Build it and they will come: a short guide to ecommerce

Build it and they will come?

Build it and they will come: this just is not the case for ecommerce or for just about any website for that matter.
There are usually hundreds if not thousands of websites in your industry competing for the ecommerce dollar and your site has to stand out, be found and also convert browsers into buyers.
Consider your ecommerce store like a new location for your existing business, if you only spend a small amount on a new bricks and mortar store you won't have any budget for a big neon sign or advertising and certainly nothing for marketing. An ecommerce store has many parallels with regular retail while at the same time being a completely different animal.

Successful e-commerce stores or online businesses take commitment and hard work, you can't just start a new site and hope that it will start making money from day one, not unlike regular retail many new businesses don't survive past the first 2 years.
So how do you make your online venture successful?, well a good business plan and cash flow forecast is always a good idea and you start this by asking yourself some questions.

• Who is going to buy my product?


• How will they find me?


• Why would they buy from me and not my competitor?


• What makes my site / product / service different?


• How will they pay for it, PayPal, Credit Cards, Check, Purchase Order?


• How will I ship the product, drop ship or from stock?


• Location: for the web this means ranking, how are you going to rank organically? (organically means how your site appears in the free section of the page, not pay per click on other paid advertising)


• Stock: how to handle stock control for your site, if someone orders something you better have it available and be able to ship it quickly. The average E-bay and Amazon buyer expects their items shipped within a few days and want a tracking number to go with it.


• Delivery: How are you going to get your items to your customer, are you going to use UPS, Fedex or the Post Office, are you going to ship by a flat rate or by weight, will you offer next day delivery or just ship ground?


• What's my budget for site building?


• Who's going to keep it updated?


• Who's going to pack and ship the orders?


• What's my returns policy?


• This is just a short list of questions and there are many more factors to be considered.

My site is live, now what?

So you've spent the money and jumped into the world of online sales and ecommerce, now you need some customers and sales. This is a list of just some of the things you can do to drive traffic and sales.
Advertise: You are a promoting a web business so primarily advertise on the web. There are many options and some are more suitable for one business than another.

• PPC: Pay per click, set up an advertising campaign with Google adwords, you control the budget and exposure and you can run multiple campaigns.


• Banner Ads: Google your business or site and see who comes up first in the search engines, look for a site that talks about your industry or business, what we mean by that is a site that maybe does product reviews or is a meeting place for people of a like mind. For example if you sell cooking products you want to find a site where people review these as well as post recipes and discuss cooking. These are what are called "authority sites" and a banner ad on these can generate traffic and sales, if they have free links then make sure you add yourself.


• Inbound Links: Google has a huge part of the search engine market so we focus on them for this article. Google and other engines regard inbound links (sites that link to your site) as important, through a mixture of quantity and "quality". Quality means the relevance and popularity of the site that links to you. So if you sell footballs and there is a link from ESPN to your site they will consider that much more important than a link from the local free ads newspaper site. You want inbound links but don't be tempted by link exchanges (see below). Outbound links don't count, so have those if you want them but not for search engine purposes and make them the last thing a viewer clicks on, as you want them to stay on your site. If you do link to other sites may sure it opens in a new window so your site stays on the screen.


• Link exchanges: These are pretty much ineffective as the big search engines pretty much ignore them so you should too.


• Listing sites: There are lots of sites that list suppliers in an industry, like web designers, if the site ranks well then a paid link or ad may be effective.


• Viral Marketing: This is the latest way of getting your site "out there" Facebook, Twitter, MySpace all allow you to post you own content and if you have relevant information you find people linking to your site or blog or tweets and this in turn can bring more traffic to your site. Facebook has paid advertising and millions of users so if you have a larger budget give that a test run.


• Merchant Circle: This is a free web site for listing your business, it allows you to post images, information and even coupons for your business. You have to hunt around to make sure you don't select the paid plan but MerchantCircle.com appears in just about every search so sign up, why not, it can't hurt!


• Newsletters: Have a newsletter on your site (and use it) email your customers who have signed up and keep them informed of sales and offers. A colorful email newsletter generates sales,send them at least once a month but don't fill up your customer email box with emails every few days, they'll start to just delete them. If you offer a discount or a coupon , customers will open it and use it. If you are web based make sure they can use it on your site, make it for a limited time so they want to buy now and not be able to use it in six months when you may not have the product or want it on sale.


• Affiliates: If your software has the ability to offer an affiliate system then take advantage of it, this works by allowing them to sign up for an account and then they place links or banner ads on their site. When someone clicks on the banner and goes to your site the software records this and when the customer buys something the affiliate gets a percentage. It's an easy way for them to make money and you pay them a percentage of the sale. You get more business and you are only paying someone when you sell something. The golden rule is don't try and charge for this, make it free and they will sign up, do be careful and approve the affiliate first, you do not want your ads in any "undesirable" sites.


• Print: print isn't dead it's just not very well, as a web design business we made the decision to drop yellow book advertising, it's expensive and ineffective and our business has grown, we know how people find us and it's not in the big books of yellow pages. The same can be said for many companies , most people who are looking for a local business do it on the web and they Google it or use MSN, Bing or Yahoo (AOL uses the Google search engine). You can also skip the yellow book websites, they just don't rank well, when was the last time you went to one of their sites to find a business? not only that they list paid advertising higher than non paid. That said print is still effective (we should know we are a graphic design business), make sure your web address is on your business card, flyers, brochures, postcards, magazine ads and even on your embroidered shirt and that will help you get more traffic to your site. A colorful brochure or postcard will kick start the customers interest but a website will tell them more about your business and services than you can ever fit on a 6x9 postcard!


• TV advertising, got the budget? make sure your URL is in your ad and it needs to be easy to remember as the viewer is not going to have pen and paper to hand.

This is not a comprehensive list it's just a guide, there are many factors and many more services that can be considered when creating or promoting an ecommerce site and many of these translate to regular non commercial websites.
We are happy to answer questions and provide advice through our contact form as well as any feedback you may have.

Happy selling!

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