Ecommerce Development Tips

Developing an ecommerce business can be somewhat difficult if you are not familiar with the internet or marketing techniques. Doing business online is one of the highest growing markets for business right now. Because of the rough economy many small business owners are turning to the internet to save their business from closing or bankruptcy.

As you begin you new business venture online there are some recommendations that may help you with this process. Creating a website that will fit the needs of your online company is an important first step. If you do not know how to create your own site, then you will want to hire a web designer that can do this for you. You want to have a website that is unique. You want something that people will remember.

If you are going to hire a web designer, then you will want to do some research on what company best fits your needs. You want someone that is experienced so that you will get a good product for the money that you will spend on this service. Checking customer reviews is a great way to learn about how a company really works. You will want to make a list of your needs so that you can limit the amount of research you will have to do in order to find the right company.

Once you have found a design for your site, you are ready for the next set of developing your ecommerce business. You are going to want software that will help your customers will buying your products. Software will also allow them to register or login as returning customers. This software is often referred to as store management software or solution software. Both are designed to help you run all aspects of your business.

There are many different software companies on the market. It can be difficult to find the one that best fits your needs. One of the best things that you can do before you really get started is to make of list of the top three to five most important features that you consider necessary for you to manage your site. Once you have your list, you will be able to eliminate a lot of the companies that do not match or cannot match all of your needs. You do not want to forget about how much you are willing to spend to get the right company. This can be a very big factor in which company you will end up choosing.

Eliminating all the companies that do not fit your needs will save you a lot time. Once you have done this, you will want to find out how the company treats its customers. Some question that you may want to ask are “what the response time in customer service is” and “what kind of technical support that they offer.” These are just a few of the question that may not be answered in the customer reviews that you will want to read. A good way to test these particular areas is to send a set of “test” questions to see how they respond firsthand. This is one way to know that you are getting the best for your ecommerce business.

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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.

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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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