Use this post, where essential points of consideration before starting an online store are considered. Follow these tips to stand out in the craze of starting online stores as there are several people who had the urge to enter this stream through ‘niche’ categories. Internet has got the whole global hemisphere much closer than any mind could possibly anticipate, which is why it is conceived by several people as easy money making medium.
However, in reality the picture is not as rosy as it seemingly appears to be. Especially in today’s heated competitive era, it is surely not enough to open a site online with some ‘things’ merely put up on it for sale. Today, the medium requires one to indulge in a professional research before running a business or creating a commercial site online. As such, with even more stringent rules required to be followed by all the online business managers, a good understanding pertaining to logistics and other such essential technicalities has become mandatory for professional running of the business online.
Several questions pertaining to the modes of starting online store have cropped up, which according to me are worth pondering upon.
After having experienced varied forms of success, from more than a dozen affiliate and niche sites in the last two years, I got to know certain principles which, according to me, are pertinent guidelines in the operation of business online. I had the opportunity to work on highly successful niche sites racking in six figures a month, as much as the pleasure of associating with affiliate no -maintenance sites earning a mere $2500 per month. As such, I even came across certain sites which could best be termed as absolute drain both – financially and in content. These sites were an absolute loss; however were good eye-openers in rendering me certain valuable online insights.
Starting Online Store
I want to share these insights with my readers wherein they could get cues on how to run ecommerce stores with success. Merely imbibing the ideologies of ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes wouldn’t be enough. Instead, it is preferable to learn and take into consideration certain pointers before starting out or commencing of your e-commerce venture. The 5 things requiring consideration and which according to me are the prerequisites to be followed before starting any venture online are:
1) Trimming your existing idea for creating a more specialized niche
With all the loads of business ideas that you believe in as the future chart busters of your online business, it is worth your time to render each of these ideas a well planned thought. There are many people who might be thinking on similar ideas of business and you certainly sideline the possibility of that happening.
In fact, tablet e-commerce store was the most recent business on which I was privileged to work on. Seemingly a great business to visualize, I had the opportunity of selling Kindles, iPads, and Galaxies alongside many other non-branded product ranges. Although an evolving market showing better promise in the world of technology, our approach on running of this business was rather incomplete as compared to the range which this tablet market encompasses.
Being competitive, the tablet market certainly brings along with it the saturation, due to which any business owner or new entrant in this arena ought to find modes to niche down. In our case, we failed to do so. We focused on multiple products, rather than simply focusing on marketing and selling only the viable niche brand amongst others available in the category. We could have followed the niche market to be led by the then new entrant- Fire. We could have spent all our constructive efforts in marketing Fire before its release, rather than following the extremely competitive market driven by iPad. In other words, following niche would have rendered us much more success.
Thus, if you niche down your idea, it would make better sense in driving bigger success for your business.
2) Test-run your idea even before you invest
Starting a brand new project online without evaluating the degree of interest that your venture could possibly attract, is not such a good idea. By not doing this, you pose a strong possibility of all your time and money going down the drain. Moreover, if you do not evaluate your offer converts before your business run, you might be committing a blunder. Starting a blog is a decent idea to understand your business value and anticipate the demand that your business could garner. For instance, Simon Stock made good use of WordPress blog before he started his now successful venture of surfboard racks. As such his highly successful E-Surfboard racks stands on the foundation of a good research and the interactive medium of WordPress blog and SEO technology. Simon Stock’s blog was much informative, which was appreciated by the target audience seeking information on racks and surfboarding products. Moreover, he placed Amazon affiliate links besides each information which was depicted in his blog as well as in the sidebar. In doing so, he generated significant traffic from prominent search engines ultimately rewarding him with good affiliate sales from Amazon. Further, taking aid of Google ads not only enabled him market products but also rendered him do a successful test-run for his surfboard business. Test-driving his business potential before actually running him not only branded his business identity in the eyes of many prominent manufacturers, but also enhanced his identity in making him an expert in the arena of surf boarding and its accessories. Today, E-Surfboard racks stands as one of the largest surfboard resellers on the World Wide Web.
In a nutshell, test-run the potential of your business before making a fully-fledged investment in it.
3) Manufacture your products on your own or outsource your manufacture optimally
Sharing your sale proceeds with any foreign manufacturing company can drive away significant amounts of your profits. Therefore, starting an online business which affords you the feasibility of manufacturing its products on your own would be optimal business tool.
Knowing your target audience and having procured expertise in your business, should render you the strength to market and manufacture the products on your own. Or as an alternative, sourcing its manufacture to developing nations such as Vietnam or China would sound just right for your business profitability. However, there are certain issues which could create lot of problems, especially if you desire to source your product manufacture to Asia or other developing nations. Firstly, the language barrier in these nations is a hindrance as for any business development communication plays an integral part. Moreover, lack of quality control measures and the methodologies used or the operational standards adopted in Asia could stand as major obstacles in the manufacture process. Which is why, wither you opt to manufacture products on your own or decide on partnering with some Asian giant to manage your manufacture on day to day basis.
In case, you want to choose an Asian company to run your manufacturing show in that country, it would be formidable for you to fly down there so as to check their business operation so as to ensure your investment profitability. Also, it would be optimal for you to ask for samples from such Asian entity so as to enable you the feasibility of your outsourcing operations. I would not like to commit the same mistake a friend of mine made. He neglected to gain insight of the company he chose for manufacturing his products. Due to which, he had to face a lot of quality control problems ultimately resulting him with several rejected goods as well as enormous losses due to the significant refunds he made to his customers.
The bottom-line is that having your products manufactured from any company in Asia won’t hurt if you carry it out with a well versed plan.
4) Imbibe the SEO technology for your business growth
The time required by any business owner to spend on ecommerce SEO errors is one of the most sought-after questions on any business blogs. Although you do not need to spend more time on tackling SEO issues, you ought to know certain parameters which could garner you better rankings and render a good outcome.
With the help of using efficient SEO technology to your advantage, you could make your E-commerce a whole new ball game. Social sharing is certainly critical for enhancing your business interactivity, however which SEO strategies to use is necessary to understand so as to refrain your business from creating bulk-up in your traffic. Bulked-up traffic could be a hindrance rather than an advantage. Some of the most successful niche sites I experienced or managed generated approximately 90% of their traffic from prominent search engines.
Using SEO technology rightly would definitely reward you whereas you can also turn-off many of your customers as well as advertisers such as Google if you happen to over-use it. Many webmasters can tell you their story of losing top rankings on Google by overdoing of recent Penguin update. Nothing wrong in overdoing SEO, but you would certainly piss-off a lot of people around you.
As a serious e-commerce site, your business could adopt high quality SEO which could comprise of the following:
- Creating Content which can be linked: Writing good quality content is prima facie for attracting broad appeal to your site or for your business growth. A good quality content should be informative enough so as to depict you as an expert in the arena of business your run online.
- Guest Post. Ghost-writing is certainly not such a bad thing to do. Likewise, Guest posting is something you should indulge in on your business blog. In doing so, you can give valuable information to your readers thus enabling value-additions to your business in literal sense.
- Participating in forums actively. If you become fairly active on related forums, you can easily build contacts as well as stay in touch with the latest trends in the niche segment of your business. Your quality posts and participation could get you quality links as well.
Adhering to the aforesaid pointers could do your business a whole world of good. Using SEO technology to your advantage is the best way you could stay as a front-runner in your business. As it is, all the yesteryear spamming links have been termed to be low level and which is why Google has completely shunned them by perfecting on its defense mechanism online. You too as a business owner ought to proceed by imparting advanced technology in your business.
5) Choosing a Communication platform
With many of the options your E-commerce stores could possibly afford, you have to take steps in adding appeal to your secured business website. Apart from keeping good patience for nurturing your site’s development, choosing of an optimal communication platform becomes more than critical. You have to study various cases to enlighten you with several problem areas and the mistakes created by the site developers or owners. On the other hand, you could gauge into the benefits of a WordPress to enhance the workability of your website.
Choosing your platform is crucial as migrating can give you several headaches. From my experience, shifting my case site to Shopify from its original OSCommerce was such a good idea. However, hire a professional to do the same for you rather than trying it out yourself. I would advise you to start using Shopify especially if you happen to be a beginner. Apart from being convenient, it is economical costing you as low as $30/month for its basic use.
There are many platforms which are more technically advanced as well as expensive, however your choice should correlate with what you intend to do with your business or how you want to run it.
Start with a research, which should render you an insight into marketing several products, as much as enlightening you with many more technicalities to be used in your business for betterment of its operations. The same goes if you want to run an affiliate site, however I would suggest that you maintain your use of WordPress. You could also try out some advanced plugins along with the WordPress usage in case you want to run an elaborated data feed marketing for your business products.
