*Click to read the affiliate disclaimer*


(Last Updated On: )

If your business has taken a bit of a hit over the recent months, you’re probably looking forward to gearing up and getting going again now that commerce is beginning to come back to life.

Maybe your product lines have been in short supply. Some suppliers might have gone out of business, or maybe your usual selling outlets have gone a bit quiet. For a while postal deliveries slowed down, but they seem to be getting back on track too.

As we start embracing the ‘new normal’, owners of reselling businesses need to get set for the challenges ahead, whether those are meeting bigger demands from customers or figuring out new markets and product lines.

Scout Out New Market Platforms

If you’ve relied on eBay or Amazon, maybe take a look at Etsy or Folksy, Shopify or any of dozens of others. If there’s one thing the pandemic has shown us, it’s that online shopping is stronger and more vital than ever and it’s not going anywhere soon. Now is a really good time to expand your online presence, find new markets, develop alternative niches, and grow your product range.

If your social media marketing has been shaky up to now, this is also a valuable resource to start building up. You could start a blog, branch into affiliate marketing, or ramp up your presence on standard social media platforms, and investigate advertising options.

Scale Up Your Storage

For many resellers, stock storage is an issue. If you’ve been storing items at home, expanding your product range or ramping up the number of items you sell may mean sacrificing even more living space to business storage. This isn’t good for business, and it’s definitely not good for your lifestyle.

Self storage is a solid solution. There is plenty of self storage in Nottingham and across the whole country. Whether you choose to rent a room or you decide a locker is big enough to hold your stock, the short term contracts make it virtually risk-free to try. If you’re very risk-averse you can start with a small storage space and expand when you’re ready. The flexibility of self storage for business is a big benefit as you can scale your space to meet fluctuating needs.

Streamline Your Processes

An expanded business is naturally a busier one, so if you don’t want to end up working 24/7 you may need to change the way you work and adopt a few new best practices.

Organisation is key. Whether you’re storing stock at home or somewhere like a self storage facility, arrange the space so you don’t waste time hunting down sold stock items.

  • Use transparent tubs for quick identification of small items.
  • Group in categories such as size, colour, type, age, gender.
  • Put fast sellers close to the door.
  • Use sturdy shelving or hanging space, with labels to indicate where each item or type of item goes. This makes it easy to spot when something is running low. (If you choose a self storage facility, you are allowed to install freestanding shelving or hanging rails).
  • Get obsessive about recording numbers and doing regular stock takes.

Also vitally important is the way you allocate your time. Another way of gearing up your reselling business is to reduce travel time by preparing and packaging items in the same place you store them. You can drastically reduce handling time if you don’t spend precious minutes carrying items from one place to another to process them.

Create a packing station in your storage room by adding a desk or table and somewhere for packaging materials, then pick and pack in one smooth operation.

Just about everyone is doing online shopping, even people who previously preferred physically visiting shops. For online sellers, it’s opened up a whole world of new opportunities that are likely to continue far into the future.

Whether you’ve been thinking about expanding your business for a while, or you’ve seen a downturn in opportunities and need to get going again, now is the time to grasp the new opportunities opening up.

Chiino
Latest posts by Chiino (see all)