Failing to Plan Your Ecommerce Solution is Planning to Fail

Starting an ecommerce business is not unlike starting any type of business. The most overlooked process is planning. You can absolutely determine the success of your ecommerce business by proper planning, goal setting and market research.There are many pitfalls that many businesses can fall into when venturing into the ecommerce territory. As you might expect, most online business fail to deliver. Because they are relatively easy to set up compared with their brick and mortar counterparts, the risk is lower and the loss is palatable.If an ecommerce business has a good product and is competitive in the market, why would it fail? Most owners of failing online businesses have no idea how to answer this question. The answer almost always is that they “winged” the business. They may even have a beautiful website but forgot to implement the basics of business planning.Very few business succeed without a business plan. Ecommerce planning is just as much a requirement although developing a plan for an online business requires a different approach. Sadly, if most ecommerce failures had established a plan starting with the following guidelines they would probably not have failed. Some may not even have ventured online as a result of understanding the challenge ahead of them.Ecommerce planning begins with this simple approach to developing a plan for a predictable ecommerce business. Begin with the end in mind.1. ESTABLISH YOUR REVENUE TARGETIf this is a new ecommerce site, be realistic. How much revenue do you need to turn over in the first year to produce a profit? What would you be comfortable with? I don’t know what a good number is because it depends on the product. $30,000 might be a great number if you’re selling an e-book but might not carry your overhead if you’re selling physical goods that you have to stock and inventory. In any case, know your target. Let’s use $10,000 for this example.2. ESTABLISH YOUR SELLING PRICE FOR YOUR PRODUCTA little research is in order to make sure your price is consistent with your competitors who are already selling on the net. You are always in a better position if you are selling unique products but we don’t all have that luxury. In any case, once you’ve established your price, you can by simple division know how many units you need to sell to meet your revenue target. So far, so good. For this example, lets use $10 per sale.Revenue / Product Price = # of Sales required$10,000 / $10 = 1000 sales required3. ASSUME A CONSERVATIVE CONVERSION RATE FOR YOUR WEBSITEE-Books usually have a conversion rate of 0.5 – 5 percent. More expensive could have lower conversion percentages. Also, and very importantly, how the visitor got to your site has a dramatic affect on the conversion rate. If the search terms that your site gets ranked for are very closely related to the product or services being sold, it is likely that your conversion will be higher. If you know personally some of the owners of competitive sites, broach the conversation and ask what a good conversion rate is. Whatever you establish, make sure it’s conservative (a low number). So now, you can calculate how many visits your site will require to meet your revenue target. Let’s use 1% conversion for this example.Visits = sales required / conversion rateVisits = 1000 / .01The website needs 100,000 visitors to meet plan.This is where the rubber meets the road. The challenge is to figure out how to get 100,000 visitors who need your products and services to visit your website. For many clients, this represents the 1st time they’ve been able to express definitive business goals and requirements for their ecommerce solution.CHOOSE KEYWORDS THAT DELIVER YOUR TRAFFIC REQUIREMENTSYour ecommerce solution involves a website that is optimized for keywords relative to your market. Basic keyword research will highlight whether there are enough searches in your business category to meet your goals. Choosing the correct keywords, ones that you know you can rank for is extremely important especially for start-up ecommerce sites. You don’t have enough clout to play with the big-boys! Pick your niches carefully or you’ll never see page one of the search engines and therefore never meet your visitor numbers goals.Ultimately your ecommerce solution needs enough funding to support a well thought out website and an on-going search engine optimization plan. Skimp on the SEO and the money you put up for the website will in all likelihood have been wasted. Build the SEO into the marketing plan of your ecommerce site (or learn how to do it yourself) and your online business should be predictable and profitable.

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Online Advertising Strategies

Online advertising is all about getting your website in front of the people who are interested in your product or service. There are a number of different ways in which a website can get itself advertised on the web like contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, online classified advertising, integrating pop-ups on a visited site, advertising networks, and email marketing, including email spam. In most cases it will prove preferable to include a variety of types of media and different versions of online advertisement.Search Engine Advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on Web pages that show results from search engine queries based on keywords and phrases entered by internet users or potential buyers. The three biggest sources of this type of advertising are Google, Yahoo. Search engine advertising works on the simple principle of supply and demand.Contextual Advertising, also known as content-targeted advertising is based on keywords in the surrounding content or context, which means that your advertisement is shown on a Web site that is ‘in context’ to your specific product or service. This advertising technology works by publishing your text or rich media advertisement on the relevant affiliated Web sites that best match your selected targeted keywords or channels. This is usually less profitable than search advertising which is based on user intent expressed through their keywords.There are three common methods of purchasing online advertising space for various types of advertising tools:* Cost Per Click also referred to as the Pay Per Click means that payment for advertising is proportional to the number of unique clicks on advertising banners. Cost Per Click differs from Cost Per Visit in that each click is paid for regardless of whether the user makes it to the target site. Either a flat-rate or a bid-based pricing scheme one can choose from for a Cost Per Click ad. A drawback to the Cost Per Click advertising model is that it can be compromised by click fraud.* Cost Per thousand impressions means that the method of payment is based on the number of views. This advertising model is generally reserved for websites with high traffic volume (more than one million pages viewed per month). The total price paid in a Cost Per thousand impressions deal is calculated by multiplying the Cost Per thousand impressions rate by the number of Cost Per thousand units. For example, one million impressions at $10 Cost Per thousand impressions equal a $10,000 total price.* Cost Per Action or acquisition, also be known as or Cost Per Lead means that payment is based on performance, and is a common method in affiliate marketing programs. In this advertising scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser pays only for the amount of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up. According to industry observers, this is the best type of rate to pay for banner advertisements and the worst type of rate to charge.Online advertising is so flexible and cost effective that even small businesses can afford to look into advertising online as in many types of ads there is no pay unless there are results. This type of strategy can make advertising very cost effective, especially for those who do not have large advertising budgets. Online marketing services are incomplete without online advertising, without the powerful advertising marketing can never be successful.In this world of businesses the need of online advertising company is crucial. An online advertising company can play a major role in assisting its client companies advertise their products on the Internet and reach their target audience. The future of online advertising and online advertising companies looks bright and very exciting to be sure.

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