Is Your Business on the Ecommerce Train?

For many small business owners, their website is the meat of their company. Without it, they’d be just another fish in a big pond of companies competing for a limited amount of dollars.

With that in mind, stop for a moment and re-evaluate just how effective your website truly is.

Ask yourself the following:

• Does our traffic increase, decrease or stay about the same each month?
• Do visitors leave positive, negative or any feedback for that matter?
• If I were a customer, what would I like and not like about our company site?
• Approximately what percentage of online retail sales is from repeat customers and what percentage comes from new purchases?

Are You on Board?

With all you have to do as a small business owner, never neglect your company’s website. Doing so means losing out on potential revenue, revenue that your competition will gladly take.

If you have yet to really delve into all that Ecommerce can do for your small business, start doing some research in order to find the best options out there for getting you set up, whether that proves to be Ecommerce Partners or another solution.

Among the tasks at hand in determining which Ecommerce road you travel down:

1. Do you want your own Ecommerce site or host it on an online marketplace such as eBay?
2. What is your level of tech expertise? Along with the fact that you are a busy small business owner, how much technology experience do you have? If the answer is not much, having someone else design and help you with the site makes more sense, even when it means investing more money.
3. Are you relying heavily on online sales? In the event you do not get much foot traffic into your business, putting more time and effort into an Ecommerce site makes much more sense. If your small business does have a substantial physical customer presence, you can work the online option in at a little slower rate, making it a viable option for people not close to your store and/or those who can’t get out to shop.
4. What is your budget? – This is oftentimes the biggest and most difficult question to answer when considering setting up an Ecommerce platform. For those small businesses that have more money to play with, designing and maintaining a well-run Ecommerce site makes sense. If you’re on a tighter budget, start slowly and see how the traffic goes and what kind of service your provider is giving you before throwing tons of money at the site.
5. Marketing and Advertising – Lastly, no site is going to bring in significant revenue without substantial marketing and advertising. As you look for the right Ecommerce solution, ask the various providers you are considering if they offer a host of marketing services, among which are an online marketing strategy, search engine optimization (SEO), Google product search, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management, Email marketing and more.

As you can see, there is much that goes into the decision of how to get started with the right Ecommerce solution for your small business.

Make sure you do your homework, allowing you to see all that Ecommerce potentially can offer.