The Time Is Great For An Ecommerce Start-Up (Strand Davis)
Aug 29, 2010
Ecommerce is booming. The economy may be weak, jobs may be down and workers unemployed, but ecommerce is doing quite well. So, what is ecommerce? Electronic commerce. For our purposes, the selling of goods and services and exchange of money over the Internet. Product sourcing is integral to this and especially important for the small, home business. If you currently use a website--whether your own or a simple blog on MySpace or Facebook--and you market anything at all, then you are doing ecommerce.
One of the keys to running a successful ecommerce site is the appropriate use of automation. That is, using software--and this doesn't have to be terribly complicated--to automate many of the repetitious, rote tasks that can take up so much of your time. For example, much of your communication with customers can be automated through the use of an email auto responder. Another example would be your shopping cart platform. The shopping cart is crucial as it automates almost every aspect of your customers' experience with your website and generates records of customer email, telephone, address, and financial transaction.
Although the shopping cart software can be very sophisticated, do not let that put you off. There is a large choice available on the market, and there are even excellent free, open source shopping cart options available. In fact, most reputable web hosting companies include a choice of shopping carts when you by hosting. The shopping carts integrate with your site at the click of a mouse. (You can, of course, hire a programmer to code your very own shopping cart from scratch, but that isn't necessary.) The shopping cart is your principal means of automating customer interaction with your site. It also allows you to catalog and track your goods, and records all financial transactions. The cart also allows you to automatically integrate a payment processer, such as PayPal, which handles the secure transaction of money.
I find it simply amazing that automation allows you to have a site up and running in a matter of hours. Would I actually recommend that you try to put up an ecommerce business up in a couple of hours? No, because a business generally needs to be planned out, but you can certainly have the shopping cart up and loaded with sample products in an afternoon. Once you reach that stage, you can begin initial testing of the site in order to evaluate the user experience. At this point you probably know which products you will sell and have a short list of product suppliers. When you test your site, you also want to be sure to test-evaluate-your suppliers to make certain they are trustworthy and can live up to their customer service claims.
Finding sources of product supply is often seen to be a major obstacle to going into business on the Internet. Actually, this is less a problem than a perception characteristic of newcomers to online business. Product sourcing for home business is important whether you selling products on eBay, in a flea market, from a dorm room, or out of your kitchen. I think that after you do a little business planning, questions of where to find products will start to answer themselves. One of the biggest product sourcing secrets is that manufacturers will generally tell you who their product distributors are.
Ideally, you want to get to the stage where you can let your site take care of itself. This generally happens after the site and hosting service have been thoroughly tested and found to be working without problem. Keep in mind the technical aspects of the site and set-up are not your business. The site is your tool or instrument, and once it is working, you can focus on more important business activities of branding yourself, advertising and promotion, customer contact, marketing, and product research.
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