Information about E-Commerce and Selling Online
In order to successfully create, setup, and run an online shop you will need various things, as well as time, money, and people to build it into what you require.
The way to look at this, is no different to a physical shop. You need someone to create the shop (inside and out), People to work in the shop, and someone to manager its processes and other essentials such as sales and marketing.
Something’s which should be focused on quite early however include:
- A set of products, that unless you want to manually enter them, formatted preferably as a .CSV file.
- A method to ship your customers products back to them, FedEx have a mission statement to ‘get any product anywhere’ - so perhaps that is a good place to start!
- An E-commerce application, either bespoke, off-the-shelf, or Open Source.
- Someone slightly, Technical to administrate your new e-shop and its products and customers.
- Someone very Technical, to analyse, design, and development you new e-shop, and its customers and market position.
- An Internet Marketing strategy, which obviously includes AdWords and organic S.E.O but also much more than just this.
The hardest part of setting up any e-shop or e-commerce, is working out how, why, where and to who - to sell you products to. This initial analysis is no different to a physical business, except the how part above.
1: Automated Product Uploads (into your e-store)
Most people understand that organic visitors from google is based upon the number of pages in Google’s index, as well as 99.8 other things.
Therefore with each product that you add to your e-commerce store acutally become from 1-5 pages (dependent on your chosen e-commerce application or provider), it becomes obvious that owners or operators would want as many products onto the system, in most cases as quick as possible.
Automated product uploads offers this kind of result being able to upload thousands of products per second, rather per week or month!
Additionally when you have complete understand (and hence control) over the code that produces this effective, it can customised easliy and powerfully, only being constrained by the programmers SQL knowledge.
The steps involved in achieving this result, or rather writing this code, is done via:
- Write .CSV file, formated with rows full of your product information, and a zip file full of your images (correctly sized and named), with their image names referenced in the .CSV file so both items can be linked.
- Read in .CSV (ignore top header row) and build into a PHP 5 Arrray.
- Open DB Connection to E-Store DB, and use approiate functionality to insert key DB Table updates.
- Confirm writes and inform user, close connections, etc.
Its that simple! If you need help, get in touch.
2: Your chosen E-Commerce Application
This the second most important thing after your products, it underpins how effective your attempts will as well as will dictate costs, both operational and technical.
Be wary of any person that states (or asserts) that “N is perfect for you to sell online and WILL get X, Y, and Z”. In our experience each new e-commerce store will need to be looked at, not to mention the market you aim to enter as well as the processes involved to get you products sold and to the customer.
All of this should be carefully looked at with stake holders and full requirements being created. Many business and therefore people fail with e-commerce for reasons that include the most basic business skills such as business and marketing plans, not to mention customer and market analysis.
Like any shop, if people don’t walk past your shop then they definitely wont shop, and if they don’t shop they definitely wont buy! SWOT analysis and a basic marketing plan is ESSENTIAL if you want to survive and grow in the online marketing place, with documented grows at over 20% per annum.