subject: The Five Step Plan Which Makes E-commerce Child's Play [print this page] Don't be afraid to start in e-commerce. This will hep you make some initial decisions.
1. Find a Niche. Of course there's a lot more to it than just finding something to sell. You need to test the size and scope of the market, look at the keywords available, assess the competition and decide whether you can make any headway against them.
Not being on the front page of a google search can be very like being invisible online. Look at the probable profit to be made on each sale and try to find a niche where there will be repeat business, then you can make full use of the internet's amazing ability to connect people and gather information.
The rule of thumb is that the higher the price the lower the conversion rate, but this may not be the case for every niche. Although many people do look for bargains when shopping online, price is not always the deciding factor.
Once you are making sales you will be able to boost your income faster if you are selling items in the medium to high price range than if your product price is very low.
2. Find a supplier. The simplest type of e-commerce uses drop shipping because this means there is no need for any up front outlay on inventory. It's important to get your information about drop ship suppliers from a reputable source and when signing up be sure to ask important questions.
Will your customer receive goods which appear to come from you, or from the actual supplier? What sort of shipping is possible and at what rate? Does the drop ship supplier handle returns.
3. Build a website. There are many different types of website available for use as an e-commerce store. Many charge a monthly fee for service with additional fees for certain features.
You can build these stores yourself, or have others build them for you. Some charge according to the bandwidth they provide and others limit the number of items you can sell in your web store.
The cost of running your store month by month, plus the cost of maintaining a merchant account is a constant overhead for your business, but is usually far lower than, for example, a brick and mortar store.
In addition to webstore and merchant account costs you may also want to have bulk email/newsletter software and tools to help you track the response to your advertising, Internet trust seals, an SSL certificate, a toll free telephone number for your store (and possibly a virtual assistant to answer it) and of course there is the yearly renewal of your domain name.
When building the website remember that every page is separate, you have no way of knowing which page a visitor will arrive on. Don't fall into the trap of viewing the home page as important and the rest as minor. All pages are equally important, product pages, more so.
4. Promote the website. The biggest mistake made by most Internet store owners is a result of the belief that once the store is up and running it will attract it's own traffic. It is quite possible for your new webstore to remain on the Internet for years and never be seen.
You must make sure the site is indexed by search engines and once that happens you need to promote it, make it visible by writing about it and linking to it.
From where? From everywhere. If you don't bring in traffic you can't make sales.
5. Repeat. Few Internet fortunes are made on a single product. Fortunately, the drop shipping model makes it perfectly feasible to develop one store to a certain point and then open another, possibly in a different niche or market while keeping the first going.
With no up front inventory costs and no problems around storing inventory there's no reason not to take your new found knowledge of e-commerce and repeat the process to make even higher profits.
by: Kirsty Hale
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