An entrepreneur in the ActSeed community recently asked if it was possible to sell a unique fashion accessory through Facebook or Pinterest with no traditional web site. Here’s what we told them…
Facebook and Pinterest are often great venues to market your product, but keep in mind you will need an ecommerce platform to actually transact business.
Have you considered eBay and Bonanza.com? You can open up storefronts on eBay and Bonanza for very little money. You can post your products there. You can even post on Craigslist and drive business back to one of the other sites if you want.
We recommend using Facebook pages and Pinterest as marketing and promotional venues to draw buyers back to your storefront(s). Don’t rule out the value of setting up a simple web site and unique domain name. For less than $100, you can have a domain and a WordPress web site where you can blog about your items, embed your eBay store and draw even more attention to your products, including a good ranking in Google’s search engine.
All in, you can get set up and manage this combination of social media and ecommerce for around $30 per month (plus listing fees on eBay). Just a few years ago, it would be unthinkable to build a good web commerce and marketing presence for anything less than a few thousand dollars a month.
If you really want to turn up your promotional engine and reach thousands of reporters and media outlets (and an amazing social media dashboard that puts your Facebook and Twitter “on steroids”), you can add the Vocus and PRWeb small business marketing suite for a few hundred dollars a month, which will pay for itself through the time it will save you in managing and optimizing your social media activity. The Vocus team will give you a great demo here.
