6 Steps To Success In Establishing A Successful Ecommerce Site
By Tim Donahue, Founder BigStockPhoto.com and CoolHomepages.com

1. Find a product or service that the market wants.
It goes without saying that you will need to settle on a product or service that the marketplace wants. This step can take anywhere from days to years sometimes. Any idea you have should be something you are still very excited about several months after you first conceived of it.

If possible, settle on a low-cost product or service that doesn't involve stocking a warehouse full of products, paying high rents or hiring a large staff of employees on day one. For example: Selling software is cheap, once you build the software. Selling clothing is expensive because you have to stock a full range of colors, sizes and styles and have them already purchased and ready to ship.

2. Plan it thoroughly.
Think the whole plan through from beginning to end. Plan your costs to get to market and then budget for 12 months afterward. Develop an accurate spreadsheet that details all your costs and plan conservatively, because it always takes twice as long as you think to get to market. You'll see what I mean about this annoying, but remarkably accurate, law. Have others entered this market and failed? Is anyone doing well in your market? What are your monthly costs and revenues likely to be in 6-12 months if things don't take off like a rocket?

Most businesses start a little slow and build momentum. After you gain momentum have a plan for how to deal with what we call a "success catastrophe"... a truly luxurious problem to have!

3. Research it.
Know your competitors. There is always room for a handful of suppliers in any market but you need to know where you will fit. Do not enter an overly crowded marketplace if you can help it� it's much harder for a new business to get noticed when there is already a lot of "noise" in your space.

Take every assumption you have about your new business and stick them each on a wall. Then go one at a time through each assumption � challenging it and re-considering it critically and thoroughly as though you will be paying the bills for this new investment. (Yes, I know... that is the point I�m making.)

4. Build it.
Depending on the complexity of delivering your product or service, you may need to hire someone that is more expert than you in managing and building your site. If you are selling goods with a Yahoo-style ecommerce store, it is normally not necessary - you can do that yourself with proper planning and research. But if you are building a downloadable music store or planning to stream movies into the homes of your customers you will need some people who really understand the pitfalls and solutions that come with building a complex service like that.

5. Give it a high gloss look.
Your web site design needs to look professional. Without a clean, professional look, your customers won't trust you or your site. Spell check everything. Hire a good web designer with a handful or more of really slick looking sites under their belt.

You can also start with a high-gloss website design template instead of paying a web designer hundreds or thousands of dollars to create it from scratch. High-end web templates are better looking than anything your average web designer is capable of crafting from scratch. See CoolHomepages.com Web Template Store ( http://www.coolhomepages.com/store/ ) for hundreds of high-end designs priced at just $39 each.

Incorporate attractive photos into your site. These days sites like BigStockPhoto.com ( http:/www.BigStockPhoto.com ) provide you with a choice of a million beautiful images for as low as $1.00 each. Sprinkle your site with at least one photo per page � users get bored of long, text-only pages. You can also use images of customer support personnel, assembly lines, computer servers, etc. to suggest to your users that you are a somewhat more mature company than you really are.

6. Drive Traffic.
Once it is built, you have an empty store unless you drive traffic. The fastest and easiest method for driving traffic to your site, is to use Google's pay-for-click advertising. Depending on your needs, this service can drive thousands of users to your site the first day. However, first you need to learn the ins and outs of maximizing your spending with Google or any other pay-for-click advertiser. There are good books and website manuals that cover this. Do not spend so much per click that you waste your marketing budget immediately. Remember that, on average, only about 2% of the people who click on your ad will end up buying from you. A good rule of thumb is between 10 cents and 40 cents per click. Try starting in that range and see what happens.

Forging partnerships with other sites that have like-minded customers works fantastically -- and costs you nothing. If you are selling artwork, locate a busy site that sells frames. Trade links. Look into starting an Affiliate Program so that partners who drive sales to your site can earn a percentage of each sale they send you.

Set aside a large chunk of time to read up on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is a huge and complicated subject, but a worthwhile investment of time. A few weeks of nightly reading, should provide you with the proper knowledge to make informed decisions about how to best position your site to be noticed and ranked highly by the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Be wary of anyone who tells you they can get you top Google rankings � generally there are a lot of sharks out there who use tricks to prove they�ve helped you � when in fact the search terms they get for your site are not heavily searched and don�t drive much traffic.

Last words:
Most people who start an ecommerce business for the first time skip steps 2 and 3. Don�t make this mistake � be sure to plan well and research your product, the market and what it takes to build a successful ecommerce site.

6 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Ecommerce Business

1. Launching a product or service nobody really cares about.
Often we get excited over a product or service idea before we learn whether others will care about it. Do your research and save yourself thousands of dollars and months of wasted effort. Start by discovering if others have already implemented your idea online. If so, what kind of web site traffic do they receive? (see Alexa.com for the answer to that question) Do they appear successful? How busy does their site seem?

Next, talk to friends. Tell them to be completely honest with you, otherwise they will just tell you what they think you want to hear. Think of all the ways you can gauge interest in your idea and test as many as you can. You could go so far as to paying for some advertising and driving users to a site with nothing more than a logo and a "coming soon" message and possibly a "leave a message" form for users to leave you comments. Count the number of people who click to get to your site and ask them any burning questions you have to determine what they think about your "coming soon" website.

2. Overbuilding your first version site. If version #1 is successful, upgrade it to a bigger and better version #2.
Start with a less expensive first version of your site and include just the basics your users will need to use the site. Find out if you can get traffic and build up clients or interest. If it starts to take off, budget your version #2 and get busy adding to the site until it meets all your users' needs.

Often web entrepreneurs will invest everything they have in a fully tricked-out site before they know if people will have interest in the site. Don't make that mistake. Don't put all your eggs in one basket until you are sure users care about your site.

3, Hiring programmers who lack experience in ecommerce business sites.
Web designers and programmers come in all shapes, sizes and levels of experience. Spend the time talking to any programmers or developers who you are enlisting to build your site and make sure they have developed sites of similar caliber before. Make sure they have a handful of nice looking sites under their belts already. Trust me on this one: the last thing you want to do is hire an under-qualified programmer or designer.

4. Building a site that you can't maintain inexpensively.
There are always 10 ways to build a web site. Make sure your site is built so that you don't need to pay a programmer to make all the daily changes, edits and additions that will be required. Managing products, changing prices, editing pages and text copy are all things you should be able to do with little more than general website and computer knowledge if your site is built well.

5. Programming the site from scratch unless absolutely necessary.
These days there are a lot of ecommerce web site hosting and building companies like Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, or Storefront.net. These companies have very full featured ecommerce store builders and they will help you complete your store if needed. Building a solution from scratch, that is similar to the ones they already have, could cost you 10-20 times what you'll pay these companies.

The limitation is that these stores might not provide absolutely everything you want - and if you have a custom product or service, they might not be suitable for your needs. Strongly consider a "ready to use" solution if this is your first store and you are selling typical goods or services.

6. Blowing your entire marketing budget by overspending on Google advertising.
After your store is built and ready for the world, you'll go to Google or Overture and invest in some advertising. If you are not careful, you could blow your entire months' budget in a couple days by overbidding for clicks. Spend the time to learn what you should be spending and what your return on investment will be if you make only 1 or 2 sales per hundred or so clicks.

Good luck
Hopefully these tips will save you time and money as you embark on your website journey. Remember, it will ALWAYS take you twice the time and energy you originally planned for and it will end up costing more too. With that in mind, good luck with your project. You can do it!


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Tim Donahue is the Founder of BigStockPhoto.com and CoolHomepages.com. BigStockPhoto is a leading provider of low-cost, royalty-free stock images. CoolHomepages is the largest online gallery of the best designed internet sites. Please direct inquiries to suzie@bigstockphoto.com.