If you’re a small business owner these days then you know that if you want your retail business to thrive you need to get online. What is probably much less clear is how exactly you’re supposed to do that. Just getting a basic information site up and running is enough to put most business owners off! There are so many options available and with every tom, dick and harry web designer telling you they can build your ecommerce site (usually for a clean fortune) it’s hard to figure out what option is the right fit for you and your retail business.
Some of the main questions I hear from small business owners and entrepreneurs are:
1. Pricing – “Everything’s cheaper online, right?”, “How do I go about charging less online without losing or annoying my offline customers?”, ”Will I have to slash prices to the bone to compete online?”
2. Technical Set Up – “How do I actually get an online store set up?”, “What option should I choose?”
3. Cost – “Sounds expensive! How much will all this cost me to set up?”
Before you can get specific answers to these questions, you have to understand exactly what you need. Here are the main things to consider initially:
Your Vision
As with starting any kind of new venture, you need to have a very clear vision for your online endeavours. What is it that you want to achieve, what market do you want to serve, what problem are you going to solve? Come up with a vision that you are passionate about – if you’re not passionate about your business and driven to solve your customers’ problems then your business will never reach it’s full potential, whether you’re online or not. Passion and true belief in what you do keeps the engine running at the most important times!
Amazon’s mission statement is “to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online”. Not everyone wants to build something that big, that’s fine (although I say why not?!), but what is important is that you know exactly what you’re setting out to do. The factors to consider and the set up you require will be very different if you’re aiming for global domination rather than offering an online service to existing local customers.
Basic Market Research
Once you’ve got your vision sorted the next thing to do is a little bit of research to make sure that people want to buy what you’re offering and that they want to buy it online. The simplest way to do this is to see if anyone is already selling something similar online… that’s right, just google it, it’s that simple! Now, stay with me here, if there is no one paying for ads on Google (the results that appear at the top of the page and down the right hand side of the page) then THIS IS A BAD SIGN. If no one else can afford to advertise what you want to sell then there’s probably not much profit in it! Obviously there’s a happy medium, it might not be the best idea to enter a market that is extremely competitive either (unless you’ve got a unique angle or offering), so we’ll do a little more digging around.
Once you’ve established that there is a market for your offering, the next thing to do is have a play around with the Google Keyword Tool – choose a typical search term to analyse, e.g. if your business sells fishing rods then analyse ‘buy fishing rod’ in the Keyword Tool – it will tell you how many searches this term receives on a monthly basis and also what the level of competition there is for advertising on Google for that particular search term. You can also browse by category (on the left hand side of the page) to get an idea of trends across industries. Another great free tool is Alexa.com, which lets you analyse the traffic of any website – pick a competitor’s website and check out their Alexa rankings. It’s always useful to check a few websites you’re familiar with and know are popular for comparison and to familiarise yourself with traffic levels and general rankings. Less than an hour poking around on the internet should give you a good idea of whether or not your vision is a feasible and potentially profitable one.
Your Current Set Up
The final inital consideration is your current business infrastructure and capabilities. If you are not equipped for a large scale ecommerce operation at the minute (and you’re not planning on throwing lots of resources at it in a short space of time) then you don’t need to get an all singing, all dancing ecommerce site. Something on a smaller, simpler scale would be a more appropriate way for you to start doing business online. Business owners tend to think of getting their ecommerce site up and running as the main event but in reality the hard work and major operation starts afterwards - adding and updating content, marketing the site, processing and shipping orders, keeping customers informed. Even processing 10 orders a day can put a significant strain on a small business. It is important to realise that a successful ecommerce set up generally requires significant changes to your business processes and structure.
In the next few articles I’ll be looking in more detail at the different ecommerce platforms available to you, the costs involved and your potential business model options. If you have any specific questions just hit me up in the comments below.
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