Building an Ecommerce Business During the Recession

Several people are scared about investing money or spending money right now with the way the economy currently is. That is okay, and they have a good reason to be careful with their money. The purpose of this article is not to tell you that you need to spend everything you own. Rather, it is to help you decide whether you can be successful online during this recession.

First off, let me say that online business is continuing to grow. While many companies are having their sales lower overall, many are seeing more sales online, but far less in their retail stores. For the last six years, studies indicate that businesses are doing far better in sales online than they have in previous years.

Let’s be realistic about what is going to occur online throughout this recession. Currently, people are evaluating what they need and trying to do away with unnecessary expenses. However, this really is no different than it ever has been in the past. Right now, people are just taking it to another level.

One of the best marketers I have ever heard once told me that really the saying “I don’t need this”, really just means “I don’t want it bad enough”. Let me give you a real example. I will use myself for this. I am a huge fan of PC gaming. I typically stay up with all of the newest releases. The problem with this industry is that games are constantly requiring more from computers to be able to run well. So for example, when Call of Duty 4 came out, it was time for me to upgrade my computer. Did I really need to upgrade my computer? Not really, I could have done away with gaming or avoided this game all together. However, since it is something I am passionate about, I found a way to spend money to upgrade my computer. Everyone who comes online to purchase items is this way as well. Typically, if they want to buy something, they will find a way to pay for it. However, when they really are not interested in your product, the line that they will use is “I don’t need it”.

So how do you know that you can be successful online? You really have to ask yourself what type of person would buy your products or services. Are there any people out there who will feel that they need your item like I felt in the scenario above that I needed to upgrade my computer? If you can be realistic with yourself and answer it with a firm “yes”, then I believe you can do well online. There is obviously going to be a market for what you are offering.

Another thing you are going to be required to do is to create this desire to have your product. If you own a website and it is simply full of text, it has vague descriptions of your products, no pictures, no videos showing it in action, and no testimonies; you will find it difficult to ever sell your product. I am not saying that you have to have all of those mentioned above, but certainly do not sell yourself short on your website. Get straight to the point, put your products directly in their face, and convince them that they need your product. With a little legwork and salesmanship for your ecommerce website, it can go very far online even during a recession.

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Ecommerce Mistakes and Pitfalls – Placing All of Your Eggs into One Basket

By now, you are probably well aware of the fact that you need to market your ecommerce website. You know that without doing so that you probably will never see any significant amount of traffic. Worse though, you may never see a single sale of your products.

Let me start off by saying that you do need to market your website. It is the only way to succeed. However, you do not want to place all of your eggs into one basket. This is a common saying where I am from, but to put it in the proper context for online marketing: do not invest all of your money into one thing.

In the world of ecommerce some stores will use different techniques to gain traffic. I could fill this page with the different techniques but I won’t do that. To name a few of the most popular that you might read about, you may find interest in Pay Per Click, Direct Advertising, Article Marketing, or Social Networking. There are different ways to invest money into each of them although article marketing and social networking you could do on your own with no investment. Still, some people choose to outsource this work and pay others to do it.

On of the most common problems is that people will read about Pay Per Click, they love the idea and read many of the real success stories out there. They will then take their entire marketing budget and throw it all into Pay Per Click advertising. Pay Per Click is actually a place that you can lose your money quickly if you do not know what you are doing. A lot of testing has to go into it and if you jump in head first you may lose your entire marketing budget for that month before you even know what happened. This happens all to often and then you actually have nothing left over to invest in other areas.

The problem here is that there was very little testing done on what is going to work. Just because one ecommerce store was successful with Pay Per Click does not mean that you will be. Pay Per Click specifically has a lot of relation to how competitive of a market you are in. If you sell a very unique product it could be very useful, but if you are selling t-shirts which is likely a very crowded market, you will have to invest a lot more money to get traffic through Pay Per Click.

To overcome this obstacle you have to be focus on testing the marketplace. You should invest a little bit into different places. Place a percentage of your marketing budget into direct advertising and the rest into a few different pay per click campaigns. Evaluate what is working and what is not working. Always keep an eye on the performance of the money you have invested. If you are not seeing any traffic from the place you are directly advertising, you should stop your advertising campaign there and perhaps even ask for a refund depending on what kind of Return On Investment (ROI) you received. The first few months may be a little bit bumpy, but in the end you can tweak it and you will eventually find something that will work for your ecommerce website.

Grow by leaps and bounds with software to skyrocket your business: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.