. But there’s still an opportunity for the lonely and talented you to make a dent in the world because a pool of problem lies ahead us and the only way to solve all those problem is entrepreneurship, you can turn into an entrepreneur build an e-commerce business which caters to the problems of mass and help in making this world a better place to live.

Building an e-commerce business is not a child’s play, it requires a seed fund and it requires lot many amenities. Most of the entrepreneurs start looking for funding at the time when they are boot strapping which is a trap, you get trapped, you should always depend on your own while starting an e-commerce business, funding is for the time, when you plan to go big. Here’s a set of things you can do to acquire the seed fund for your business: –

Freelance

Freelancing is the new market. All you need is a computer and a specified set of talent and you can earn a fortune for yourself. Just to motivate you an average successful Indian blogger earns 20,000 USD per year.

Go with the alternatives

Now that you have earned enough from freelancing, you need to spend it wisely. You do not allow need to go with the costliest thing in the market. For example things which are imported are costlier than the things made in the country. Using services and commodities designed and manufactured inside your own country will help you in saving fund for other indispensable things. Here’s a set of alternatives which provides you with the requisite services and costs less.

• Using Indian post services instead of using foreign courier services like FedEx, Blue-Dart which serves with the same service but costs you a fortune.
• Keeping Stack of every product listed on your website is a hectic task and it requires loads of initial investment while choosing Just in Time Inventory can help you in running your business with more ease and grace.
• Do it as the only job you have. Never ever consider your dream project as a secondary job. Make it your full time job, set goals and try to beat deadlines and you will find yourself growing big time.

• A website is necessary for your e-commerce business. You need to pay big bucks for getting your site customized and updated at regular interval. Spending big bucks while bootstrapping is foolish instead of going with a customized website you can go with Software as a Service ecommerce platform option. In this model, you can get your shopping cart up and running within a day and with almost no upfront investment.
• Use free payment gateways to collect your payment. Free payment gateways do not have any upfront setup fee or an AMC. You only pay a small transaction charge as low as 1.75% when you make a sale.
• Social Media pages can help you in procuring the required traffic on your website. You don’t always need to pay for the heavy traffic on site sometimes you need to depend on organic traffics.
• Blogging is the key to organic traffic. You can always prefer blogging over PPC ads. This helps you in saving some good bucks. Blogging is equally good; it provides you with an organic traffic. Blogging can also help you in generating some seed investment for your online business.

Impact lives

When Bansal guys started Flipkart, they were going to book distributors and helping them in making a database of books presents in their warehouse, for almost a year they wrote databases for umpteen numbers of distributors and today they stand at a place where no native e-commerce company can challenge them.

Take help from your family and friends

Seeking help from family and friends is an easier job; you can always repay them when you have enough.

Gathering resources for your startup is an important task; when you are starting up, you are moving inch by inch and spending a fortune on resources can be a pain and since your business is e-commerce, which is based on internet, you can always manage to get a set of resources for free over Internet or by paying a meager sum of money.

• Following entrepreneurial sites can be of great help, entrepreneurs from different parts of the world are generally on these sites and are always looking to help start-ups with a potential to change the world. They are providing e-commerce training for the newbie entrepreneurs.
• Internet is the place, where you can find almost everything for free. Search on internet, you may find the theme and other features for your website for free.

If you are a bootstrapped ecommerce startup, do let us know what effective methods you use in your business.