Ecommerce is well known for being a low overhead route to the marketplace but that doesn’t mean that you could be complacent about your business model.
I’ll give you some ways in which you can attempt out your eCommerce business concept before you get in too heavily.
A common way to set up a good eCommerce site is, to begin with, your business idea, and talk to the design or web company who will provide you with a project suggestion to design and build your website. After built and paid for then you certainly begin to wrestle with solutions to generate traffic to your new internet site, given that the site is brand-new and has few (if any) inbound links you’ll soon always be setting up your Google AdWords bank account and paying for visitors with a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis.
Provided that you’ve just paid to create and build the site and are at this point paying for your traffic, this may not be a good time to find out that there merely isn’t the demand you assumed there would be for your products, or maybe that given the cost of site visitors and overheads you can’t make money on what you sell.
A few look at some ways of staying away from a situation like this. By taking a variety of steps using existing internet tools and services you will get some real-world research to discover a bit more about your potential marketplace, and then with a minimal investment decision test how receptive which market is to your proposed services price point.
Step 1. Where may be the search?
Your first step should be to take note of a list of the phrases you think potential customers would use to discover your products, once you have these types of phrases use some online keyword research tools to find out just how much traffic there is for each phrase, as well as the level of competition every single phrase has.
You need to remember the figures for looking for volume will vary dependent upon in which go for the figures and the software industry you are looking at. Google’s keyword study tool is geared towards AdWords and by default will give you stats based upon their ‘Broadmatch’ placing which includes similar searches, therefore by default gives unusually excessive traffic figures.
I prefer to work with Yahoo! or Wordtracker just for this kind of information as the stats is more realistic, if you do employ Google’s keyword tool then be sure to enclose the search term throughout speech marks as this can match the phrase straight.
Step 2. How many competitors exist?
You might find that you have a healthy lookup volume, but then if this is a good already well-mined market with many existing competitors you may be at an immediate disadvantage as the competitors will be trading with a recognized website and you will be starting from scrape.
There are 2 pieces of info we will need for each term to give us a complete image of the situation. One is the number of direct competitors who are currently in Google’s index for the phrases we are interested in plus the next is a keywords efficiency index (KEI) which mixes search volume with opponents’ volume to derive a catalog figure which highlights possibly each phrase in our record.
Step 3. Get to grips while using competition
Not all search phrases are manufactured equally as some should have more sites competing for the coffee lover than others.
Imagine you will have a search phrase in your list using 100 searches per month, will you be competing with 10 websites for that traffic or twelve, 000, 000 other sites? Through the use of an effectiveness index, you will observe at a glance where there are gaps from the competition and if you decide to try with your new eCommerce website you can use this information to help optimize your website for these phrases.
When I decided I wanted to find the number of competing sites for the search phrase, do a search on Google using the search phrase in speech scars and take a look at the “Results 1 to 10 of approximately xxx” the xxx number is the number of websites which are in Google’s index for the exact phrase.
The KEI equation is searched by searches/competition sama dengan effectiveness for example 100 by 100 / 10 sama dengan 1000 KEI which is an excellent opportunity as ultimately you might have 100 searches with just 10 direct competitors for the phrase. Whereas 100 by 100 / 10, 000, 000 = 0. 001 KEI which is dreadful!
Once you learn a bit about search engine optimization you are going to recognize these techniques because they are often used in the keyphrase selection when optimizing an existing internet site, but given that this exploration can easily be completed before almost any website has been built reasonably to employ these techniques to purchase a feel for the nature with the opportunity presented online for ones particular business idea first.
Step 4. Test your business strategy with PPC
This technique involves more of an investment but incentives you with some more perceptible results.
You will need to set up a number of web pages for your key solutions with a click-to-purchase option that sends you an email. Inform your prospective customers that you are out of stock and enquire if they would like to be informed if the product is back in.
Now create a PPC account together with Google and spend several hundred pounds/dollars on generating traffic to the page, you’ll shortly get a feel for the associated traffic and the kind of conversion rate you’d be starting with.
Step 5. Prototype your eCommerce site with SaaS
These days there is numerous low-overhead software as a service (SaaS) web software for eCommerce that are all set to use with nothing more than a web-based sign-up.
This kind of service uses existing functionality that extends on a web server and has not any design/build overhead so you can easily start trading and paying for the service.
Pick the e-commerce service provider that you like the appearance of, upload your products and prepare it with a low-cost payment system including PayPal and off planning.
If you did the saying research you’ll also have a start to set up an AdWords profile and a strong lead for the phrases you should include in your actually site content to attract search-targeted visitors.
Essentially in this last move, we are setting up a fully operating eCommerce website, however even as we are only paying for the services monthly and there is no design/build overhead we can quickly be able to grips with the nature of the business and see if it provides legs or not without sacrificing our capital, which if items go well we are then to be able to spend on improving an internet commerce site we know works as opposed to simply gambling on an expectation.
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