How to make money online in Nigeria - Sell Online

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Posted by Felix Okoli on Tuesday November 9, 2010 at 6:7:58:

Sell Online, Deliver Online
I recently blogged about how to make money online and and I highlighted the various ways of doing so available for Nigerians. Carrying on from that I would like to continue discussing about the topic with a focus on Selling online.

One smarter way of making money online is by selling. That's the simple truth! To be able to continuously make money online and independently, you need to start selling!

Selling online in Nigeria would require the following things:

* A standard website
* Online Payment platform
* Product(s) or Service(s)

Setting up a website

It could just be an e-commerce website or just a brochure type website that is connected to a shopping cart that allows buyers to select items they want to buy and go on the payment process. When setting up a website in Nigeria that would allow you to sell, the best thing to do is to make it look appealing as well as functional. It should be a smart website that displays your product properly while at the same time not slow down the buyer's interaction.

A typical website of such could be designed for as low as N20,000 and it should be able to display the array of your regular products or services. An ecommerce website would be much more expensive to build taking into consideration the care and security involved in setting up one.

Online Payment system

Once you decide to start selling your items online, another thing you would need to consider is the payment system to be used. Not all international payment platforms are available to Nigeria and so Paypal is out of the question for now. Other reliable and cost effective ways to sell online is by using Alertpay, Google Checkout, 2checkout or the local brands like Etranzact, interswitch, Softpurse and Fastecash. The payment systems I intitally mentioned allows funds to be used and stored in foregin currencies like teh US dollar rather than the naira however teh local brands like Interswithc allows you to sell and get paid in naira using an enabled web payment card. So whichever you choose, you should consider the benefits for instance dollar payment processors can still help buyers retain the time value of their money sincethe US dollar is relatively a stable currency and has been growing stronger than the nair for some time now, also the Interswitch and Etranzact payments which are more expensive for sellers to set up at a cost of around N150,000 allows buyers to save their funds in the bank while earning interes while at the same time being able to use it for making online payments.

Alertpay, Google checkout and other dollar payment systems I initially mentioned are much cheaper to set up and can be easily be integrated to your website and this is a much better payment system if you are selling to the whole world.

Product or Service

To sell online and make moeny, you would definitely need to have your own prouct or serve and it would be best if it was digitalized and allows to automative delivery without you bothering to fulfil orders once they are made. A lot of peole who have made money online by selling digital items are mostly those who sell information products like ebooks, videos, mp3s and even digital pictures. So whatever you are selling online, try to make it easy to deliver even while you are asleep such that you would not have to employ a full time staff to spend time on processing orders. If it is a service, you can still sell digital service and this can be in form of professional consultation, price quotes, stock speculations and advise, medical consultation and so on. So whatever business you are in whether as a Medical doctor, Accountant, Lawyer and so on, you can sell your service online by just allowing people to consult you on your website while paying a fee and you will at a later time answer their questions. I have seen a website where people pay a fee with Paypal just to ask a professional question while at the same time agreeing to accept the answer whether they are satisfied or not.

So everything sells and with the right product and then your selling platform

Conclusion
Selling online and delivering virtual content is a much quicker and profitable way to make money online in Nigeria today. A good example of a website that does this is www.zoodrums.com which sells Nigerian music and accepts payment using Interswitch. One other good example are websites that sell recharge cards online and accept online payments. The only thin the recharge card seller needs to do is to load the pins on a secure database while allowing the payment gateway to deliver them to buyers on autopilot.

Comments:
Re: How to make money online in Nigeria - Sell Online Posted by alex on Monday December 20, 2010 at 15:16:57:

Just found a website on investing in Nigerian stock market - Buying Nigerian Stocks or Shares
http://www.247broadstreet.com