Start with a Marketing Game Plan
Apple's iTunes Store dominates the digital media eCommerce space with 435 million accounts, placing it ahead of both Amazon and PayPal in number of users, notes Business Insider. The success of iTunes reflects Apple's long-term marketing strategy of focusing on a small line of products with a high profit margin. While iTunes is not Apple's biggest money-maker, it serves the function of adding value to Apple's profitable line of mobile devices.Apple's success illustrates the pay-off of approaching eCommerce with a well-designed marketing game plan. You can find an online introduction to marketing on the U.S. Small Business Administration's website. A well-rounded marketing plan should cover several key issues, including:
- What problems does your product or service solve?
- Who else is offering something similar, and how can you distinguish yourself from them?
- Who would benefit from what you sell?
- Where can you find prospective customers?
- How can you attract visitors to your website?
- How will you convert website visits into sales?
- How can you turn sales into repeat business?
Do Your Market Research
Business management legend Peter Drucker believed market research was the key to marketing and sales success. In his classic book, "Management," he wrote the aim of marketing is to know your customer so well, the product sells itself. When marketing online, this principle can be put into practice by using market research software, often called "analytics" tools.
There are several categories of analytics tools available to businesses. Social media analytics tools such as Klout gather data about users of Facebook and other social sites, providing you with information about your audience, where they're gathering, and what topics interest them. Keyword analytics tools such as Google Keyword Tool (currently being phased out by Keyword Planner) tell you how often users are searching for different keyword terms. Sophisticated business intelligence (BI) tools can help companies mine marketing data, identify patterns, and predict trends.
Get Your Domain
When it comes to picking a domain name, Google SEO spokesman Matt Cutts explained you have two basic options, with the best choice being dictated by the needs of your situation. If you have a recognizable brand, you can pick a domain name that reflects your branding and does not necessarily contain a target keyword. For instance, the name "Google" is not keyword-oriented and does not tell you the company provides search engine services. The alternate approach is to pick a domain name that contains a keyword related to your name, product, or service. Cutts suggested that the latter option might be used for a website named after a company users are likely to be searching. You may need to consider several naming options in case your first choice is not available.
After settling on a domain name, you will need to register your domain with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Domain registrar services will do this for a fee, usually in the range of $10-$35. GoDaddy.com is probably the most famous domain registrar service due to their TV advertising presence, but there are many others. You can read reviews of different services if you want to do some comparison shopping.
Set Up Your Hosting
When you first buy your domain, you'll notice your home page defaults to a generic look, which is known as a "parked" page. Before you can customize how your website displays to other Internet users, you will need to get web hosting services. Domain registrar services often provide hosting, but this is not their specialty, and it's usually advisable to host your domain with a company that specializes in this. As with registration services, it's best to read reviews of different providers.
When shopping for providers and comparing different hosting packages, one thing you might wonder is, "How much bandwidth do I need?" or have similar questions. The answer depends on how many visitors you'll be getting per month, the size of the files they'll be downloading, and whether you'll have peak times where traffic is prone to surge suddenly. Talk to your hosting sales representative to get an estimate of your bandwidth needs and the most suitable package for your purposes. After you set up your hosting, you can monitor your bandwidth through back-end tools provided by your host, and you can make adjustments to your package based on your actual usage.
Choose Your Site Building Platform
After you purchase hosting services, your host will provide you with a password to a back-end area of your site, invisible to the public, where you or your site administrator can add and edit files to build your site. One of the decisions you will need to make in order to build your site is what site building platform you will use.
The first websites were manually written in HTML, and site building tools such as Dreamweaver were developed to assist with this process. Dreamweaver remains a viable option, though an expensive one. For those on a more limited budget, a good freeware alternative is KompoZer.
Today, blogging and content management software tools have emerged as other popular business website building platforms. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform for business applications, as it easily adapts to eCommerce purposes. Drupal provides an even more powerful eCommerce platform, but is trickier to administer and has a smaller pool of qualified webmasters available for hire.
Design Your Site Structure
When an architect starts building a home, they start by drawing a blueprint. When professional web designers begin building a website, they start by creating a site blueprint with the help of a visual aid called a wireframe. A wireframe graphically depicts the layout of your site's pages, navigational structure, and interactive tools, such as registration forms and buy buttons. This helps you design the look of your site to support its business function.
You can create a simple wireframe by drawing your site's pages on paper or a whiteboard, or by laying them out with notes. Professional web designers can select from a variety of powerful wireframing software tools.
Create Your Main Pages
If you go to Google's home page, you will notice a number of links at the top and bottom of the page. On the top of the page, you will see links that enable you to control your search preferences and log into your Google Account. On the bottom of the page, there are links promoting different Google Services, explaining Google's privacy policy and terms of service, and providing more information about the company.
These are examples of some of the main pages a business website should include. In general, most sites should have a home page, navigational links on top or on the side to help users find your most important pages, and links on the bottom for pages that are not necessarily of primary interest to most visitors but are still important to include, such as your privacy policy and terms of service.
Secure Your Download Area
On sites such as iTunes and Amazon, you can download digital purchases from the site to your device. Of course, if you could download these items without paying for them, Apple and Amazon wouldn't be making much money. Selling digital products profitably requires having a secure download area.
There are several popular methods you can use to secure your download area. One is to host protected content in a password-protected area on your site or that of an external vendor. This method requires you to redirect your customer to the protected area upon purchase, and to email them their password in case they need to log in again.
Another method is to hide content from search engines by using an encrypted link. Here again, you will need to email your customer the link. A third method is to email your customer the digital content itself. This may work for smaller digital content, such as PDF files, but can be impractical for large files.
Select an eCommerce Service
As eBay grew popular, demand grew for an eCommerce service to support Internet purchases. To meet this demand, eBay acquired PayPal. PayPal is one example of an eCommerce service that has grown popular among small businesses. PayPal offers a variety of merchant service packages with different features that illustrate some typical eCommerce options.
PayPal's Standard merchant package enables you to send visitors off your site to PayPal's site, where their transaction is processed before returning to your site. This transfers the security burden for the transaction to PayPal, freeing you from having to pay for upgrading your site to meet security compliance requirements. The reduced technical and cost requirements make this type of option attractive to many merchants.
PayPal's Advanced package lets you process transactions directly on your site without sending your visitors off-site, and it also provides more shopping cart flexibility. PayPal's Pro package allows additional customization, and also enables you to accept credit card payments by phone, fax or mail. Both these options are more expensive and require you to implement additional compliance measures.
There are many eCommerce services besides PayPal, but PayPal's options illustrate the range of issues involved in selecting an eCommerce package. Before settling on a solution, do some comparison shopping with the needs of your site in mind. Ask yourself some basic questions about your eCommerce needs: Will you sell one item per transaction, or do you need to give your buyers the ability to load multiple items into their shopping cart? Will you send them off-site during the transaction, or will you keep them on-site? Where will you send them after their purchase? How will you deliver their order? Do you need to integrate your eCommerce solution with an email service in order to send them a download link, or follow up with email marketing? Questions like these will help you select the eCommerce vendor who's right for your site.
Have eCommerce tips? Share them in the comments.
Author Bio
Murray Lunn is a freelance writer specializing in content marketing for online businesses; his work includes business blogging, product development, and brand development.
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