While the Internet has revolutionized the way businesses work, allowing easy communication between consumer and supplier, there are other methods to market your goods or services.
1. Retail – You sell to the user yourself. Higher running costs, but you keep all of the profits, and means customers can come to you instead of you searching for them.
2. Wholesale – You supply retailers who sell on for you. While you are handing over most of the control of the sale to the customer, you can now spend time doing other things for your business.
3. Distributors – The people who stock your product and sell it to their customers, usually arranged through a business-to-business model.
4. Agents – Sell your products alongside others. Great for niche production lines, following seasonal products, or just a limited time sale, where orders tend to be small.
5. Online – Setting up an online store though your own site is expensive, but using existing sale sites is possibly the easiest one-time sale to make. However, selling multiple products or a line is most likely best on your own site to avoid losing cuts.
6. Intermediaries – Effectively a distributor without handling the product. They introduce you to your customers, and you make the sale. For example, consultancy is often sold this way.
7. Networking – Some people sell through networking, a heavily socially reliant method, where people buy because they know them and think they can be trusted.
8. Demonstration – Go out and present your product. Attract street-goers eyes and expose them to your service to sell, or find a fair or similar venue to show it off.
9. Multi-level – A system where product customers are encouraged to become distributors and in turn the recruit more distributors and so on. A fantastic effort for product awareness.
10. Piggyback – You can sell your product as part of someone else's package. Often, you sell your goods to a company who will sell it as a package to make it more appealing.
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