If you sell a product that can be purchased almost anywhere from multiple vendors, you’re selling a commodity. This creates some problems in that you must convince customers to buy from you and not someone else.
Since your product itself is ubiquitous, you may be tempted to compete on price. Selling a commodity based on price is a losing proposition. Someone will always be able to undercut you.
So go ahead and sell the product at a fair price.
But wait, that can’t be it. Can it?
You’re right.
You’ll need to give the customer non-price based and compelling reasons to buy from you.
I recently purchased a new laptop from Costco. I could just have easily purchased this product from multiple other websites or retail stores.
In researching the product and reading reviews, people loved the computer but occasionally were frustrated by the return process if they had received a product dead on arrival. Instead of sending the laptop back to the vendor, they had to work with the manufacturer to ship it back and fix it.
I turned to Costco not for price, but because they alleviated the pain of buying this commoditized product. Costco offered a 90-day return policy compared to other vendor’s shorter 15- to 30-day policies. Costco also let me return the product to their store if needed so I wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of the manufacturer’s return process.
So while the product was a commodity and could be purchased anywhere, the service and policies of Costco turned me in their favor.
In fact, I told my wife when I purchased the laptop that there was no risk because I could always return it, hassle free.
You want your customers to chose you because you are “risk free” and the easiest to purchase from.