Turned out to be an interesting week with various clients wanting to sell online. Always exciting these new projects. Everything from selling direct, selling affiliate products to creating websites for drop shipping opportunities.
IMO, it's almost too easy these days to set up an e-commerce website. Some tools are free while others charge a minimum monthly rate depending on the number of products you plan to sell. I even talked to a company that was looking for a $35K minimum before they would even consider setting you up online. If you want the cadillac of shopping carts, this would be the way to go. Considering that companies are also spending anywhere from $100-$2000 a day advertising with Google AdWords for their various e-commerce and marketing campaigns. How much money does your company have to spend online?
An interesting find was Magento eCommerce Open Source. This initiative in exciting although it may have a few draw backs if you are considering getting an e-commerce site online. To name a few: your web server must support PHP5 (most hosting servers are still operating at the PHP 4.x flavor), initial page load times are apprehensive (10 secs. & up in some cases), the current version is still in development (production release not up yet - Jan/Feb 2008) and a few other items.
On the positive side, excellent CSS templating, product recommendation, great navigation, good support community growing by the day, and finally great potential for this venture. One to keep an eye one.
Back to selling online
Again, yes it is easy to create your own e-commerce website with tools like OsCommerce or even X-cart, what needs to be considered are:
- the time it takes to configure the shopping cart application
- the time it takes to input your products, images and descriptions
- setting up tax and shipping calculations
- setting up product groupings and categorization
- overall theme and template for the website
- plus more
On the marketing aspect, how about these questions:
- How are you going to drive traffic to your new website (links, search engine, PPC ad campaigns, AdWords, etc)
- Do you plan to blog about your website?
- Who will perform product reviews and research?
- How often will your prices change?
- Will you create sale partner channels online (resellers, affiliate programs)
- How will stock be maintained
Bottom line, what is your strategy for driving traffic to your website?What about drop shipping to your customers?
In regards to one client, they expressed they wanted to start a drop shipping business from home. Hey ... if their neighbor is selling garden equipment and supplies, well then why couldn't they are well? On top of that, why deal and worry about the hassles of maintaining inventory, dealing with shipping issues, RMAs and more.
One interesting publication that has been around for a while is a list of drop ship companies in the US that offer wholesale services.
Get more info on the drop shipping list here ... (look for the drop ship company list)
So that challenge always lies in how do you set up your structure, what products are you prepared to market and promote online and where do you think will be most profitable for you and your business.
Some things to ponder on a lovely weekend.
