25.Sep.2011 How to launch a (successful) eshop – part one

You’ve probably seen a lot of guides like this one, which is normal since e-commerce is present everywhere nowadays. On the other hand, this one might actually be the one you’ve been looking for all these days. It’s plain simple, I’ve now been an active professional in the e-commerce sector for several years now and every day I face the different facets of these stores. We’re not talking about one or two projects I’m familiar with but an all-in experience with around  500 web shops launched in the past 2 years alone and a personal portfolio containing around 1500 merchants and counting. Believe it or not but every single merchant in this portfolio was helped individually.

Oh, by the way, this guide might also be of use if you’re planning to improve an existing shop.

Now it’s your turn to embark in the ecommerce adventure. Before we get started, you need to ask yourself three basic questions. these questions will be developed further below and will basically mark the difference between you and the millions of other online stores on the web.  Don’t use these questions and you might as well abandon your project right away…

• What am I going to sell?
• Who am I selling this to?
• How will I sell it?

These are the only three questions you need to think of at first. We’ll treat the other questions later on. Now let’s focus on the first approach. Each question you just answered automatically generates more questions. For instance, if you replied “clothes” on the first question, you’ll automatically get “What clothes will I sell in order to match the public in question 2?”, “In case the clothes don’t fit, how will people send them back?” (that’s right, when selling in the EU, you’re legally forced to enable this as a merchant), and so on . The second question will automatically generate the questions, “what are these people’s interests?” , “how do they think?”, “how do they pay?”, … . The last question will do just the same. Once you figured out a complete set of questions, you’ve basically got the building material to build the framework that will support your very own success story.

It’s finally time to get started. After all this thinking, you will need to do some research. Try to find the best rates for buying your stock (and don’t be afraid to be a real douche when doing so!), find yourself a decent logistics partner, hook up with a payment gateway, start thinking how you’ll build your site or who will build it, where to find your customers, how to increase your visibility, how to retain your customers, … STOP! This list is getting too crowded, maybe it’s a better idea to make a step by step outline of your project

Allright, first things first. Depending on what you’re going to sell, you might have to gain some stock (even if it’s just a tiny bit) or you might have to develop a service. When planning to sell goods, you might have two approaches: a big product range and low prices or a limited product range and somewhat higher prices. A blend of the two approaches is possible, but it’ll cost you way more time and money, so you better start off with one of the two and play it black and white to begin with. Find yourself a decent supplier (or suppliers) and negotiate. Negotiating isn’t so hard and believe me, it’s fun!  For services, try to limit your costs when it comes down to development, but don’t overdo it. A little outsourcing will not only improve the quality of the programming side, but it’ll let you focus on more important things.

Next up comes your site. Now this is the point where many people think they’re doing it right but are doing it wrong anyhow. I’ve seen lots and lots of websites with a nice lay-out but lacked customer friendliness or offered great products but were not nice and therefore scared potential customers off. A good website looks nice, is easy to use and is not just “generic website number 7.125.032″. Before even thinking about making a site, do the little test below:

• Do I shop online every once in a while (yes/no)
• Do I understand CSS (yes/no/what’s CSS?)
• Am I a creative person? (yes/no)
• Is it a bad thing to use Comic Sans? (yes/no)
• Do I know about SEO (yes/no)

If you answered all the above questions with yes, things are looking good and you might basically consider making that site yourself, starting from scratch or by using shopping cart software. If you answered 2 or 3 questions by no, you might just consider making it yourself but be sure to ask for advice and do a little research first on those subjects. If you answered more than 3 questions by no I suggest you just outsource the project to a web designer.  Be sure to pick a good one and always ask for examples of previous creations. If you outsource the site, this first part of my tutorial ends here for you. See you in the next part!

For those who take on the challenge of creating their own site, these are a few tips I give away for free:

• Keep the site plain simple (did you know that in many countries in Europe 50-70% of the population never shopped online?)
• Provide the user with the best user experience they ever had. A nice example is www.coolblue.be . Every single of their sites has a nice wizard to guide you towards the item that suits you the most.
• Try to think of unique tools or functions to impress your (future) customers
• Ask people around you to have a look at the site while it’s being developed and ask for their input
• Make sure the user can always go back ons step without having to start over the whole process of ordering something on the site
• Finding a good lay-out is not easy, try over and over and over till you find a good design which is appealing to the eye and easy to navigate through
• Once again: keep it simple!

That’s it for the first part. Next time we’ll have a look at the payments and the customer service, but also at how to make sure people find your site.

Questions? Place your comments below or send an e-mail to info ["at"] evowars.net. Alternatively, you may also ask away via Twitter @nsonnet

Recommended reading:

The 80/20 Princple by Richard Koch – Buy it

Smashing CSS by Eric Meyer – Buy it

What would Google do? by Jeff Jarvis – Buy it

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury – Buy it