Are you new to ecommerce?

If you are new to selling online or have limited experience, let us begin with a dose of reality. . . online sales take just as much hard work as any other type of sales.

Over the past few years, I have been approached by dozens if not hundreds of people that want to establish an ecommerce storefront. One question that always arises is “what is the best way to begin?” . . . the simple answer to this is: as inexpensively but as professionally as possible. These two things are important for two very separate reasons. It is important to do it inexpensively because quite frankly, a new online store operator does not fully know what their needs are or will be in the future, some money may be wasted going down any number of wrong paths. A professional looking store is important simply because it is the only part of your ecommerce operation that a prospective purchaser sees and it can have some influence upon the purchasing decision.

Not that a slick store design has ever sold anything to anybody but in that a poorly designed store can kill a sale. Either by fostering doubts within the purchaser or by lack of functionality, i.e. making it too difficult for the store user to navigate or find what they are looking for. I have seen many store designs which have focused on a really slick appearance but were nearly unusable or confusing to store users because of their layout and choice of colors. What is the point of investing time, money and effort into something that is self defeating to the ultimate goal of selling online?

With an inexpensive and professional appearance established as vitally important, we must also add functionality and the potential for future extendability to our initial criteria. It is with these things in mind that we have chosen a stable and widely used open source shopping cart solution in osCommerce and have devised a simple way for those with moderate coding skills to install a very functional, easy to use and navigate storefront.

From this point on, as someone new to ecommerce, it is up to you to watch your pennies, learn as much as you can about the field of business you have just entered and to do the work necessary to grow your online business. If you are of the mentality "build it and they will come" . . . you will find in time that promotion and hard work are the only things that will bring people to your online store.