Why your ecommerce startup will fail in Nepal

Everyone back in Nepal want to grab the lucarative ecommerce business which seems to be doing well in India along with other part of Asia but thing here in Nepal is quite different. Beforing going big with ecommerce business you should know the business ecosystem of Nepal along with the user behaviour and tech penetration. Most e-commerce websites/startups based in Nepal fail due to the various reasons. Let’s check out some reason which can push your e-commerce into the dead-pool.

Market

Watching People using high end smartphones doesn’t means that our market is ready to adopt e-commerce culture. Bitter truth is that we are still not ready to be the part of e-commerce culture. People are still struggling to adapt online banking and without online banking, online purchasing is never going to be an easy task. You might know that “Cash On Delivery” is not going to make your business sustainable. Even if you survives the technical aspect, user-base who can be your potential customers is quite low in Nepal. Targeting the users of so called metro city like Kathmandu is not going to make your business successful. Meanwhile, When you are about to create your user-base over the period of time, new competitors will have entered the market and creating threat to your market share.

Too much competition

There are hundreds of so called e-commerce websites or facebook store in Nepal who claims them-self as a no 1 e-commerce business and they are fighting for the small pie with almost same identical products. We have a trend of starting e-commerce business in Nepal without figuring the potential market size and customer’s demands.

They run out of cash

Well, These days you can start an online store for just a few hundred dollars. Eventually after going live for few months or after spending few dollars in Facebook, they realize that a few hundred dollars is not going to let them survive. What You need is more cash until you reach into the break-even point.

They get into trouble when they don’t have enough cash to keep operating and eventually shutting down their store.

User experience

If you want to success then you need to have user friendly design, great products photos and easy checking out process, if it sucks, you will fail. No one is going to buy products from your website if they are having awful experience.

Patience

Alert, You are not going to be a successful in this business segment even if your website is experiencing good traffic. More than 90% of your traffic will come from people who are not buyers, yes they might be visiting your website to see the products and compare it with the products from some random off-line stores. So what I am trying to say is that e-commerce business takes time to grow. If you are trying to make overnight profit then you are seriously heading into the dark zone. Don’t be surprised if it takes several months to earn profits despite of having good website traffic.