Starting an eCommerce business is becoming easier by the day. More business owners are looking to expand their online efforts to include eCommerce and build a true online business. Unfortunately, this presents a large set of challenges, not least of which is the threat of larger, better funded competitors online.

Thankfully, the key to successful eCommerce isn’t complicated. By planning ahead and considering your goals and your audience you will greatly increase your chances of success. Here’s three simple ways to make your online shop stand out from the crowd.

Step 1) Focus on Your Best Products

Selling your entire inventory online is unnecessary and often a mistake. Instead, sell a small sub-set of your products that you think may sell well online. For each product, provide a high level of detail describing the product. Follow up with some solid advice on how to choose the correct product for you, or provide expertise and background on the origins of the product.

This way, instead of building an impersonal warehouse-style shop online, you’re providing more of a boutique, - a personal experience that actually engages the customer and answers more of their questions than other shops do. Think of a supermarket versus a boutique fashion store - one simply fulfills their function, the other assists you to make the right buying choice with passion, knowledge and a personal connection.

Make a conscious decision to be the boutique; supermarket-style online stores are everywhere. Most products can already be found online, but there’s often a lack of detail and advice regarding the product. This can become an important and trust-building point of differentiation between you and your competitors.

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Two-thirds of 831 respondents report that they plan to increase their use of both email marketing and social media in 2010; 54.2% surveyed won’t do online banner advertising in 2010

SAN FRANCISCO, November 17, 2009 — A leading provider of self-service email marketing, online surveys and direct mail solutions for small businesses, today releases the results of a survey of 831 small businesses of under 500 employees, which showed that 74.1% of respondents plan to increase their use email marketing and 68.3% will increase their use of social media in 2010.

The survey reveals that small businesses intend to continue their marketing spend in the email marketing channel. Only 3.8% of respondents do not plan to use email marketing in 2010, which indicates that the channel continues to demonstrate value to small businesses.
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Here are some simple points where marketing and sales can connect to achieve some quick wins. Of course it's still important for them to collaborate on longer term strategies which is the subject of a future blog post.

Detailed Email Marketing Reports

You're on track for sending out that 'special deals' newsletter on the 2nd Monday of every month to your clients and prospects but have you been measuring attention to the performance of your email marketing?

I'm not just talking about basic statistics like open rates and number of recipients. You should be diving in to find out:


    *     who opened your newsletter,

    *     what links they've clicked on

    *     what actions they've made on your site as a result.


Utilize this information by exporting the data and building lists of your most highly engaged readers to pass on to the Sales team for chasing up. You're adding an immense amount of value by presenting the sales team directly with the 'low-hanging fruit' that you KNOW have been reading and clicking your emails rather than making them call all recipients in the hope they've engaged.

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When you are building an eCommerce site there are so many things to think about.  You need a website, a customer database, credit card processing, marketing, Inventory management, reporting, and the list goes on. Sometimes there are just too many things to think about. That's why it's good to have a list.  Building a "to do" list and checking it off is the best way I know how to get through the multitude of tasks when starting a new venture like an ecommerce site.

For the purpose of this article we are going to focus on the Six Page Views of a typical ecommerce shopping cart. This list is a great check list for designers and integrators looking to set up an ecommerce site.  Each one of the six views is equally important in that each page view is one stage in the conversion path or sales funnel.  If any one of the six page views is broken then you have a problem and the orders will slow or worse stop.

>> Catalog View

The catalog view is the main entrance to most shopping carts.  This is where the main categories of products,the main classifications or items being sold.  We need to be smart in our classifications in the Catalog View.  This is where your online visitors are going to start their journey browsing your product offerings. 
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When you are setting up an online store you should consider in which currency you charge your customers. Either you accept only one currency or you offer your customers the opportunity to choose from different currencies. In this article some of the of the Pros and Cons of single and multi-currency stores are discussed.

Single-currency Store

• Allow anyone around the world to purchase - but in your currency.
• The customer's bank takes care of the currency conversion.
• Are easy to set up - one payment gateway, one set of prices, one set of shipping options.

Here's an example: You set up your store on a xyz.com site. Every visitor on that URL will be shown US product prices, US shipping options, US tax codes an so on. The visitors will be charged in US dollars via the payment gateway that is assigned to the USA.

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About 4 years ago, we were looking into starting a new business, online. As an accomplished businessman we started thinking about what we were going to need to be successful. A website was the obvious starting point. It had to be easy enough to add and change content - because websites live or die on the basis of fresh, useful content.

Next - we needed a way to manage leads and customers. You need to be able to react quickly to new leads and follow up on old ones. Then, marketing. Email marketing to be precise. A permission based list of people who are receptive to hear your message is priceless. And don't forget - online shopping. Selling online is the most important function we needed to do.  We wanted to process orders 24 hours a day.

That's a basic list. There's more, like community forums, affiliate programs, blogs and so forth. But let's keep it simple, ok?

So, checklist in hand (we are pretty organized kinda guys) we went looking for something to do all this and we found Content Management Systems, and Customer Relationship Management systems, and Shopping carts, and Email Marketing Solutions, and Site Analytics. So we signed up to all these services and downloaded what we needed to download.

OK great, we thought, let's get started!....Or not.

We got frustrated. Because running any business is a little like racing a car. You've got to push hard, stay ahead of the pack and be smart about how you race. But our  problem wasn't that we couldn't race. We were wasting our time trying to build the nice, fast car.

The other problem was we found ourselves spending a lot of time trying to keep all his separate systems in sync. And more than once we forgot one of the five or six log in details we were supposed to remember.

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Ever wonder if the basics from grade school would come in handy in your business life?

Getting your website ranked best in internet search results uses all of that knowledge. Search engine results are based on those science, math and English courses. Internet technology is the science that allows "spiders" to comb the "web" for data applicable to a search inquiry. Search engines have unique mathematical algorithms that formulate your website's relevance to that inquiry. Finally, your English lesson is where writing the copy on your website can help tie all of that together for best results. In the following, you will get valuable tips on creating titles, copywriting advice, using graphics, and keywords to better place your website in search rankings.

1. Do Some Research

Do you know where your website ranks in search results for different key words or phrases compared to your competition? Check various search engines such as google.com, ask.com, msn.com, and yahoo.com. Take a look at your website to check how the homepage relates to a consumers search. Look at your competition and how they write their website content. Are they being found? Search for products or services that you're interested in and click those who rank high in the search results. Can you tell why?
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Step One: Make full use of your permission-based email software package. BigTurns has a ton of advanced features for handling your campaigns. It makes it easy to create and send your newsletters. It will manage subscriptions and bounced messages for you. It automates a lot of the grunt work involved in an email marketing campaign.

Step Two: You'll have to decide what type of campaign you want to run and how frequently you want to send your messages. I recommend sending at least a monthly newsletter. Of course, if you sell more than one product, it might be a good idea to send multiple messages. Just be sure to keep your broadcast times consistent. You may consider sending promotional messages offering a discount or coupon for your product.

Step Three: Add a sign-up form to your website. The sign-up form lets you collect a group of addresses for your sending lists. We've found that it's generally safe to import anyone who did business with you in the last year or so. Just make sure to send content relevant to what they purchased. (Always provide value!)

Step Four: Create an effective email template. A lot of email software programs include HTML templates. BigTurns actually comes with over 300 professionally designed templates. You can also create one in-house or use a graphic-design service.
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Why "All-In-One" Matters

Last weekend I moved into a new house.

In the usual flurry of last minute craziness, I managed to pack my stuff and get my furniture to the new house. Now I've got a list of things to do: 

• connect the electricity
• connect the phone
• connect the gas
• connect the internet (most important, of course)
• change address with my bank
• change addresses for magazine subscriptions
• change drivers license address
• change health insurance address

The list goes on for about a page!

What if I could do it all in one step?

If instead of calling 20 different numbers I could just call one? Imagine the time it would save!

Now maybe such a service exists, I'm not sure. But since I don't move every week this isn't a problem I really urgently need solved.

I do, however, need to manage my ecommerce business on a daily basis. And unfortunately managing an online business these days requires logging in to many different tools and interacting with them all on a daily basis. So it's a lot like when you move house - but you have to do it all the time!
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How to decide between blogging and a newsletter

Last night I was sorting all of my important paperwork: Car insurance, health insurance, credit card information, work stuff, tax information, and you get the idea. Then I put them into folders to organize. Let's do the same with your content and then decide where to include this content (Blog, Newsletter, or Both). 

1. Education - BOTH
2. Business ideas for feedback - NEWSLETTER
3. Showcase before and after photos - NEWSLETTER
4. FAQS - NEWSLETTER
5. Common Concerns - BOTH
6. Tips - BOTH
7. Coupons and Discounts and Specials - NEWSLETTER
8. Products - BOTH

There are a few caveats, so lets take a look at them.

Education:

You should never pass up an opportunity to educate. Customers like being in the know and they appreciate you keeping them up to date.
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