Ecommerce Site Design – The Functionality

There are a lot of things that people look at when they start developing an ecommerce website. Unfortunately though, so many people want to break the simple rules to produce something that is extremely unique. I do not have a problem with unique websites, but many times they go so far against the rules of Ecommerce Site Design that they end up hurting themselves more than they help. Below I have several rules that you should consider when developing your website. If you feel that you break any of these rules, you should really contemplate whether what you are doing is productive to your goal in an ecommerce business.

Rule #1: Place your best selling products at the forefront.

In several of the articles you may have already read, I have been stressing the fact that you have to test what is working. Checking how many sales you are making on specific products is no different. It works similar for almost all companies. Generally, they have one product or service that they are well known for. Others are side items that are generally purchased along with your main product. Therefore, if you are going to sell laptops, you do not want your customers to have to sift through hundred of laptops bags before they ever come across one. Your specials and hottest items should be directly on the front page where they are easily visible and enticing to the buyers.

Rule #2: Make it easy for your visitors to search for products.

This is especially the case if you have a website that will have a lot of products on it. You should break down your products into relevant categories, have those categories easily visible. If all else fails, you may want to have a search feature to. There are numerous ecommerce sites where I have used their search feature before. It is frustrating though when it does not work. So if you have a search option, make sure it is functional. Overall though, if your visitors can not find the products they are looking for, they will leave as quickly as they came.

Rule #3: Make the order process easy to complete.

The hardest part to get people to convert in many websites cases is the transition from adding the product to the shopping cart to actually completing the order. However, many companies make it so difficult that they probably lose a good portion of their business before they ever get the opportunity to charge a credit card. I am going to go ahead and pick on GoDaddy here. It is without a doubt one of the best domain registrar companies in the world. But their ordering process is terrible. I have told friends who are not very computer savvy to order from there and probably most than half of the time I have to spend time walking them through so that they do not get other products that they do not need. Many turned away from GoDaddy until I was able to help them. For those that might have registered there but did not have anyone to help them with the process, they probably lost them as a customer before the ordering process was completed. Do not do this! The order process should be easy, you should be straight-forward and it should be able to be completed within a few minutes after basic information has been input.

Rule #4: Make it easy for website visitors to contact you.

You will find when you look at many ecommerce stores that there are numerous ways to contact the business. There is good reason for this. You do not want to lose out on what people call “leads”. Essentially, anyone who contacts you for information about your product is considered a high quality “lead”. In fact, it is stated in some places that as many as 30% of those who contact you about your product will end up buying from you. However, it is safe to assume that if they are unable to contact you or you do not respond that you are losing out on a lot of business. For this reason, I would encourage you to allow people email you, use a web form, submit a support ticket, or give you a phone call. Perhaps, you should also have several avenues to make it easier. These forms of contact should be extremely visible and easy to access. For example, if you have a phone number for your ecommerce business, this should be directly on the front page.

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Ecommerce Site Design – The Visual Aspects

Within my six years of web development experience, I have learned a lot. Primarily it was through my own mistakes. Below are some of the things that I had encountered early on. I would highly recommend that while you are in your web design process that you really take into consideration some of the aspects that I mention below. It will make your site more visually appearing and will help drastically in converting your ecommerce website into actual sales.

Make your website easy to read.

For some, this may seem fairly logical. However, many times people get caught up in trying to find cool looking font for their logos or text on their website. Also, for many people they find that the tiny font is extremely cute. It just looks prettier for some reason. However, having a cute font or a cute sized text throughout your website does very little for you. In fact, it hurts you. While I am not going to say that you should totally avoid making your text presentable and appealing, its primary function should always be to clearly tell the reader something you want them to know. You certainly do not want to put an age restriction on your website by keeping the elderly from being able to read what you have on it.

Colors are important.

I have been in web design for a long time and colors have quickly changed. I am not going to tell you that you need to go with a specific color because that is not the case at all. Rather, you should always stick to a color scheme of some kind. Back in the 90’s many websites were extremely colorful. People had their websites look like rainbows a lot of the time. There was a lot of animation and this quickly diminished as businesses started taking their websites more seriously. There is something that gives an old or unprofessional appearance when a solid color scheme is not completed throughout an entire website. Yes, this even goes for the ordering process where you may be using pre-written software. You can and should modify it.

Always have a logo that brands your company.

Most people do not really think of this too much. It sometimes gets overlooked but you should always have a logo that brands your company. What I mean by branding your company is that it should be something that people can see and immediately recognize your business. A classic example is the bitten apple that all Mac computers have on it. It is not overly complex, it is simple, and yet regardless of what color it is, people can still recognize that as being associated with Macintosh.

Your website should be easy to navigate.

It does not matter how creative you can get with a navigation menu, it should always be very easy and simple to navigate. When people come to your ecommerce website they are looking for a product more than likely. If they have a difficult time finding what they want, or have a difficult time working their way to where the products are, they will quickly leave. Generally, it is stated that you have seven seconds to give a visitor some reason to stay. That means if your website takes three seconds to load, you are now down to four. If they do not see an easy path to the product they are looking for, they will leave and go elsewhere. It is a requirement that your navigation on your website to different pages be as simple, easy to find, and easy to use as possible.

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Latest Trends in Ecommerce

When it comes to ecommerce, a lot of the professionals rely on the trends to determine what is going to be successful. Many people do not look at this, but it might be important depending on what type of business you are getting into online. Below are simply some interesting trends that may impact your business. Generally, ecommerce, despite the economy is still a good business decision when done properly.

Fact #1: Ecommerce is continuing to grow rapidly

Source: http://usa.usembassy.de/economy-ecommerce.htm

While the sales have slowed down in recent years, the industry of ecommerce in general is still thriving. There will likely still be growth this year. Since 2001, there has been an average of roughly 25 percent increase each year. This number is expected to lower this year but I doubt that it will be in the negative.

Fact #2: There are continuing to be more internet users each year

Source: http://www.impactlab.com/2008/04/09/will-the-economy-affect-e-commerce/

It really is to no ones surprise that there are more internet users now than there was back in 2000. In fact, the internet usage for North Americans has seen an 132.5% increase since then. So basically, it is safe to assume that this number is not going to go down anytime soon. It is probably safe to consider that those who used the internet the last several years will not quit now and the younger generation is growing up and utilizing technology as well.

Fact #3: The Age is lowering, but will rise again

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_internet_usage

Source: http://www.december.com/web/text/tutor/netuse.html

This is probably one of the more interesting statistics that would relate to ecommerce. It is generally stated that no one from the older generation uses the internet. However, this is a common misconception according to this trend. Generally, the average age for internet users has become lower. However, you may be shocked to know that as of 2000, the beginning of the internet burst of users, the average age of an internet user was 41 years old with an income of $65,000. This is likely because they had more access to computers. However, this number has lowered to an age of 29.78. The reason for this is the younger generation seems to love technology in general. They have really caught onto the internet and use it for a lot of their communication. This will continue and the average age number is expected to grow as the generation of internet users gets older. You will also find this number increasing as more businesses begin to do business online as well. Generally though, this number is probably not as low as some may expect. The average internet user is very capable of making purchases online. This is good news for ecommerce.

Fact #4: More purchases are being made online each year

Source: http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/data/html/08Q4.html

According to statistics, people are continuing to buy more online each year than they had previously. Often times, we are finding that even common items are being purchased online. For example, in some cities you can now buy your groceries via a website. This means that as people make that transition, there is more and more money being transacted over the internet. Overall, businesses are growing in terms of how many sales they do online in comparison to how many are being done in the store. This is a good indication that people are buying more of their products online instead of in retail stores. There is no suggestion that this will slow down anytime soon.

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Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – Link Building

If you are like me you enjoy being independent. Regardless of the reason, you probably came to this article to find out how to start the link building process for your ecommerce website. Whether you simply ran out of funds to have someone else do it or you would rather invest that money elsewhere, you came to the right place. While this next question may throw you off guard if you are not familiar with SEO at all, it does have a lot to do with link building.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a short name given to a any link that is from another website that has a destination of your website. Therefore, if you own an ecommerce website called johndoesbikeshop.com and the webmaster from reallycoolbikestores.com linked to it on his website. That link would be considered a backlink.

What is link building?

Link building is any process that you take to obtain backlinks in effort to rank better within search engines. In a nutshell, anytime you are going out of your way to get a link from another website back to your own website (also referred to as backlinks) then you are link building. Therefore, there are many things you can do that could be considered link building.

How should link building be done for ecommerce?

Now that you know what backlinks and link building are we can move on to the more in depth stuff of the actual process. For an ecommerce store, it is imperative that the anchor text used in your backlinks is relative to the products or services you are offering. For example, many times people will get a backlink but the anchor text might be “click here”. Google does in fact count that as a vote to have your site rank when someone searches for “click here”. However, this does little to help considering you probably will not convert traffic that come to your site after searching for that term. Therefore, if you have any say in the process you should make the anchor text of all backlinks relative to your products or services. For example, if you are selling bikes, you want people who search for “buy bikes” or “bikes for sale” to find your website on the search engines. This, then, should be the anchor text used on your backlinks.

How do I start link building?

Link building is not a one time thing. You will never be able to say, “Okay, I am done with my link building for this website.” Instead, even if you are number one for a specific keyword, you will still have to do more link building because you know that there are other competitors trying to take your spot. Not only will they try, but if Google sees that there is more interest in their website than yours, you will quickly be replaced because Google will think that they are more relative than you are. It is safe to say this is a process that will never end during the time that you own an ecommerce store. You will constantly want to tell people about your site and gain links back to your store’s website.

The upside to this is that the methods of link building can be quite simple. Sometimes people will use services such as linkxl.com or text-link-ads.com but this has been spoken plainly by Google that they frown upon such services. Therefore, other methods can be taken that are also effective. Below is a short list of things you can do to help build backlinks for your ecommerce website.

1: Directory Submissions – Submit your website to directories online.

2: Article Marketing – Place content online at article directories with a link or two back to your ecommerce website.

3: Social Bookmarking – Link to content on your own site through sites like digg, delicious, and reddit.

4: Social Networking – Talk to others and link back to your website when you feel that your website is relative to the conversation.

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Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – On-Site Optimization

On-site optimization is a key element to any ecommerce website hoping to get traffic from search engines. Generally, search engines use software or robots that view your website. These robots then have to determine what your website is about based on what is on it. The problem is that if your website is not optimized properly it could land unfound in search engines or maybe even in search results that will never generate any buyers for you.

First, we must look at what a keyword is. Essentially, it can be a single word, but is typically a group of words that people might search for to find your website relevant to what they want. So for example, you may have an ecommerce website that sells curtains. A possible keyword would be “curtains for sale”. This might be a term that people would search for in order to find your website. I am not saying that this is a definite good keyword because you need to do research to determine if people even searching for that, how much competition, or if there might be better untapped keywords out there that you could rank easily for and convert into sales.

So now that we know that you have to have a keyword for on-site optimization, you may be asking yourself, “How does this relate”? Generally, it relates in every way because you will be using your keywords throughout your website. Let me give you a perfect example, the Title of your page is very important to robots. It is intended to be a brief overview of what your website is about. This title is the text that appears at the top of a browser but is generated through a tag in HTML within the section. If your title is “Welcome to my awesome curtain website” then you might rank well for “awesome curtain website” which probably has little traffic and is not relevant to you actually selling curtains.

Now here is the kicker, you do not want to use the same keyword on every single page. You should perhaps use your best selling and most popular items in the keyword on your front page as well as the actual page selling those items. However, if you also sell curtain rods or drapes on a different page, you can change that title and use a different keyword for that page. Google actually recommends this and you may hurt yourself if you simply throw a single keyword around everywhere possible. You must have a title and use keywords that are relevant to what is on that page.

Where else other than the title can I place a keyword?

There are numerous places that robots will look. Below are a few places that I would highly recommend using your keywords at.

#1: H1 HTML Tags – H1 tags are HTML tags that help outline a page. For example, when you were in English class you probably had to have an outline. Google prefers that you do the same thing on your own websites. H1 is generally an overview of what is below. The next level would be H2, which should contain contents of H1. H3 is generally the lowest level that website will go and it should be the littlest details. Below is a brief outline based on previous examples of a curtain ecommerce website.

H1 – Curtains for Sale

H2 – Ruffled Curtains

H3 – Pink Ruffled Curtains

H3 – Purple Ruffled Curtains

H2 – Straight Curtains

H3 – Pink Straight Curtains

H3 – Purple Straight Curtains

#2: Within the Content of Your Website

The robots these days are quite complex. They actually read what you have on the website including your entire content. The words on the page about having curtains for sale should indicate that you do have “curtains for sale”. You should have that placed somewhere in your content and you should make easily visible. At the same time there has to be a balance, your content should flow naturally and you should avoid placing your keywords in areas where it does not make sense or read well. The goal is to help your website visitors at the same time find what they are looking for.

Please note that Google claims to have roughly 200 things that they judge a website on to see where it fits best. Many of these are based on what you have on your website. While I just touched the surface on other places to use keywords, there are numerous other techniques that you may find beneficial for your website. Generally, if you follow the rules of placing keywords that are relevant Google and other search engines will reward you.

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Ecommerce: PCI Compliance

So now that you are deciding to get involved online, you may come across a situation where you feel it is necessary to hold onto your customers’ credit card information. While I would highly recommend that you do not do this unless it is absolutely necessary, I understand that there may be times where it is needed depending on what type of business model you are running.

The reason that I discourage you from doing this is because the major credit card providers have started what is called PCI compliance. PCI is short for Payment Card Industry. This basically is an agreement that if you accept their form of credit cards and hold onto card holders information that you are responsible for keeping it secure. If it leeks out, the credit card companies can come to you for reimbursement of those illegal charges on the cards if they find that you were not handling the information properly. With that said, they left plenty of loopholes in there to catch companies who run into the problem of having their system hacked to gain access to that information. Below are several things that you are required to do to make yourself PCI compliant.

#1: You are required to keep a secure network.

This is generally done anyhow but smaller businesses can frequently overlook this. For example, you are not allowed to simply keep the information in an excel file on your personal computer that is not secured behind a firewall and other features implemented to protect it. When you simply have this information on your computer and are connected to the internet with no security measures in place, you risk having that computer hacked and having that information stolen. You then become the source of the problem and could be liable for fraudulent charges to those credit cards.

#2: You have an obligation to protect the information.

Let us say that you are on a network and it is secure from outside sources other than the employees of your company. This is generally considered to be non-compliant. This information should only be available to people who actually need access to it. Access to it should be strictly limited to other employees if you have any.

This goes a step further for online transactions. When you accept a credit card, all of that information needs to be encrypted while the server is processing it. It has to be encrypted to a 128 bit SSL certificate minimum.

#3: There must be a vulnerability management program

This primarily relates to keeping everything up to date. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people out there who enjoy working their way around firewalls and anti-virus protection. When this occurs, the anti-virus software should have regular updates to fix any problems it encounters. The sad part is that this is an ongoing battle and you will need to keep all of your software up to date as well. You must regularly update your system to keep new viruses from infecting your computer and leaking important data.

#4: Monitoring the Network and Information is a requirement

You are not allowed to simply set it up and forget about it. You are required to regularly monitor access to this information. You will need to have each person who accesses the information have a unique identifier that they login with. You need to monitor who access the information, at what time, and where they go, etc. This can be rather complicated, especially if you have multiple people with access to the data. This monitoring is also used to track those who may not be associated with your business and have malicious intentions. You might be able to catch this type of activity before it becomes a huge problem.

#5: You must maintain a security policy

When you have hired employees, you must make them aware and sign a security policy that states importance of keeping this information secure. This is particularly necessary if they are going to be handling the credit card information. They should know and understand what type of responsibility they have to keep the cardholder information secure.

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Basic SEO Guide for Ecommerce Websites

This is yet another topic that deserves a book to be written on it. The problem is that I can not recommend a book. In fact, this industry changes so quickly as Google tweaks their algorithm it is difficult to determine what the most important factors are. However, I will try to point out those that very few people will dispute as the big ones. Others are there just for your benefit to be aware of.

First off, there are two major categories in SEO. There is on-site SEO and off-site SEO. Generally, most everyone will start with the on-site SEO because you want Google to recognize what your website is about. If they do not, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword? These spiders that crawl your website will be looking at several different attributes on each page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google’s website.

Another note worth mentioning: What is a keyword? A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your website. I have been using a motorcycle website as an example throughout, so I’ll continue to do that. People could search for “motorcycle”, but they might also search for “buy motorcycle”, “black motorcycles”, “Harley Davidson motorcycle for sale”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases. However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note below that almost all on-site SEO has to do with is placing good quality keywords throughout your website where Google’s robots, spiders, or software might be able to determine what your website is about.

On-Site SEO Factors

1: The Title of the Page

2: The keywords used throughout the text on the website.

3: What keywords are used in H1 tags.

4: Keywords used in your domain name

5: Keywords used in the URL of a webpage.

6: Meta Keywords

Off-Site SEO

1: Links Pointing to Your Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a unique motorcycle, and you have it for sell, they may link to your website with “unique motorcycle” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

2: Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Harley Davidson’s official website or something along those lines.

3: The Age of Your Website

I listed this as an off-site related issue but really it doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks. I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this than Google does.

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Marketing Your Ecommerce Website

To be quite honest, marketing your ecommerce website deserves much more detail than this single article. There are entire books devoted to some of the smaller aspects of marketing a website. So for this section, I am going to go over some of the common methods that you will find to bring people to your website. Some of them may intrigue you and I would encourage you to read more on those individual topics that you think might be good avenues to take for your ecommerce website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably one of the more popular and most discussed marketing methods. You may be telling yourself that this sounds way too complicated or technical. Really, it is not.

To explain what it is, I first have to explain a little bit about how search engines operate. We will use Google as our example because it is the most popular search engine in the United States. When you go to Google, type in a “keywords” to search on, it pulls up several results, sometimes millions. Now, Google does not have little workers that manually go through each website on the internet and determine keywords that are related to it. This would take countless hours and would be unproductive. Instead, they have what people call the “Google algorithm”. As Google finds new websites through its software, it determines what it is related to. It uses a wide variety of things to do this, the title of the page, the content, and who is linking to the website, what keywords people are using in their links when they do link to it, the domain name, etc. There is a huge list of factors that play a role in SEO. The act of marketing from your end, is to make your website easy for the Google software to determine what your website is about. Therefore, ranking you better than many other websites that Google is unable to tell what their website is about. The end goal is to have your website listed in the top few results when they are searching for your products or services.

Direct Advertising

This is one of the most popular marketing methods. It is simply like a billboard except on the internet. You place advertisements for your products or services on other peoples websites that might have traffic who would be interested in what you offer. For example, if you sell motorcycles, you might place a banner on a forum that has people who are interested in motorcycles on it.

Pay Per Click

This is one of the quickest methods to getting traffic to your website. The problem is that if you do not know what you are doing, you may never see a return on your investment. I highly recommend you read a lot about PPC before you ever get involved.

The actual process however is placing your website within search results at places like Google when people are searching on keywords. For example, you could pay $2.00 per visitor for when someone searches on “Motorcycle” at Google. This would actually not be a good keyword to buy because it is too broad. But again, this is a simple overview and you should read more into PPC if you decide to take this route.

Smaller Free Methods

Generally, these methods are not quite as good. At the same time they are worth mentioning because you will read about them elsewhere. These take time and effort, but if you have time to spend to build your website up, you might as well do these to gain some extra traffic. Many of these are related to SEO, so you there are side benefits as well.

Grow your online business with software web designers love: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

The Importance of Product Reviews for Ecommerce

Buying products online has a bad reputation from the many people who have really treated their customers badly. Since you can not just walk into a store talk directly to the manager or force the owners to speak with you, you are limited to phone calls, emails, or maybe not even this much in some cases. People online will not hesitate to tell others about their poor experiences to keep others from buying from any company that did not treat them right.

Since people are so skeptical of online businesses, they will frequently visit review sites before ever making a purchase. In fact, some will go to the degree of going to review sites before ever checking out their products or going to their website. For example, lets say I know that hundreds of business are selling computers online. I want to go with one of the more reputable businesses, so I will go find reviews on sites. Then I may go to their site and see if they have a computer that I am looking for. This is not an uncommon practice which means that your reviews can be crucial to your businesses success.

Reviews can help your ecommerce business gain credibility in the marketplace. This is especially the case if you are in a packed market where you are competing with several businesses. You should look forward to having numerous reviews, even if all of them are not positive. Others will note that you are doing business with other people, and therefore, you are not new to shipping items properly or handling online buyers.

The biggest thing you want to do online is create a buzz about your products or services. You want others to talk about what you are doing, how you treated them, and about where they purchased their product or service. This is referred to as “going viral”. If you find that others are talking about your business without you having to force them into a conversation, you will likely find your traffic growing substantially, and in return, more conversions into sales. This is the overall goal, and it can be jumpstarted by positive reviews about your business.

So you may be asking, how do I get positive reviews or keep from getting negative ones? The biggest key to keeping your business on track is to go above and beyond in customer service. There is no doubt that you will run into some problems on occasion. You may ship a product and it might get smashed in shipping. You might get an email that they even received the wrong product. You will have some angry customers every now and then but you have to find the best way to deal with them. This may cost you some money out of your pocket, but this is far better than scratching it up as an unsatisfied customer. Rather, send them a free shirt, if you having shipping issues, let them mail it back, you cover costs, send the next item as a high priority mail and try to get it done as quickly as possible. You will find that instead of a negative review, they will more than likely take what was a bad situation and let others know how well you treated them when things were out of your own control. When going above and beyond what you have to do, you will see the appreciation given from your online buyers.

Grow your online business with software web designers love: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

The Reality of Online Business

At this point, you should already have a ecommerce website developed. You might be getting co-workers, friends, family, and some occasional other visitors on your website. This part may scare you, but there is more to being successful online than just owning one of the millions of websites that are on the internet.

Disadvantages to Being Online

1: You must market your website

This is not like brick and mortar companies. Often times, you can build a restaurant in a local town. The word will quickly spread and people will see the sign as they drive by. Many times you might just get traffic from people who are curious as to what the business has to offer. This is not the case online.

A similar scenario would be if you were to build your business in the desolate desert where no one would see it. Instead of relying on the curiosity of people, you have to compel them to come. This is where marketing comes into play. Through marketing, you can move your business from the desert to Broadway in New York City.

2: You are in direct competition with more businesses. In a small town, you might be the only business nearby that sells motorcycles. You do not really have much competition. Everyone who wants a motorcycle will normally find their way to your store. Online, this is not the case. You are competing against the biggest companies to sell your products.

3: It is a never ending process

Just like your brick and mortar business, you will constantly be working on improving the performance of your online store. You will need to find out what works, what doesn’t work. You will have to capitalize on the market changes.

Advantages of Being Online

1: You have the ability to market your products to many more people

You might sell one or two motorcycles a day and that might be very good business for you in your brick and mortar company. Lucky for you, you now have a marketplace that is ten times larger than what you did have. Instead of selling your product to your metro area that has 100,000 people in it. You have the opportunity to get your product to the 100,000 people that are looking for your product on a daily basis.

2: Very little overhead expense

Running an online business is very inexpensive in comparison to brick and mortar companies. With brick and mortar companies you will be paying for location to store your products and do business, utility bills, you have to be there to keep the doors open. An ecommerce store will allow you to stay open 24 hours per day, even though you may not be directly at the computer. You will also find that a small web hosting fee and a mediocre marketing budget is much less expensive than what you are already paying to keep your doors open.

3: You can compete against larger businesses

Luckily for you, you do not have to have one hundred employees, a huge marketing budget, and sell overpriced products to compete with the bigger companies in your market. Instead, with a smaller budget you can do quite a bit online. You may find that you are taking business away from your other competitors if you are spending wisely. Just like you, it no longer matters that they are on a busier street in a bigger neighborhood. You are both online and you can directly compete against them and build up your business.

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