How to Sell Online in Nigeria

In one of my blog posts about making money online in Nigeria, I mentioned selling online as one way of doing so. Now how do you sell online?
What does it mean to sell online?

Selling online means that:
- You have an online platform
- You have a product or service
- You have a payment processor
- You keep records of orders
- You will have to deliver orders

Your Online Platform
This could be your website or a another person's website where you may sell your item online. The website allows you to display your product or service and also indicates the pricing, payment process and so on. It gives more detail about what you are offering on the internet including your terms and conditions.
Having your own website is more preferred for most merchants but you may as well leverage on the websites of existing and more popular merchants to sell your item.
Companies like Amazon.com, Buy.com and others all sell items online and also provide personalized stores, for a fee, to individuals who want to sell their own products.
However if you are really into the business for real and for the long term, it is better you get a website for your business

Your Product or Service
What do you sell? This refers to what you are offering to the online public to buy at a fee. You will need to decide whether you will develop your own product or just resell another person's product. For instance in Nigeria, there is a growing number of websites that are being set up to sell recharge cards and these items are not exactly produced by the merchants but by MTN, Airtel, Glo and others. But they get their own profit by making recharge pins available for people who want to buy it online just using their websites.
So either way, whether it is your product or another company's product or service, you can still profit from it so you just have to choose which strategy works best for you.
Examples of products you can sell online are ebooks, mp3s, videos, pins, digital pictures, perfumes, clothes, shoes, computers and so on. Some are virtual products while others are concrete products and may have to be delivered by hand.
Examples of services you can sell online are consultations, professional answers to questions, blog reviews, analytical reviews, tutorials, web hosting, web design, domain names, hotel bookings, tour guides, On-demand media and so on.

The Payment processor
Now how do you collect money from online buyers? How do you process a payment a client wants to make. Although some Nigerian website owners who are already selling online normally display their bank accounts for deposits to be made by the buyer, this is not ideal and generally a slow method of collecting funds online. It will be much better if you integrated an online payment system to your website such as Alertpay, 2Checkout, Liberty reserve, Interswitch, Etranzact, Fastecash and others. Don't bother about the fact that most of them are set up only is US dollars as it is a good way of storing online funds since most local currencies depreciate over time when compared to Dollars.
You will need to set up a payment processor that also alerts and records every payment you receive even if you are not there. It should be online, real time and automatic.
Payment platforms like Alertpay and Fastecash have a system that can alert a remote script within your site of a payment that has been received on your behalf and you can start processing the order immediately since it has been confirmed.

Delivering your goods or service
After you must have received a successful order and payment for what you are selling, the next thing to do is to deliver the product or service. If it is an item that is virtual, it can be easily delivered online such as by providing a download link for successful payers. One easy way you can automate delivery of virtual products is by linking them to the payment processors which will then redirect buyers to download their product.
If it is a physical product you have to deliver physically or service you have to render face to face, then you may have to use courier or some other means to deliver. Customers who receive physical goods will have to acknowledge receipt of goods and you should keep such acknowledgment in your records for a time period.
Selling virtual products are much easier to sell online in Nigerian and it can be delivered either automatically or manually. For manually, it may involve sending an email to every client and for automatic, it would involve sending the item immediately after payment using your cgi script or some other secure web application. Stuffs like pictures, videos, recharge pins, prepaid credit cards and even web hosting can all be sold and delivered automatically online if you set up the platform properly. Manual delivery of such products by email can be time consuming and may lead to a lot of errors so why not go automatic using a working web script such as an ipn handler or other processor.