Make Your eCommerce Site Failure-Proof by Nowshade Kabir
Often companies while developing their eCommerce business from ground zero tend
to make similar mistakes. They don't have specific business objectives, don't
plan site promotion well ahead, and most importantly forget that eCommerce like
any other business requires to have some key advantages over the competitors.
Building an eCommerce business is not an easy job! The chances of making
mistakes in selecting the right solution for your specific business are quite
high as there are way too many options around. If you are not ready to spend
big money on your Internet venture in the beginning, there are online systems
that allow you to create and run eCommerce site for a small monthly payment.
Advantages of these solutions are that you can build a site for a very short
period of time and you don't need a major initial investment. However, these
solutions provide limited functionalities, which could be a big inconvenience.
Yahoo, Rusbiz, and Bigstep are examples of this type of systems.
Rusbiz
differs in a number of ways from others. It allows you to utilize its own
eCatalog - which uses a highly sophisticated and advanced classification system
- this helps you to sell your products and services from your site and through
Rusbiz marketplace simultaneously.
Another way of building an eCommerce site is to get an off-the-shelf solution.
This is good if you have some knowledge of programming or you have enough time
to learn technical aspects of these solutions.
The third option is to hire a developer to build your eCommerce site. The good
thing about this approach is that you can design your site reflecting your
company image and give your eShop unique look and feel. But the problem here is
that for every minor change on the website you will need to contact the
developer which makes site support pretty expensive.
The best but more expensive solution is to use site development companies. If
you are working with a professional company, depending on the size of your web
project a professional team of people will be taking care of it. Namely: your
account manager, lead programmer, web programmer, designer, content editor,
database programmer, web promotion specialist, and web administrator. If you
are serious about your eCommerce website and planning to hire a professional
company you should consider building your site with dynamic pages holding an
administrative capability. This means you will be able to edit contents of
these pages yourself without requiring any help from programmers.
If you already have an eCommerce site but sales are still low as the site is
not popular yet and few people visit your site, you probably need a web
promotion specialist. Search engine optimization has become the primary aspect
of your web promotional efforts. Studies show that over 80 percent visitors
come through the search engines. If you end up in the top three positions of a
search result your chance of getting visited increases dramatically.
Your eCommerce site is not just another sales channel! For many companies after
launching their online shop in a very short period it became the primary sales
channel. In most cases after opening an Internet shop the sales of the company
increase from 20 percent to 100 percent within first year.
Although, to have a professionally built high-quality eCommerce site seems like
an obvious choice, majority of the eshops available today are not even close to
the required standard. Apart from the functionalities of the website, its
design and usability, content, offered products, their variety and
specifications are also important factors.
Often vendors forget that it is always better to focus on a niche market rather
than trying to sell everything to everybody. It is easier to promote several
products rather than thousands of unrelated goods and services. Especially,
since key word marketing is becoming outrageously expensive. For example if you
are in cosmetic and perfume industry it is difficult to compete with big
merchants when you are not focused in a single type of product line such as
cosmetic masks. Keep in mind that you can become a major player in your
specific niche if you are one of pioneers in the field.
In many aspects of Internet shops, Amazon still sets the standard. You should
study this site carefully. Any eCommerce site can adopt wonderful ideas from
this industry behemoth. Look at how their search system works. Although, it is
a huge site with hundreds of thousands of products, you can find any product
you are interested in virtually immediately. The second important thing you
should notice is that every product carries enough information so that
customers can take immediate buying decision. Another thing is the simple but
attractive and clear design of the pages. The contents are also segmented and
presented thoughtfully.
Around 76 percent of all of your visitors are looking for more information on
the product or service they are planning to buy. Only 44 percent know what
exactly they are going to buy but there is no guarantee that they will buy from
your site. That's why it is very important to have enough content that can
influence positively on their buying decision.
To build an effective online shop you should try to avoid the following common
mistakes:
Building a site without professional help
If you are just experimenting than it is a different thing. But, if you are
serious about your prospective Internet business, you should hire professionals
to do this. Gone are the days, when you could build a site and people would
come any way! Now you have to build professional sites. A visitor takes less
than a second to decide subconsciously whether he is going to stay on this site
or move on. Design plays a key role on this. If your choice of colors and page
layout along with the pictures are not effective enough, you simply loose
clients not even knowing about it.
Forgetting about the functional mistakes that annoy visitors
These are wrong links, slow page loading, bad site navigation, unclear
marketing message, pop-ups, and a huge number of products on one page.
Trying to sell everything to everybody
Better concentrate on few vital products from your industry. You should become
the expert for the products and services that you sell.
Don't forget that like offline world, service is important on the Internet as
well. It should be simple for buyers to find products, check out and delivery
should be easy and prompt. After sale support should be of high standard.
If you would like to avoid failure, define your business objectives, figure out
the system functionalities needed to achieve these objectives, and add
necessary information requirement to system functionalities.
About the Author
Nowshade Kabir is the CEO of http://www.rusbiz.com,
a leading B2B portal with facilities like Marketplace, Aggregated Electronic
Catalog and Sales and Procurement Management, where buyers and sellers come
together to communicate, collaborate and conduct business. More information on
eProcurement and Sales are available on
http://www.rusbiz.com/deal_manage.html
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