E-commerce website help

[Jacob Evans]

Hey guys! My family has recently set up an e-commerce website where we’re selling our products. Our main intention was to generate more sales. We have the assistance of this agency (Actuate), but I want to know the experiences of others who are also involved in e-commerce.

Mainly, I have 2 questions. How did you set up your website? Did it take long for you to actually see any growth?

 

[DazRave]

You might want to have a scan and search in https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/websites-ecommerce.59/

 

[AlanJ1]

Also wouldn't shock me if this was the agency owner "advertising."

 

[Russ Michaels]

this is a bit of a confusing question, as you have said you already setup the eCommerce website but are asking for advice on how to set one up?

 

[iHubbi.uk]

Setting up or building a website is quite simple as there are many predefined websites out there. You can visit sites like hot scripts and search for ecommerce scripts which will allow you to find many ready built scripts that you simply upload to your server, install, then start adding products.

You can also use various Content Management System (CMS) software like WordPress or Joomla and then install various ecommerce extensions on to your site. The advantage with CMS sites is that you can also add other extensions to help add editorial content, carry out search engine optimisation and interactive tools to make your site more interesting for your visitors.

For either way of setting up an ecommerce website will require some understanding on setting up hosting/construction of a website, else you will need to employ the services of a web developer.

The second part to your question on how quickly you can generate sales is a difficult question to answer as it will depend on several fronts.

Firstly, do you have a database of potential clients with their names and email addresses, as marketing of your website is extremely hard to do as unless toy have a decent list marketing your site organically is next to impossible.

If you have lots of friends on social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc, building lots of genuine contacts of people who would be happy to help you to generate potential leads can take times to build.

If you have some decent amount of funds available, you could use sites like Facebook and Google and pay for keywords advertising, but you could need to spend a decent amount of money to generate a reasonable amount of sales.

One way you could also promote your site once they start visiting your site is to operate an affiliate scheme where you will pay affiliates every time they generate a sale.

It's very easy to set up a website, populate it with products and launch it. The very difficult thing to do is to get people to visit it.

You need to offer a reason why people would buy from you, so you need to be able to offer your products at an incredible price or offer a reason why customers should buy from yourselves instead of a competitor.

I wish you luck with your site.

All the best.

GJ