Are you a manufacturer? Seven things to know before you sell online

I make paint. When I decided to sell the product online, I assumed that knowing production meant I would know selling too. If I hadn't assumed that, I would have lost less money. What follows is what I wish someone had told me back then.

1. You know your product; the customer doesn't

As a manufacturer you know every detail of your product: which formula it is made with, why it beats the competitor, how it behaves on which surface. Because this knowledge is obvious in your head, you forget to write it on the site.

When I wrote my first product pages I just put “water-based acrylic paint, 100 ml” and moved on. The questions customers asked were: Does it work on glass? Does it crack when dry? Do I need to varnish it? Does it smell? Can a child use it? I knew every answer — but none of them was on the site.

When writing your product page, ask yourself: after reading this page, would the customer have to call me? If so, the page is incomplete.

2. A photo doesn't sell the product, it sells what the product does

A photo of the bottle on a white background is necessary but not sufficient. I learned this the hard way in paint: showing a square swatch on screen doesn't tell you what the colour really looks like. The biggest cause of returns was “this isn't the colour I expected”.

The solution was to shoot a separate video for each of the 234 colours — footage of the paint flowing, coming off the brush, drying. It was a boring, long job. It turned out to be the thing that most influenced the buying decision.

What is the equivalent for your product? For olive oil, how it pours; for furniture, the assembly time; for textiles, how it feels. Whatever the customer wonders about and can't see before buying, show that.

3. A marketplace brings sales, not a brand

Getting onto a marketplace is easy and the first sales come from there. But on a marketplace the customer isn't yours. You don't know who bought, you can't reach them again, and you are inside a race where the price is set by the commission.

The right way is to run both: let the marketplace keep cash flowing, and let your own site grow the brand and the customer list. But don't get the order wrong — a business that sells only on marketplaces is really the marketplace's supplier.

4. Calculate the cost of the first order, plan the second

The first customer brought by ads is almost always a loss. Ad money, commission, shipping, return risk... There's no profit on the first order; the profit comes on the second and third.

That is why “boring” work — collecting emails, post-order communication, repeat-purchase discounts — makes more money than flashy design. I learned the clearest lesson here when I went through ad accounts: a campaign built with the right objective brought back a multiple of what it spent, while a campaign built “to bring visitors” spent money with nothing to show for it.

5. Trust comes before design

For a consumer in Türkiye to buy from a site they don't know, they need to see a few things: a real address and phone number, a clearly written return policy, a definite delivery time, other people's reviews.

None of these is an aesthetic decision. But if one is missing, carts get abandoned even on the most beautiful site in the world. Start collecting reviews from day one — collecting them later is much harder.

6. List your monthly costs item by item from the start

The visible cost of e-commerce is building the site; the invisible one is the monthly expenses. Platform subscription, domain, email, apps, shipping contract, accounting/e-invoice integrator, ad budget.

If you don't write these out in advance, by the third month you face the question “why is this business never profitable”. When you list them item by item, the solution is often simple: shut down three unnecessary apps.

7. Automate everything that can be automated — but afterwards

Issuing invoices, updating stock, posting to social media — all of these can be handed to a machine. But first you have to do them by hand and see how the work actually runs. If you automate a process you don't understand, you automate the mistakes too.

Today I never issue an invoice by hand, and posts go out to eight social channels by themselves. But I didn't set these up in the first month — I set them up after seeing which work really repeats.

Summary

Being a manufacturer has a big advantage online: you really know the product and there's no middleman. The disadvantage is that selling is a completely different profession. None of these seven points is technical — they are all things someone coming from production is most likely to skip.