So you need an e-commerce site!
You may have convinced yourself or been convinced by someone else that you need an ecommerce site to ensure the prosperity of your business. But do you?
Developing an ecomerce site and maintaining that website consumes resources both in costs and your time in setting up and maintaining without guarantee of return.
Often the requirement to maintain, market and advertise and the ongoing development of a website is overlooked during the early planning and decision stages, however once the ecommerce site is live and operational it must attract customers and achieve on-line sales to be successful. With the number of on-line competitors for any number of products and services means that not only do you need to be competitive but you also must rank in the searches of your potential customers; usually involving a need for advertising by sponsored links. The catch 22 situation of the modern internet is that to gain visitors to your site costs money and is a continuous process. And once they visit your site you have to be competitive to achieve the sale; meaning your delivered price is competitive you have the goods in stock and that your users are able to navigate, place orders and make payment on your website in a secure and user friendly environment. Even if you attract a user to your ecommerce website if they do not feel confident buying from you, if your website is slow and sluggish to load pages, if your users find it hard to navigate to find goods, if your payment services are restrictive, then they will go elsewhere.
The big question often asked is “How much does it cost for a website like ...” . The answer is that the cost of setting up an ecommerce site is not the real issue it is how much will an ecommerce site make for you in profit. The sales it makes minus cost of goods, shipping and packaging, in-house staff and equipment costs of administration of the order, staff costs for maintaining website content, running cost of hosting the ecommerce site, payment services, ongoing development and maintenance costs, advertising costs and the prorata cost of the initial website set. And if the sum left over is an attractive positive number then you have a business, but to base decisions on the initial cost of setting up a website can be very premature.
Let me demonstrate with some actual examples.
Example 1.
A new small business decided to set up an ecommerce website as part of their high street shop. To save costs a mate set up their ecommerce site free of charge, so all the owners had to pay for was hosting the site, domain name, payment services and their time to add the content. After a year they had a total of zero sales from their website and no idea how many times their site had been visited or if it had generated any interest in their business.
As a result the owners had come to the conclusion that their business was not suited to the internet and glad they had not invested in developing and promoting their ecommerce online presence.
Their strategy at the start of their business both for their high street store and ecommerce website was to fit it out, set it up, fill up the shelves, open the doors and count the money as the customers come through the door.
To some degree this works for their high street shop as customers pass by, but not so for their ecommerce site. They had not made any budget or allocation of resources to build their on-line presence. They had no on-line marketing strategy. Their approach to their ecommerce website could be compared to opening a shop at the backcorner of an industrial park without even a sign above the door and expecting customers to find them off their own back.
Example 2.
A well established company with strong over the counter sales and some internet sales decided to downgrade their ecommerce website to a brochure style website. Sounds crazy but true. After a number of years of the company running their ecommerce website they decided that to become competitive on the internet they would need to change their style of business to being a box shifter; a choice they did not cherish after spending years building a strong local reputation for providing specialist advise and providing exceptional customer service.
The decision to close their ecommerce website might be well justified. As with any website it has to meet the primary reason why the website was establish, and for an ecommerce website that usually is about making sales and adding profit.
The choice of website type to maintain internet presence should not just be restricted to the options of brochure style or ecommerce website. There are other options to showcase their products and showcase their independent specialist advise and service.
As with any other businesses element, internet presence needs a strategy. The more a strategy can be tested and explored the more likely it is to be a success. Once the ecommerce site or other website type is launched it requires marketing, maintenance, development and refinement as a continuous process.
Links you may be interested in.
Wadiam. Elements of an ecommerce site
Wadiam Tips for starting a website