Three pitfalls that ordinary people must avoid when starting an e-commerce business, 10 cases explained in detail

This article is a summary of the common problems I found when I was guiding dozens of e-commerce rookies to work on e-commerce projects. It is quite representative and can help you avoid several important pitfalls in the product selection process for e-commerce entrepreneurship after reading it.

I have written many articles before about how ordinary people choose products when doing e-commerce.

These articles cover both theory and practical application, and have been warmly welcomed by readers, with a high readership (please refer to previous historical articles in this account).

Despite this, I still feel that e-commerce product selection is a huge and complex task that requires a lot of practical experience.

Especially when I select products for a new category and work on many details, I gain a lot of new understanding of product selection. This feeling is like patching the system. There is no final conclusion, and it is always new.

Many ordinary people may think that when doing e-commerce, as long as the products are selected well, everything will be fine.

But in fact, whether the product you choose can be successfully put on the shelves, delivered, operated well, and sold well is actually restricted by many factors: such as vision, time rhythm, promotion resources, and supplier's supply.

Many ordinary people do e-commerce. They have no experience in the early stage of entrepreneurship and do not understand the work after product selection. They will find that even if they have selected the products, the subsequent projects cannot be promoted. It is difficult to put them on the shelves, and even if they are put on the shelves, they cannot sell them and cannot be promoted.

Therefore, the e-commerce industry relies more on overall process experience.

Whether you have experience and practical experience in the subsequent processes will in turn improve your product selection ability, allowing you to consciously avoid certain categories and products in advance and avoid subsequent difficulties in promotion.

After all, when you know in advance that some products are difficult to deal with, you will no longer choose them like a fool.

Considering that many friends have not done e-commerce, they have not gone through the entire process of e-commerce product selection, as well as visuals, listing, conversion, promotion, etc.

Well, today I will explain to you in detail that if you want to start an e-commerce business, in order to ensure the smooth progress of subsequent projects, we must avoid three pitfalls in advance during the product selection stage.

These hidden pitfalls are likely to directly block your project.

Of course, if you are an e-commerce expert and have rich e-commerce experience, then you don’t need to read my content anymore. Because with the accumulation of experience, these three pitfalls are no longer worth mentioning.

I summarize these three major pitfalls as follows:

1. Visually achievable pitfalls,
2. The pit that can be realized in a long period of time,
3. And the pits that are achievable at low traffic costs.

Let me explain them to you one by one.

1. Once again emphasize the importance of vision

Although I have emphasized the importance of e-commerce visuals in many articles, this module is still ignored and underestimated by many people.

Today I have to emphasize again that whether you can take vision seriously and recognize the importance of vision is the most important difference between e-commerce experts and novices.

Putting aside live streaming e-commerce like Douyin and Kuaishou, whether you are doing domestic Taobao, Tmall, Pinduoduo, Xiaohongshu, or cross-border Amazon, AliExpress, and Shopee, you will always have to deal with visuals. Because whether the products we sell are good or not cannot be judged by the product itself alone, but by the combination of "product + good visuals".

That is: product + good vision = good product.

Why do you say that?

Because no matter whether your product is good or bad, consumers will always judge it through vision and product pictures.

No matter how good your product is, no matter how awesome it is, no matter how excellent it is, no matter how many functions it has, and no matter how best it is on the market, if your product does not take good-looking pictures and create good visuals, consumers will still not recognize it.

For example, if we look at a headwear product on 1688, its appearance is very ordinary and simple, and there is no desire to buy it.

Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer. If you saw a product like this, would you buy it?

Not really.

However, some merchants re-photographed, packaged and promoted their headwear products, which instantly made them look high-end and sold for over 8,000 yuan.

Therefore, in the field of e-commerce, consumers’ perception of your products is not expressed by the products themselves, but by the visuals you create.

Many people may think, is it so troublesome to do e-commerce? Then I might as well do e-commerce on Xiaohongshu, which is said to be more friendly to ordinary people.

If you are doing e-commerce on Xiaohongshu, don’t you need to take pictures? Don’t you need to do visual design? Don’t you need to make your notes and videos more beautiful?

So you see, you can't escape it. As long as you do e-commerce, vision is the product, and pictures are the product. Selling products is selling pictures.

The sooner you understand this principle, the faster you will be in getting started with e-commerce than others.

In fact, improving the visual appearance of a product can have many powerful benefits.

First of all, if you improve the visuals, you are increasing the potential energy of the product and improving its competitiveness. It will be easier for you to impress consumers among many products.

For example, the following four products are all flashlights. Which product would make you more eager to click and learn more?

For example, they are both mobile phone cases, which one makes you feel more classy?

For example, if both of you are selling resume-making services, which picture will make you feel more professional and dignified?

You can definitely tell that among a huge number of products, the better the picture and the higher the visual quality, the easier it is to stand out, attract consumers' attention, clicks, and even make people have a stronger desire to buy.

Secondly, if you improve the visuals of your products, you can differentiate them and avoid falling into homogeneous competition. Make your products more original, more exclusive, and more like high-quality products.

For example, let’s take the most common mug product as an example. The rabbit-themed mug in the picture below is sold in many stores. There is no visual differentiation and it is highly homogenized, so the sales volume is not very high.

But one of the merchants took a different approach and did not use this visual template. Instead, they chose to use models to support the product, creating a new visual effect that stood out and sold over 300 units, far exceeding all competitors.

This is simple competition among similar products, where differentiation is achieved quickly through visual means.

Then, a good visual design can increase the premium of the product.

For the same product, if your pictures are good and visually appealing, you can sell it at a higher price and make more money, and consumers are willing to pay a higher premium.

For example, the same bag, with good visual design and good pictures, can be sold at a high price of 189 yuan and then sold for 7,000+.

And it effectively resists the low-price impact of imitations.

The imitations rely on the visual effect of copycats and can only compete with low prices below 100 yuan, but they are not selling at all.

Humans are always visual animals. They always like good-looking, high-end, and beautiful things and are willing to pay more money for them. This is an eternal truth.

If you are not impressed by the above gains, the following points will definitely impress you.

The most important point is:

If the visuals are done well, the cost of attracting traffic to the product will be lower and it will be cheaper to obtain traffic.

For the same product, when you are advertising, if your pictures are good, the visuals are good, and the click-through rate is high, the cost of obtaining traffic will be low. This is the most intuitive, quantifiable, and exciting competitive advantage!

This is also determined by the characteristics of the e-commerce advertising system.

When you place an ad, the higher the click-through rate of the image, the more efficient the ad is. As a result, the platform will proactively reduce the cost of obtaining traffic for you, allowing you to obtain more traffic.

Take an advertising project I recently invested in as an example.

When one of my products was launched, the initial click-through rate was very poor due to poor image quality. The click-through rate was only 1.9%, which is very low. The cost for me to obtain one traffic was 0.43 yuan.

Later, we continued to optimize the product images, reshooting, editing, and adjusting them, gradually increasing the click-through rate to 6%.

The cost of acquiring one traffic has dropped to 0.26 yuan.

At first glance, it seems to be a small reduction of 0.17 cents, but considering the overall investment, it is very significant.

In the past, if you spent 100 yuan on advertising, you could only get 233 traffic at a cost of 0.43 yuan per traffic.

After optimization, if you spend another 100 yuan on advertising, you can get 384 traffic.

The overall improvement was 64%.

With the same promotional expenses, if you get more traffic, you will get more sales, which will lead to better production.

This is even more important in the competition among massive products.

You sell the same product as everyone else.

Your pictures are of poor quality and visually poor. The cost of getting one traffic through advertising is 0.4 yuan.

The competitors’ pictures are good and visually appealing, and the cost of gaining one traffic through advertising is only 0.2 yuan.

With the same spending of 10 yuan, your competitor can firstly get twice as much traffic as you, and secondly, the better the product pictures of your competitor, the higher the conversion rate, the more traffic they get, and the more sales they get. If you get less traffic, poor pictures, low conversion rate, and low sales, your competitor will eventually sell better and better and make money, while you will lose money on whatever you sell.

The difference between you and your competitors is not in the product, but in the vision.

Finally, I would like to say something special:

Vision is also the link where ordinary people like us can achieve low investment, high output, and the most competitive advantage in the early stages of e-commerce entrepreneurship.

You are an ordinary person, do you have the ability to place e-commerce advertisements? No.

Do you have a great supply chain? No.

Do you have money? No.

Do you have the ability to select products? No.

Do you have any awesome anchor resources? No.

You have no advantages, no money, no supply chain, no skills, no strategy, no experience. All you can do is to work hard on the visuals and make investments. The investment cost in this area is very low, but it often yields amazing results.

Therefore, when doing any e-commerce business, products and visuals can never be separated. In fact, the importance of visuals is far greater than that of products.

After all, consumers cannot judge whether your product is of high quality based on mediocre pictures.

2. Pitfall 1: Product vision can be realized

Since vision is so important, when selecting products, we must focus on the visual feasibility of the product.

This “visual realization” includes two points:

One is that you can use your own abilities to create visuals at low cost and easily with the product you choose; the other is that the visuals you create must be of high quality and competitive.

Many of my friends want to start an e-commerce business, and they think about doing this category or that category every day. But after selecting the products, they find that they are simply unable to create visuals independently, and cannot create high-quality visuals or low-cost visuals.

Then you can’t move forward with this project at all. No matter how good this product is, it has nothing to do with you!

For example, many of our friends like pet products and want to make cat and dog beds.

But in fact, the visual competition for pet products such as cat beds and dog beds is very fierce.

In order to create high-quality visuals, you not only need to set up the scenery, use lights, and use a SLR camera, but you also need to take the photo with your pet to produce better quality pictures.

The following is a shooting scene of some pet products. You can see that it is very professional and not something that ordinary people can easily handle.

If you are an ordinary person, doing e-commerce, want to make pet products, want to make cat and dog beds.

After you have selected the product, you will find that: you cannot create the visual effect of this product, or even if you can, the visual effect is very ugly, very bad, and has no competitiveness; you cannot promote it and you cannot sell it at all; so no matter how good your product selection is, it is meaningless.

Many friends also told me that I can steal high-quality pictures taken by others and use pictures from suppliers.

This brings us back to the origin of the problem: your visual images are the same as others, and you are caught in the same homogeneous competition.

But the problem is that other people’s products have sales, reviews, buyer shows, and weight, while your product’s sales are 0 and it has no crowd weight or reviews. How can you possibly outsell others?

So for ordinary people, it doesn’t matter what product you choose when starting a business. What matters most is whether you can create high-quality visuals for this product.

So how do we judge whether the visual design of this category and product is feasible? Next, let’s do a set of visual analysis exercises.

I have selected several categories that everyone would like to start a business in, to determine whether their vision is easy to achieve.

These categories cover small household appliances, daily necessities, women's clothing, and children's stationery.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to produce high-quality visuals for these products.

For example, for a product like small household appliances, the visual effect can no longer be achieved through simple photography, but needs to be produced using 3D rendering, which ordinary people do not have.

For the lunch box product, you not only need to do the setting, lighting, placement, and high-definition photography, but also put the dishes inside…

Not to mention women's clothing, which requires high-end, expressive models, matching, and location scouting, and the cost is also higher.

The photography of pencil case products is equally complex, with extremely high requirements on lighting, shooting angle, and background in order to create visual tension.

If you cannot produce high-quality visuals for the above categories of products, then there is no point in choosing them or wanting to make them.

Then let’s look at another set of product visuals to determine whether it is easy to achieve.

The following categories are: bracelets, mobile phone cases, women's bags, and software.

After reading these categories, have you regained your confidence?

You will find that their vision is much easier, and as long as the vision reaches this level, higher sales can be achieved.

Most of these visuals can be accomplished with just a mobile phone.

For example, you only need to hold the bracelet in your hand to take the photo.

Just put a piece of white cloth on the phone case, add some light, and you can take a picture.

Find a hotel with a woman’s bag, throw it on the bed, and you can easily take a picture.

As for selling PS software, as long as you know how to use MeituXiuXiu, you can produce pictures directly.

Therefore, if you choose to work in these categories, after selecting the products, continue to move forward, at least to the visual level, it will be relatively easy and you won’t get stuck.

There are also some products that look simple visually, but are actually quite complex and difficult to implement.

For example, hairpins are a small product, and it is difficult for ordinary people to create such high-quality visual effects.

Because this shoot has very high requirements on the model's face shape, hairstyle, and makeup.

It is difficult for ordinary people to have such good looks, and it is difficult to photograph them.

But it doesn’t mean we can’t make hairpins. In this category, there is another excellent visual solution that is very suitable for ordinary people.

Just directly stitch product pictures + celebrity pictures together to create excellent visuals and achieve very high sales.

This kind of visual solution is very simple. You don’t even need to take photos. You just need to know how to use graphics software.

So if you find that the visuals of the categories you choose are difficult to achieve, you can look for more cases. Generally, a large e-commerce category will have 3 to 4 different visual directions, and maybe there will be a direction that suits your ability.

3. How can ordinary people improve their e-commerce visual ability?

I emphasize again: visual realization must be based on high-quality visual presentation.

There is no point in just taking pictures of the products.

If the pictures are ordinary and mediocre, they will not have potential energy, will not attract consumers to place orders, and will not bring lower traffic costs.

Therefore, we also need to improve our "visual realization" ability through some learning, training, and off-field assistance.

For example, if you need to improve your aesthetic ability, you need to look at a large number of product pictures and cases, at least 100 or more. You should at least know what are high-quality pictures and what are low-quality pictures, right?

When we were working on the pencil case category, we collected 100 products, conducted a large number of visual comparisons, and finally selected high-quality visual directions to implement.

Secondly, you need to watch some mobile photography tutorials to understand the basic operations of still life photography.

Thanks to the development of the Internet, there is a lot of free content on Xiaohongshu and Bilibili for you to learn. I hope you will not be lazy and start learning mobile photography from now on.

Then, you can buy some props, shooting backdrops, small lights, etc., and practice shooting. These products are cheap and easy to buy and can be purchased everywhere.

If you are lazy, have poor aesthetic sense, or are just stupid and can't learn, or just can't handle visuals, then I advise you to give up on e-commerce?

After all, this is the simplest thing in the early stages of e-commerce. If you can’t even handle this, how are you going to solve the more difficult ones later?

Just kidding, if you really can’t handle the visuals, you can seek help from the off-site team.

Now there are many photography teams that accept this kind of product shooting needs, and the prices are also very attractive. You can also outsource this part and let professionals do professional work.

Even for difficult projects like 3D rendering, you can seek help from an outsourcing team.

In short, the more complex the product, the higher the cost and difficulty of achieving visual effects, and the more off-site assistance is needed.

But I don’t recommend ordinary people to invest so many resources and money to do this in the early stages.

Because you have no idea how intricate this category is, and you haven’t completed the e-commerce process, you don’t know what difficulties you will encounter later. Excessive investment in the early stages will double your stress.

So I suggest that if you are an ordinary person who wants to start an e-commerce business, you should give priority to categories with lower visual difficulty in the initial product selection. You can learn some mobile photography and do some scene and composition analysis to complete high-quality visual presentation. You can avoid many difficulties at the source.

Therefore, people who have never worked in e-commerce may not be able to imagine that one of the most core skills in the early stages of e-commerce entrepreneurship is actually mobile phone photography.

4. Pitfall 2: Long cycle can be achieved

In addition to the hidden pitfalls on the visual level, what many people tend to overlook during the product selection stage is the cyclical rhythm of the category itself.

Many products do not have strong market demand every day, but have their own sales rhythm.

The products with the most obvious rhythm are holiday products, such as Christmas trees and Spring Festival couplets. These products generally only have explosive sales in specific time periods.

The following are the sales trends of Spring Festival couplets products.

As you can see, the product sales will explode only during the Spring Festival. The sales at other times are dismal.

For example, products like children's backpacks also have explosive sales.

For example, as shown in the figure below, the explosive growth trend of children's school bags generally reaches its peak in mid-to-late August. The rest of the time is the off-season.

Why did the children's backpack category explode in late August instead of Double 11?

Why?

Because the children will start a new grade in September!

When school starts a new grade, you naturally have to buy a new school bag and new stationery to start the new school year happily.

Another example is women's clothing, taking dresses as an example.

Dresses have their peak sales season in late April and June, and at other times they either grow slowly or decline rapidly.

These products with distinct rhythms have relatively high requirements for control over operational rhythm and promotion experience.

Because it is not the peak sales season, the number of orders will be relatively small during normal times, but it is necessary to accumulate sales, reviews, and weights over a long period of time. Then, before the outbreak, we will launch a fierce campaign to attract new customers, increase purchases, accumulate consumer water, prepare large quantities of goods, and finally harvest sales at the outbreak node.

There are very high requirements for resources, operating rhythm, capital, inventory, and promotion capabilities.

In the early stages, I do not recommend ordinary people to engage in this kind of highly cyclical category. After all, many people don’t even understand promotion, conversion, volume, and supply chain. If they launch the product too early, it won’t sell; if they launch the product too late, they don’t know how to promote it, and it will be out of season, wasting time and energy.

Therefore, I do not recommend that newcomers start working in the clothing industry, as clothing categories change cyclically too quickly. If you don’t keep up with the pace, the season will be over.

I had a friend who I took to do e-commerce before, and she insisted on doing dresses.

I repeatedly persuaded her that the dresses were only for summer and time was very tight, but this friend refused to listen and insisted on making it. As a result, it took several months to select the style, match, take photos, and create the visuals. By the time the product was put on the shelves, summer was almost over. What was the point of selecting the best products, matching, and creating the visuals? The products were out of season and there was no consumer demand.

Therefore, the sales cycle of categories is another hidden pit. When ordinary people start their e-commerce business in the early stages, they must choose categories that can be realized in a long cycle. It is best if there is no obvious peak or off-season 365 days a year, and consumers will have purchasing needs every day.

Generally speaking, most daily necessities are long-cycle products, such as mugs. You don’t need to wait to buy a mug, you can buy it whenever you want.

For example, mobile phone cases (however, the mobile phone case category also has certain sales fluctuations. Generally, the release of new products by Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi will boost the sales of mobile phone cases, but people still buy them whenever they want);

For example, car supplies, refrigerator magnets, tissue boxes, wearable armor, small accessories and so on.

These products do not have a very strong sales cycle and are basically needed every day of the year. Ordinary people do not have to worry about whether they are sold out of season or have a lot of time pressure. They can have ample time to grind conversions and promote them bit by bit, because they are always within the sales cycle and any operational actions taken can get feedback in the first time.

If you have not completed the entire e-commerce process, don't even think about following the sales rhythm of a certain category, because you simply don't have the ability and experience to control the rhythm of product sales.

5. Pitfall 3: Low-cost traffic can be achieved

When doing e-commerce, in addition to creating content and generating traffic ourselves, most of the time we have to spend money on advertising and purchasing traffic.

The traffic cost for each category is different.

Some categories have low traffic costs, while others have high traffic costs.

Generally speaking, in most cases:

The greater the demand for a product, the lower the traffic cost. Because there are many people in demand, the e-commerce platform ads can be shown to more people, the advertising costs will be spread out, and more businesses will be encouraged to advertise and increase supply.

The higher the average order value of a product, the more expensive the traffic cost. This is easy to understand. For products with high average order value, people who can buy them are all high-value users.

For high-value users, the traffic is definitely expensive. After all, they are very high-quality users and must be sold to merchants at a good price.

The categories with higher concentration of big brands have more expensive traffic costs, such as beauty products, skin care products, and pet products. Although these categories have large markets, they are all categories with high concentration of big brands. Small sellers have very little room for survival. Big brands compete with each other, spend money on advertising every day, and raise each other's traffic costs.

The above are some of the more obvious situations.

Of course, traffic costs are also affected by many other factors, such as vision, time, and average order value that I mentioned earlier, which will affect the cost of acquiring customers through traffic, but basically the traffic costs of a category are roughly the same.

For example, let’s look at the traffic cost of facial mask products. The following figure shows the customer acquisition cost of a facial mask brand’s advertising.

The advertising cost is terrifying. It is no longer a category that ordinary people can do. To get a consumer to buy your product, before placing an order, 3 to 7 yuan has basically been spent.

Nowadays, many people keep pets, and some people want to sell cat food. However, the traffic cost of cat food has soared to 3 to 5 yuan, and it costs at least 4 yuan to buy one traffic.

Ideally, 50 traffic points can be converted into one order, with a payment conversion rate of 2%.

To get a completed order, you need to spend at least 200 yuan.

Ordinary people can basically give up their dreams of starting a business in this category.

Let’s take a look at another popular product, such as mugs that cost a dozen or twenty yuan, and see what its traffic cost is.

When you see this traffic cost, don’t you feel much happier? It only costs 70 cents to get one traffic.

According to my experience, if the visuals and product selection are better, it is possible to reduce the cost of acquiring mugs to 0.5 yuan or 0.4 yuan.

Because the demand for mugs is extremely high and is not monopolized by big brands, there are many products that meet the needs of different patterns, themes, and specifications, so the traffic cost is low and can accommodate many small sellers.

Small sellers can have the opportunity to make money if they improve product visuals, rely on lower traffic costs, do a good job of promotion and conversion.

Let’s take the sweater category as an example.

In winter, the demand for sweaters is booming. In addition, clothing is a super large category with huge traffic, so the traffic of sweaters is relatively cheap, reaching as low as 0.3 yuan. If the visual design is good, it is possible for the traffic to drop to 0.2 yuan.

This is also the reason why, even though competition in the women's clothing category is extremely fierce, people continue to join, because the demand is huge and the traffic cost is low.

Then you may ask, where can you see the traffic cost of this category?

Only after you open a store and actually start doing e-commerce will you gradually understand the traffic cost of each category.

This is what I have always emphasized. Ordinary people don’t need to worry too much or think too much about product selection in the early stages. Because you have never done it, have no experience, and no practical experience, your thinking about product selection is very superficial.

What you need is to get into it as soon as possible, run some processes, accumulate some experience, and then constantly review your product selections.

Of course, as long as you choose some popular products in the initial stage, categories where a large number of small sellers concentrate, the basic traffic costs will not be too high.

There are many contents saying that to do e-commerce, one must enter emerging markets, blue ocean markets, and bonus markets. I think these theories are unrealistic and impractical for ordinary people. Ordinary people only need to pay attention to whether the traffic cost of this market and this category is low enough. As long as it is low enough and the demand is large, then if you do a good job of visual promotion of the product, you will definitely be able to succeed.

The market is so big that having one more person won’t make the competition more intense, and having you less person won’t make the market more relaxed.

One more or one less makes no difference.

VI. Conclusion

OK, after writing several thousand words, let’s summarize:

In addition to establishing a correct product selection idea, ordinary people should also pay attention to some pitfalls in the product selection process, which will greatly affect the progress of your subsequent projects.

The most important thing is the visual feasibility. Whether the category you choose can successfully create an excellent visual effect will make subsequent sales possible.

Secondly, the long cycle of the product is achievable. If your product has a long sales cycle and can be sold every day for 365 days, it will give you enough time and space to continuously polish it without the pressure of time constraints.

Finally, low-cost traffic is achievable. The product you choose must have a low traffic cost. Only in this way can you buy a certain amount of traffic with a small amount of promotion fee, make sales, and obtain a certain profit. If your product selection can create a good visual in the future, has a long space for development, and can acquire customers at a low cost, then it is quite successful.

Of course, even if it fails, it’s okay. We can just change categories and products. There’s no need to worry about it.

Well, that's all for today. Thank you for reading.

Good luck with your product selection!