Now that businesses have realised the importance of E-Commerce in Singapore more than ever before, it is time to move forward or be left behind and risk shutting down.
IMDA Singapore has been pushing for business to Go Digital for a couple of years now. We’d like to do our part to help businesses make this push to get their sales online. We will go through some of the popular and easy to use online tools that you can leverage on.
How to get your brick and mortar shop to an E-Commerce In Singapore ?
- Facebook Shop
Facebook Shop is number one as it is the best place for you start strong and have a pool of ready audience who can either be your customers or can help you spread the word. How to set up a Facebook Shop:
– Set up a Facebook Page
– Select the “Shop” tab on your Facebook Page
– Change your Page temple to “Shopping Template”
– Remember to accept the Facebook “Merchant Terms” when you set up your Facebook Shop.
Once this is done, you’re all set to add items into your Facebook Shop. - Instagram Shop (IG Shop)
Number 2 on the list is Instagram Shop or IG Shop. This is another fantastic place for you to start but only after Facebook Shop. To start an Instagram Shop, make sure that you have a Facebook Page fully up first with the Facebook Shop. Then, set up an Instagram Business Account and connect this account to your Facebook Page. For now, the IG Shop needs to be a shop that primarily sells physical good until IG reviews this again in the future. Lastly, have your IG Shop connect to a Facebook Catalogue. Once done, change your profile settings to Instagram Shopping and you’re ready to sell. Just wait for IG to review and account which shouldn’t take too long.
Just my 2 cents worth. From personal experience, beauty and health products seem to perform exceptionally well in Instagram. - Sell your products on Lazada, Qoo10, Amazon and Shopee. Now, EnterpriseSG is providing the E-Commerce Booster Package up to $9,000 worth of support for you to come onboard these platforms. So, it’s practically free for you to start selling on these platforms. They only take a cut from a sale that you get on their platform. Another plus point for these platforms is that they will take care of everything else. All you need to do is list it on their platform.
Do remember that people need to be able to browse, interact, transact and receive their purchases. So just having a shopfront solves the browsing. All the platforms listed above have instant messaging functions which solve the interaction part. For transaction, only point number 3 solves this problem. For the first 2, the payment solution is only open to selected Pages. If you are new, you will most probably not fall into the “selected Pages”. But you can create your own payment solution like giving customers a way to transfer payment and email back an e-invoice. The best way is of course to link this Facebook and Instagram shop to an E-Commerce website whereby customers can select clear payment methods. The last part of the process would be receiving items. There are only 3 options, self-collect, doorstep delivery, pickup from a pickup point. Prepare some solutions for these options.
These are the 3 Free Tools that you can leverage on as a business owner to bring you store online. There’s a few more tools but they a not Free but considered as low-cost like Carousell and Google My Business.
So now, that you have this knowledge, let’s move forward. As an entrepreneur, some of the attributes need to come in hard into play now. Be resilient and adapt to changes.
