February 9th
2010
eCommerce Checklist Are You Ready to Start Selling Online?
Written by norman, posted in Ecommerce | 4 Comments »
If you are thinking about selling your product online there are a few things you will need to think about before and during the process of setting up your eCommerce Website. Prepare for eCommerce.
This article serves as a very simple introductory guide to help you determine are you ready to build a secure and customer-friendly ecommerce website. This is essential to providing your future customers with an informative, easy-to-shop, and safe online web store.
Considerations for Selling Online
Before you start there are many questions to be realistically and honestly answered. Failing to do any of the following can have serious implications in the future success of your online store.
- Do you have experience of selling products through mail order?
- Have you the skills and capacity to fulfil sales orders?
- How will you manage sales orders? You? An office assistant? Or outsourced via 3PL services (such as Online Distribution)?
- How easy is it for you to deliver products to your customers?
- Have you considered the weight and cost of shipping?
- Can you ship using standard sized packaging?
- Are your products perishable? - Are your goods available worldwide and have you considered;
- Currency conversion?
- Import /export regulations?
- Additional shipping costs or complex shipping rules? - Do your products have variations or options, such as size or colour etc?
- How easy is it for customers to make a buying decision based on only text and images where they can’t touch, taste or smell your products?
- Will customers really buy your product online? (I’m serious – you must realistically consider the implications of trying to sell an item which people will only buy if they can touch it).
- Can you handle customer complaints and returns?
- Do you have staff to answer customer questions in real time?
- To what extent do you expect repeat customers? Will you your shopping cart require an “Account” feature for your customers?
If you can answer all of the about questions and feel you can meet the challenge of running an effective online store then congratulations! The effort of establishing and managing your online store is not to be underestimated – but the reward (and pay-off) can be well worth it.
Budget Considerations
You must determine what you are willing to spend for the options and functionality you need from your shopping cart. What about professional photography and content creation (copy-writing) who will supply this?
Have you considered how you will promote your online store? How will customers find out about you? If you are serious about building an online store which is effective and is an investment you will need to market and promote it.
You will need to budget for search engine optimisation, link building and Google AdWords.
Blogging is a proven effective method to build organic ranking in Google. If you are not a writer have you considered contracting a copywriter for professional blogging?
Don’t overlook the importance of ‘off-line’ advertising channels such as magazine, newspapers, television and radio etc.
A rule of thumb is you will need to budget at least 30% of your investment to build your eCommerce store for ongoing marketing.
Awesome blog guys,
Educating the customers before they get to you, great idea and it really does show that you’re experts in this field. Good to see your back on the blogging path Norm!! ready the follow on to this also, two good pieces that will very definately help your customers prep for their e commerce initiative
You can make success happen with internet marketing, but contrary to what many people believe, success does not come like magic overnight. You must to work your way to achieve it.
I’ve found that blogging really does bring in traffic. I still yet have to drive traffic to an online cart from a blog though.
We have recently used blogging and twitter on an eCommerce project to drive sales with great success.
In this case it was for http://www.waitaha.org where one aspect of the site is online sales of books. Clearly the books have limited appeal and usual SEO efforts. A Google search for Waitaha shows they already feature on the first page of search results – however this search phrase has a very limited appeal to a very small audience group (who would already be aware of the organisation).. We needed to discover a wider range topics and issues so Waitaha could start to create news, articles, and stories (blog posts) to engage a much bigger audience group.
The driving purpose is to build a community where people might then take the next step to purchase the books. There is much anecdotal evidence to support this. Take Royal Family memorabilia for example..
Once you have a website where you are regularly publishing articles and posts, and your site members are reading, commenting and discussing amongst themselves, you have build a community where regular visitors feel they have a stake in the ownership, they find a place where they identify with your values and are heard.
Our belief is the books will naturally sell as a result of more people discovering Waitaha and feeling a part of it – community driving sales – and it worked for Waitaha!
Blogging is meant to be relaxed and informal. In the world of web marketing (and indeed blogging), it is an advantage if you can communicate on the same level as your audience – build a relationship with them, become someone they can identify with by discussing challenges you face which they may relate to.
We can help you by researching search engine requests for a range of phrases and ranking how many times these are searched for monthly. This helps us to identify the topics which may be of importance to your target audience. Contact Meta Solutions if you would like to find out the ranges of solutions we offer to drive visitors and sales to your website.