Anyone can setup an ecommerce store online. There are many ways to post products for sale in minutes, even using sites like ebay. I speak with people that want to sell products online every day. While many people want to make lots of money and come up high in Google, most of them aren’t ready to commit the time and resources that a true ecommerce store takes. Those who understand the demands and that are willing to commit the resources are the ones that have the most success.
When I say that ecommerce is hard, I’m talking about running an honest to goodness custom ecommerce store that hopes to gross over $50,000 per month in sales using a custom-built website. Stores that sell a couple of thousand dollars worth of goods per month are usually not profitable, but companies that are just now becoming serious about their ecommerce stores have to start somewhere.
How to tell if running an ecommerce website is simply not for you:
- If you hope to drop-ship all of your products so that you can avoid dealing with shipping and packaging.
If you have a full-time day job, and you hope to grow an ecommerce store on the side, prepare for your online store to be your second job. You will need to dedicate several hours a day to your store. Its also difficult for a business to just add commerce and walk away without a plan to manage and grow the online store. - You can’t designate a person at your company who can manage the store once it is built.
Who will answer the emails that come in? Who will answer questions from customers? Who will handle returns. Typically customers will try a small order with your store to evaluate your customer service before they spend a lot of money on your website. - You don’t typically check email more than once or twice a day, and/or you don’t have a smartphone.
You have to be somewhat of a techie to be successful with an ecommerce site. All successful ecommerce store owners that I have met have a smartphone with push email and internet access to monitor their store. A cheap flip phone and no qwerty keyboard is a bad sign. - You don’t experience editing photos on your computer.
Your product catalog must be full of great photos. One photo per product is NOT enough anymore. If your store has hundreds or thousands of products, you will be spending a lot of time resizing photos on your computer. If the cost and learning curve of a photo editing program is too much for you, then so is ecommerce. You don’t need to be a photoshop expert, but it helpful to know how to resize, rotate, crop, and sharpen photos. - You can’t designate an area to take photos of your products.
You will need to create a small photo booth to take product photos. If you intend to steal product photos from other websites, then don’t build an ecommerce site. - You use personal email addresses (comcast, verizon) to run your business on.
A legitimate ecommerce store should have email addresses at your domain name. If you can’t use Outlook or some other program to check multiple email addresses, that is a bad sign. - You aren’t the type to do research online, to learn about the latest search engine optimization techniques.
The best place to learn about ecommerce, search engine optimization, and more is the web. If you have to call your web designer to learn about all of these things, that is a bad sign. Certainly your provider can help you take things to the next level, but you need to be able to do some basic research on your own to save time and money. There are a LOT of buzzword topics that you will need to learn about quickly to be successful with ecommerce; SEO, cart abandonment, visitor conversion, Landing Pages, Optimization, tagging, payment gateways, APIs, inbound linking, etc. - You think that keywords and meta tags are the secret to coming up high in Google.
It is a myth that adding a few keywords to your site is all you need to do to get found in Google and other search engines. What will you do to get quality website to link to you, for example? You will need a plan for this, and that takes time and money too. If you have a list of terms that you think your business should show in the top ten results under in Google, then you must work closely with your web design team from the beginning to make sure that your site is optimized for these terms. - You have never used ebay, or done online shopping on your own.
Again, you have to be a savvy web user and shopper to know what makes a good shopping experience. - You can’t/won’t write descriptions of your products (all of your products).
Quality original content is what can make your site stand apart from others. Your store will need to convince shoppers to buy, so you will need well-written product descriptions. If you don’t have time to write these, then ecommerce may not be for you. - The products that you are trying to sell are a commodity that can be found anywhere.
The sites that make the most money that I have seen sell products that people seek out. Usually these are very specific or hard to find items. Parts websites aren’t very sexy, but they make a ton of money. You have to have a niche with your business so that people will seek you out. - You think that $100 a month to cover all of your store fees is too much money.
Ecommerce is expensive. Our ecommerce hosting framework starts at $50 per month for an ecommerce website. Add onto that the cost of accepting credit cards, and the payment gateway ($10/mo), and the fees can add up. This is without spending any money on adwords with Google. Be realistic with your recurring fees, not just your store development fees. - You wish to emulate stores online that belong to multi-million dollar businesses, on a tiny budget.
Look for stores online that more closely resemble what you are trying to create. Do a lot of Google searches for related products to what you are selling. See what the competition looks like. While it might be tempting to want to emulate a multi-national corporation website, be realistic. - You don’t have a database of people to market to right away
This is why brick and motar stores do so well online. They can market to their existing customers. - Your project’s goals aren’t realistic.
If you are trying to build an expansive website in a matter of weeks, it just wont happen unless you have an extremely small or template-based online store. If the store is very small, then your sales will be small, and you may not make enough to cover expenses.
If you have comment or questions about ecommerce success, please post a follow-up below. I will answer your questions here.
