e-commerce

Back in the early days, selling online was as easy as putting a web page with your product description, an image and an order form that people could print out and either fax it or mail it to you. This was great if you only had just a few products to show on your site. Manually managing a handful of products is not much of a burden. However, once inventories grows and if you have a couple of hundred (if not thousands) of products, then managing an online store is better done with a database driven site.

Now a days, you have many technology options, services and various tools to choose from. The tools, services and technology you would need depend on your skill level, your online selling experience and your resources. In a nutshell here is what you would need in three very simplistic areas:

1. Product presentation
2. Order taking and transaction system
3. Order fulfillment

If you are new to e-commerce, we recomend starting with market research and creating a business plan. Just because you put your products online does not mean there is a market for them. Also, just because your products are online does not mean that you are going to get customers.

Assuming that there is a market for your products, you must generate traffic to your site. Think of this as promoting your products. It works just the same as a brick-and-mortar store, you must adversite to get customers to your store. How do you advertise and promote your site online? Well, there are several techniques at your dispossal, some are free and some will have a cost associated with them. Over the years, we have determined that a successful store will utilize a combination of marketing methods.

If you are just starting out and want to test the waters yourself, then you must at least develop the nescessary skills to put together your product presentation. You would need to be able to get product pictures and edit them for web use. You will also need to write product descriptions or sales copy.

Before you spend a lot of money developing an in-house full blown e-commerce site, you may want to explore some services that facilitate online selling such as eBay, Yahoo Shopping and Amazon Stores to name a few. The advantages of these services is that they are stablished shopping portals with lots of potential customers visiting the portals every day. Although these services are not free, they come with a team of engineers that keep the portal running and contineously add new features. The disadvantage of these shopping portals is that you must adhere to their site presentation templates and the cost of sales associated with them.

Once you determine that there is a market for your products and your sales volume trends upward, then you may want to weigh the cost of sales associated with the shopping portals vs. hosting your own branded e-commerce site. You will have more freedom with your own e-commerse site in regards to presentation and features. You will not be restricted to the shopping portal service templates, but instead you can create your own layouts and offer your own site features. Another benefit is that you can also reduce your cost of sales and deliver a customized shopping experience to your customers.

A custom e-commerce site does not come without a cost. Once you decide to branch off on your own, you will have to assume the responsibilities of managing the site and develop any features you want for it. Luckily, there are several options at your disposal; before you hire a development team to develop a custom solution from scratch to your specifications, you can start out with an open source solutions to get you started at a lower cost. At Tambo.com, we utilize open source shopping cart solutions that can be customized to minimize delepment time and cost.

In addition to the system that runs an e-commerce site or shopping cart, you would need to consider wheather you want to manage the site content and marketing, or if you would like to outsource it. Choosing a content and marketing management partner should not be taken lightly. You will want a company with experience in SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) to drive traffic to your site. However traffic without sales, in our opinion, means nonthing. You will want a partner with Analytics experience to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Analytics allow us to measure where traffic is coming from and from what marketing effort. This is a crucial element for a successful e-commerce venture. Marketing without measurement is like throwing a dart onto the the dart board blind folded and hopping that you will get a bulls eye. Careful measurement of your traffic and correlating that traffic to a marketing effort will help you make the right decisions how to adjust and hone your marketing efforts and expenditures so that it lines up with your ROI (return on investment) goals.

For additional information about what we can do for you in the area of e-commerce please contact us for a free consultation. We will be more than happy to schedule a time to answer any questions you may have.