Ecommerce Software Solution

Posted on January 29th, 2010 by Jeromy

Technology, available training and software solutions, have made a lot more possible for your average ‘non-tech’ to develop their own online store. You don’t need to spend thousands on a designer, or go blindly into a market or spend a fortune on advertising. A home based online business is, hands down, the cheapest business to start and many ecommerce business start ups have been very successful.

Home based e commerce business is booming, even in today’s struggling economy. Ecommerce is one of the fast growing business models in the world and is the sole source of income for many many families. As you can imagine, the competition is fierce, essentially in “hot” niches. So as well as finding the right ecommerce software solution, you also need to understand the Internet Marketing environment and how best to leverage your own ecommerce business to maximize your profits. The following video discusses this a bit further.

This video was produced by Steve Clayton of Niche Blueprint 2.0. He shows you a research tool for finding and researching markets online. You’ll notice that some research makes a BIG difference when it comes to placing and branding your ecommerce website(s) and maximizing your business revenue.

Why so Many Online Stores are starting up and why they are so popular

more and more existing ‘Mom & Pop’ businesses are diversifying by adding their brick and mortar business to the internet,
due to mass layoffs across the Nations, families are searching for new sources of income,
An Online Store is more affordable (than a physical store front) and can be run at home with no (or very little) staff,
ecommerce software solutions are more simple to use than ever before, making it easier for ‘non-tech’ people to develop their web store without massive web development costs,
the potential market, any prospective shopper with an internet connection, is insanely HUGE and growing,
the ecommerce market has grown by over 400% in the last few year and continues to grow.

Perhaps you already have something (or an idea) that you want to sell. Certainly the options are only limited by ones own imagination. There are online stores that encompass a large variety of items and there are stores that specialize in something very specific. There are a number of key factors that must be considered before you proceed;

Determine your market – to best design your site and present your product, you need to know your market & demographics. What is the average age of your market? Men, Women or both? Education or ‘language’ of your market? Other things your market is typically interested in? What keywords describe your market, what do people ‘Google’ when looking for your product? What is your existing competition?

Market and Keyword Research Tools

Google Insight

Google Keyword Tool

Microsoft Adlab Commercial Intention Tool

eBay Pulse

Amazon.com

Wholesaler list – you may not need this if you have a product already, however, you may wish to add to your existing product line, so having access to wholesalers is still valuable. However, Access to suppliers is tricky. There are many wholesale & dropship scams out there, that it is hard to weed out the real wholesalers from the sneaky middle man. The only reliable Free Wholesale List I know of is run by eBay expert Skip McGrath. He has a free wholesale search engine on his blog. The reputed best paid wholesaler and dropshiper directory is Worldwide Brands. I am pretty sure that many of the sites listed on Skip’s site are sourced from Worldwide Brands. They have had the most trusted and extensive wholesaler and dropship list for many years and specialize in working with small businesses.

Ecommerce Website complete with Shopping Cart – I think this is one of the more daunting requirements as many people haven’t a clue how to go about building an ecommerce website. Further, local design /hosting firms generally charge exorbitant fees that are out of reach for many would be entrepreneurs. ecommerce software solutions have become very popular. They range from very inexpensive templates that you customize and upload to your own hosting account to premium development services and hosting. My thought is that you should always get your own hosting. There are a number of reasons for this, it is cheaper, your website is not tied to a service that you may decide you no longer need. Most online store builders that include hosting lock you into a monthly fee that is significantly higher than hosting on its own and they limit you to one domain name. If you decide to cancel with that service and you are using an included hosting package, you’ll often loss your domain and website as well. Whereas if you have your own hosting account, any work you do to your domain and website(s) stays with you, you own them. The challenge then is to determine if you will host your own shopping cart (more expensive) or redirect to a provider (such as Pay Pal). Either way you need to have your website built and integrated with your shopping cart, which is not that hard, but it is still fairly technical. There are lots of options and software to help, free and premium themes and templates. A surprisingly affordable option is to simply outsource its development and integration. There is an amazing amount of professional and very skilled people that can do top notch work on all sorts of jobs, including sorting out your ecommerce integration. In most cases the popular project collaboration sites have very good rating systems (kind of like eBay) so you can generally see what past employers have said and the types of projects they have done. My favorite is elance, where you define your project, budget, time-line, etc and then freelance members bid on it. But there are a lot of popular and trustworthy ones online.

Affordable Web Design Freelancers

elance.com

rentacoder.com

getafreelancer.com

99designs.com

Online Marketing – There are various ways to market your store, pay per click, banner placement on other sites, search engine optimization, social marketing and combination/variations of each. The fastest way to get visitors to your store when it is first launched is via paid advertising, Google Adwords and Yahoo Search marketing, being two of the more powerful and popular mediums. The longer term and residual goal should be to get onto the 1st page of the search engine results and get Free Organic traffic. This means that when someone types a search related to your online store, you have set up the processes to ensure your site shows up on the first page of their results. This takes time to see results of effort, but the results can be very significant.

Finding an ecommerce software solution to simplify and streamline many of these tasks will help significantly to ensure a successful launch. There are a handful of respected service providers that have helped many home business owners to successfully establish and run ecommerce businesses. Niche Blueprint 2.0, is a premium “all in one” ecommerce software solution for building your website(s), market research, SEO and optimization. It includes a huge library of training videos and guides, a host of market research tools, a wholesale supplier directory and more.

An ecommerce business is certainly an opportunity with very real prospect of success. The key is to implement the right processes and get your online store in front of the right audience (customers). There is real work to do, if anyone tells you otherwise, they are full of it, plain and simple. But people that understand and expect to put in real effort to build their online business can find ecommerce to be a very profitable business model.