6 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Ecommerce BusinessBY: Tim Donahue
1. Launching a product or service nobody really cares about. Often we get excited over a product or service idea before we learn whether others will care about it. Do your research and save yourself thousands of dollars and months of wasted effort. Start by discovering if others have already implemented your idea online. If so, what kind of web site traffic do they receive? (see Alexa.com for the answer to that question) Do they appear successful? How busy does their site seem? Next, talk to friends. Tell them to be completely honest with you, otherwise they will just tell you what they think you want to hear. Think of all the ways you can gauge interest in your idea and test as many as you can. You could go so far as to paying for some advertising and driving users to a site with nothing more than a logo and a "coming soon" message and possibly a "leave a message" form for users to leave you comments. Count the number of people who click to get to your site and ask them any burning questions you have to determine what they think about your "coming soon" website. 2. Overbuilding your first version site. If version #1 is successful, upgrade it to a bigger and better version #2. Start with a less expensive first version of your site and include just the basics your users will need to use the site. Find out if you can get traffic and build up clients or interest. If it starts to take off, budget your version #2 and get busy adding to the site until it meets all your users' needs. Often web entrepreneurs will invest everything they have in a fully tricked-out site before they know if people will have interest in the site. Don't make that mistake. Don't put all your eggs in one basket until you are sure users care about your site. 3, Hiring programmers who lack experience in ecommerce business sites. Web designers and programmers come in all shapes, sizes and levels of experience. Spend the time talking to any programmers or developers who you are enlisting to build your site and make sure they have developed sites of similar caliber before. Make sure they have a handful of nice looking sites under their belts already. Trust me on this one: the last thing you want to do is hire an under-qualified programmer or designer. 4. Building a site that you can't maintain inexpensively. There are always 10 ways to build a web site. Make sure your site is built so that you don't need to pay a programmer to make all the daily changes, edits and additions that will be required. Managing products, changing prices, editing pages and text copy are all things you should be able to do with little more than general website and computer knowledge if your site is built well. 5. Programming the site from scratch unless absolutely necessary. These days there are a lot of ecommerce web site hosting and building companies like Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, or Storefront.net. These companies have very full featured ecommerce store builders and they will help you complete your store if needed. Building a solution from scratch, that is similar to the ones they already have, could cost you 10-20 times what you'll pay these companies. The limitation is that these stores might not provide absolutely everything you want - and if you have a custom product or service, they might not be suitable for your needs. Strongly consider a "ready to use" solution if this is your first store and you are selling typical goods or services. 6. Blowing your entire marketing budget by overspending on Google advertising. After your store is built and ready for the world, you'll go to Google or Overture and invest in some advertising. If you are not careful, you could blow your entire months' budget in a couple days by overbidding for clicks. Spend the time to learn what you should be spending and what your return on investment will be if you make only 1 or 2 sales per hundred or so clicks. Good luck Hopefully these tips will save you time and money as you embark on your website journey. Remember, it will ALWAYS take you twice the time and energy you originally planned for and it will end up costing more too. With that in mind, good luck with your project. You can do it!
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