e-Commerce

The term e-commerce is used generally for online stores, selling products online.

E-commerce is a whole different way of doing business than a retail store. The e-commerce web site can have an international audience of millions of people. Running a e-commerce web site can often be done out of the garage or guest bedroom when starting up, which means it fairly easy to get started.

E-commerce = easy money?

The reality is that 95% of e-commerce start-ups never make a penny. Why? Due to the easy entrance into the market lots of newbies with no skills try it out. Lots of merchants forget to implement a effective strategy to make real money.

How do you get real visitors to the web site to buy the products? Without effective search engine optimization most start-up e-commerce stores will barely get any sales, advertising is often to expensive.

What is needed for successful e-commerce?

• Product: great niche, not too many competitors
• Knowledge of web design, internet marketing- or do you want to pay external consultant/ designers?
• Management/ business skills: prioritize what is most important to be successful, money to re-invest?

Examples of successful e-commerce web sites selling high-end designer clothes:

www.comomilano.com

Can advertising online be successful?

PPC advertising and other ways of Internet marketing are not always cost effective. In the early years of e-commerce (2000-2005) PPC advertising was significant more effective as cost was a fraction and competition was minimal.

Nowadays competition is fierce. Aggressive competitors can ruin it for everybody including themselves. Paying $2- $8 a click for a reasonable lead is often not cost effective when 25 might be generated form this. It is not a rocket science to calculate the break-even point for PPC advertising.

Bottlenecks:

• Uneducated and even stupid competitors might throw away their money on high PAY-PER-CLICK advertising, which also means that you will have less exposure when you are paying less per click, which means less sales.
• Pay-per-click rates can vary significantly as competitors change their bids.
• The Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing software can be fuzzy and can make you advertise to generic, which might be not effective at all.
• Credit card Fraud: depending on your business/product, fraudulent orders might be a problem. Do not expect that the merchant always takes care of this. Generally speaking you always loose. After really understanding credit card processing and fraud filters this can be minimized to a very low level.

Having very "attractive" ads mean more clicks but does that also more conversion? I suggest to keep it very specific: specific key words, specific region, specific media (do people buy when browsing on their phone?)

Email Newsletters to get existing customer back to the website.

Get more out of your website: Extensive one-on-one training/ consulting to improve your web site.