How to start a E-commerce Site with no traffic

[robdstone]

Hi Everyone

When you look to start an e-commerce business, how do you look at starting it when you need to invest but have no traffic.

Did you build your site, purchase stock and go from there or

Did you start a site as a basic structure, SEO until you had traffic and then turn it into a online store?

Thanks everyone

Rob

 

[seoswat]

Best tactics would vary drastically dependent on the actual product that you offered.

But all sites would start at the beginning from having zero traffic so your in the same boat already as all those who have succeeded. Unfortunately, you are also in same boat as all those who have failed.

If you could post what type of products you offering i am sure it will help others on here give a better idea on how best to go forwards and not just give you the "SEO your website" or "start off with some PPC for fast traffic"

 

[antropy]

I'd say probably best to purchase a little bit of stock so that if you do get any orders you can fulfill them.

I'd also recommend also selling on eBay.

 

[japancool]

Hi Everyone

When you look to start an e-commerce business, how do you look at starting it when you need to invest but have no traffic.

Did you build your site, purchase stock and go from there or

Did you start a site as a basic structure, SEO until you had traffic and then turn it into a online store?

Thanks everyone

Rob

We pretty much all started in a position where we had no traffic. Unless you're leveraging an initial customer base, or you're prepared to a lot of pre-launch advertising, you're going to start there too.

But if you can't fulfil the orders that you do get, you'll be doing yourself more harm than good. You'll lose customers and damage your budding reputation.

But as seoswat says, a lot depends on what you're selling.

 

[bartonz20let]

I'm in my ninth month, currently hold no stock, my first order came in month 3 and we've averaged roughly £3k/month turnover since then (obviously this is growing as time goes on).

I've yet to spend any money on advertising (as I'm still improving the basics of the site, product uploads, aesthetics, features etc.) and all SEO work has been done by myself, I'm surprised by the success that I've had with the SE's (particularly google).

The sector I'm in is mostly drop ship but I'm looking at some order's I've lost due to long lead times and working out what stock to hold in the future, obviously this will also increase my profit margin.

I invested £150 in the beginning to set up the company as I had little to invest.

I'm doing it the hard way as business loans and savings were not available to me but in some ways this means I'm making more prudent decisions.

I'll be looking at full completion of the site (all the products I intend to sell, having a decent/affordable payment gateway etc) by the end of year 2 and I'll probably look again for some investment for stock and advertising.

I won't go into my profits but if I can double my turnover, continue to maximise profits and keep overheads down I'll be on my way to making a comfortable living wage in the future.

What I'm getting at is there is more than one way to skin a cat, the most important thing is to be prudent, dedicated and intelligent, It also helps not to expect the world to just fall at your feet.

Every business is different and plays by different rules depending on the sector and you as you learn your sector and develop a better understanding what you thought was a good idea a month ago suddenly seems ridiculous.

I really thought having few £k of stock was critical to actually having a business, I now think its important factor in reducing costs that needs careful consideration.

 

[Mainland]

I started by offering a small product range which I drop shipped and then used the profits generated to drop ship more and more. Once sufficient funds were available I steered away from drop shipping in favour of stocking items myself to take advantage of bulk buying and better control over delivery. You also avoid the problem of customers buying direct if you stock the items yourself.

 

[RepricerExpress]

Although we don't know too much about what you're selling at this point (which I think is really important in determining how you should approach this) bartonz20let has done it brilliantly. I don't think there's a need to spend a fortune setting up everything in the hope that you'll get sales. Get it going, have some stock to fulfil orders and grow from there.

It's great that you realise much of your effort has to be on SEO and ensuring people come to your site-I have seen so many people spending their budget on developing a site and having no money left for generating traffic and visitors. They end up with white elephants-nice sites that the world will never know about.

One note of caution though-if you plan to sell on the larger marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, make sure you have the stock there to fulfil orders as long delivery times will kill your reputation and feedbacks.

Best of luck.

 

[asadsaffa]

Hi Everyone

When you look to start an e-commerce business, how do you look at starting it when you need to invest but have no traffic.

Did you build your site, purchase stock and go from there or

Did you start a site as a basic structure, SEO until you had traffic and then turn it into a online store?

Thanks everyone

Rob

If you want to start an eCommerce website first of all you have to decide about your traffic, if you have another blog or website that you can send traffic to your customers it is a good decision, but If you don't have then try to look for a SEO friendly shopping cart system.

 

[Paul Norman]

Building an e-commerce based business requires a process like any other business, because the 'product, site, or marketing first' question is dependant on something else.

Your business plan.

When we began, our dream was to build a large, national, brand. This we have achieved. To do that we had to start fairly ambitiously, with a big stock range, a respectable, professionally put together website, and a combination of on and offline marketing to draw traffic in.

 

[asadsaffa]

Hi Everyone

When you look to start an e-commerce business, how do you look at starting it when you need to invest but have no traffic.

Did you build your site, purchase stock and go from there or

Did you start a site as a basic structure, SEO until you had traffic and then turn it into a online store?

Thanks everyone

Rob

If you want to start an eCommerce website first of all you have to decide about your traffic, if you have another blog or website that you can send traffic to your customers it is a good decision, but If you don't have then try to look for a SEO friendly shopping cart system.
that these features are important features to look for
SEO Friendly Features, like meta tag generator and etc
Best Payment and Shipment Support
Good Security, it is important to be PCI, PA-DSS Certified
Marketing and Promotion Tools
Syndicating with Other Shops like eBay, Amazon and etc
Social Media Support
Integration with Affiliate systems *If you Need
With having these features you wont need traffic because the more you sell in other shops the more traffic you will gain from them

 

[joeptsearle]

In my opinion I think 1k would be a good place to start in terms of stock.
With regards to traffic, it would take some time to get the traffic flowing.
It would be best to start off as an eccommerce site and then straight away look at your marketing strategies. If you have a decent amount of money to invest, you could look at banner advertising and PPC, try to find your optimal keywords for your niche.
If you haven't got as much to invest at the beginning, you should look at the free methods like blogging and providing valuable content for your prospects.

 

[keeron]

Hi Everyone

When you look to start an e-commerce business, how do you look at starting it when you need to invest but have no traffic.

Did you build your site, purchase stock and go from there or

Did you start a site as a basic structure, SEO until you had traffic and then turn it into a online store?

Thanks everyone

Rob

I cant give any real advice, because i dont know what products you are selling or what niche you are in so its hard to help you.

But everyone in here as pretty much covered everything already.

I will just give you some really basic tips:
Make sure your website is attractive and looks secure.

• Make sure your meta descriptions and meta tags are simple so google can read them
• Upload your sitemap to Google webmasters.
• Submit your URL to Google, which means that you are adding your URL to googles database, and your website will start to appear in google's search results.
• Name your images on your website properly, which means if you have a picture of a football, Name the .jpeg or .png file, football.png, then your images will appear on google images when people search for an image.
• When you add your products, make sure there Meta Title and the Url is relevant to your product, if you are selling an iphone 5 make sure your URL LINK is ww.yourdomain,com/iphone5 or /iphone5buy

Remember that google owns 67% of the whole market share of search engines And also remember that bing is rising and owns 17.9%, i would concentrate on Google when it comes to SEO, to be honest.

I would suggest you go onto youtube and type in the question you just asked us and you will find 2 hour lectures answering all of your questions.

You will also find examples on youtube of how to increase traffic, how to build websites, how to understand SEO and how to use SEO.

I would do a test run website, so when you launch your real one you know exactly what to do.

 

[eCommerce Domination]

After helping lots of eCommerce businesses to grow (and thrive) my advice would be to focus on growing your business using sustainable methods that you are in control of.

Too many startups strive for free traffic from Google results and invest serious time and money in SEO as they think this is the cornerstone to long-term online success, the truth is it ISN'T.

Google change their algorithms literally hundreds of times a year and roll out some 'major' updates 3-4 times a year so how on earth do you keep up with this?

We have seen many businesses invest in SEO, see good results then watch their traffic bomb after an algorithmic update, by focusing on SEO you are basically putting your businesses future in the hands of a company that lets be honest, doesn't (and why should it) care about you and your business.

You need to focus on sustainable methods of traffic (which are normally paid-for) and factor this into your business plan, Google Adwords, Leveraging eBay and Amazon traffic, advertising and more.

Free traffic is great and can be good for your business but NEVER rely on it to grow your business, there are too many horror stories of this happening and the businesses crashing and burning.

You need to make sure your business plan can support paid advertising, a business plan that says 'I will get 500 free visitors to my website a day' is flawed, always look on 'free traffic' as a bonus and not the foundations for your business.

 

[Alan]

Did you start a site as a basic structure, SEO until you had traffic and then turn it into a online store?

As others have said, business plan first. And in your business plan is your marketing plan.

If you do your homework on your marketing plan you will realise that SEO is pretty low down on the short term effective channels.

You would do well to consider initially alternative market places (e.g. Ebay / Amazon) to start to gain initial customers and test demand, and then build out with AdWords. Once you have a viable business you can reinvest in the longer term SEO efforts to try and reduce cost per acquisition (SEO does not = free visitor SEO is a cost and difficult one to estimate and control, the reasons for this well given above).

Whilst not 100% aligned to your post I wrote a blog post http://llocally.com/blog/2013/08/30/how-to-start-an-online-shop/ its not really targeted at people building a serious business plan, but to give some basic thoughts to people who are planning to dip their toe in to e-commerce.

(constructive comments welcome)

 

[keeron]

As others have said, business plan first. And in your business plan is your marketing plan.

If you do your homework on your marketing plan you will realise that SEO is pretty low down on the short term effective channels.

You would do well to consider initially alternative market places (e.g. Ebay / Amazon) to start to gain initial customers and test demand, and then build out with AdWords. Once you have a viable business you can reinvest in the longer term SEO efforts to try and reduce cost per acquisition (SEO does not = free visitor SEO is a cost and difficult one to estimate and control, the reasons for this well given above).

Whilst not 100% aligned to your post I wrote a blog post http://llocally.com/blog/2013/08/30/how-to-start-an-online-shop/ its not really targeted at people building a serious business plan, but to give some basic thoughts to people who are planning to dip their toe in to e-commerce.

(constructive comments welcome)

I agree with everything you just said !

Great Advice!

 

[Josh_Geneva_Digital]

Hi Rob,

Firstly, great question!

As allot of others have mentioned, everyone starts in the same boat with no traffic. However, as with all things in business preparation is key.

For example, when we create an Ecommerce site for a client we ensure they either have a full marketing plan in place or they would like us to do that for them. Reason being, you can have the most beautiful, or ugly Ecommerce site in the world but if no one sees it, it won't be worth the investment.

There has been many a business owner that felt "all I need is a great website and my business will take off". Unfortunately this isn't the case. Think about how you would set up offline, would you start renting the most beautiful retail space if it was on a street no one ever walked down and you had no plan on how to get them walking down there? Of course you wouldn't, create a plan that people have proven in the past, or invest ina company that can do it for you.

In terms of stock, that purely depends on your turnaround time it takes from you ordering from your supplier to delivery. If it's a quick turnaround, my advice would be to invest into the marketing, when the orders start coming in you can immediately pay for your stock.

Hope that helps

 

[Multi-store]

Some real interesting stuff here. Interesting comments about the white elephant, i never really thought of it like that. You typically assume a good website will automatically draw visitors through recommendation.

I have had a couple of ecom sites in the past that have generated small amount s of revenue, my latest one (in sig) is a product of the big cartel baby.

My costs are very low and my stock holding is little more than a few hundred pounds worth. BC isnt very easy to edit for a novice so i'm hoping that orders will start to arrive purely over time. 4 weeks in and no orders yet, 25-50 hits per day but mostly in the US which makes my bounce rate extremely high.

The correct domain name (without the Big cartel bit and a .co.uk) should be active this week and i've put £25 into my adwords account (offer on at the mo, spend £25 get another £75 free) to help generate traffic to the new domain.

Note that i dont RELY on this website as a source of income. However id love that to be the case one day! Another person said they waited three months before getting an order, is it the case that over time websites will automatically generate some organic traffic? I also use SM to help boost traffic.

 

[limboltd]

Have you considered pay to click advertising? Or crowdsourcing sites to get people to do the traffic for you like infiniteworkers?

 

[japancool]

Some real interesting stuff here. Interesting comments about the white elephant, i never really thought of it like that. You typically assume a good website will automatically draw visitors through recommendation.

I have had a couple of ecom sites in the past that have generated small amount s of revenue, my latest one (in sig) is a product of the big cartel baby.

My costs are very low and my stock holding is little more than a few hundred pounds worth. BC isnt very easy to edit for a novice so i'm hoping that orders will start to arrive purely over time. 4 weeks in and no orders yet, 25-50 hits per day but mostly in the US which makes my bounce rate extremely high.

The correct domain name (without the Big cartel bit and a .co.uk) should be active this week and i've put £25 into my adwords account (offer on at the mo, spend £25 get another £75 free) to help generate traffic to the new domain.

Note that i dont RELY on this website as a source of income. However id love that to be the case one day! Another person said they waited three months before getting an order, is it the case that over time websites will automatically generate some organic traffic? I also use SM to help boost traffic.

It was well over a month before I got my first order, so I wouldn't panic yet.

In my case, I had to develop an audience and a reputation in my niche market before the orders started to come.

 

[japancool]

Your e-commerce business will succeed if you have a great multi-channel online shop that works seamlessly on desktops, tablets and smart phones and also expose your products in online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. I can offer you all that from just £19+VAT per month. It's a low cost model that allows you to focus on selling your products with an affordable outlay that is spread across monthly payments. I have a few clients who started their e-commerce businesses from scratch using my online shop rental platform and now run very successful e-commerce businesses whilst paying low cost monthly rental.

It's a bit much to say that a business *will* succeed if they have those things, isn't it? They're only part of the overall equation. Having the right products at the right price point and with the right USP is probably more important.

 

[keeron]

It's a bit much to say that a business *will* succeed if they have those things, isn't it? They're only part of the overall equation. Having the right products at the right price point and with the right USP is probably more important.

i agree with you @Japancool..

Having a USP and identifying your target audience in your specific chosen niche is a good way to start.

Although Ebay and Amazon are an easy platform for people to see your products, yet if your niche is not specific, then you are competing with 1,000 to 100,000 or even millions of different sellers, which makes your success harder.

Just by having your product on ebay or amazon does not mean instant success, there are millions of sellers on ebay and amazon and thousands upon thousands of sellers to compete with, in most niche's

 

[LikeToHelp]

Yes agreed, it's a bit much to say that the business will succeed with just the right online vehicles. Obviously I realise that you need to have great products at the right price points to be able to sell successfully online. What I'm saying is that if you do setup the right online vehicles then it will be a good foundation to help your business succeed providing your customers with great user experiences and giving maximum exposure to your products. I know there are major players like Shopify, Magento etc, they are great shopping carts but they do not really help businesses sell online in other ways like helping out with Distance Selling Regulations (DSRs). DSRs are very important for legally selling online in the UK/EU and are overlooked by many businesses wanting to sell online via their own online shops. These businesses are leaving themselves open to risk which is unnecessary. Also just because thousands of people are already selling on eBay and Amazon doesn't mean businesses shouldn't bother because it's too competitive. If there is a solution which can self automate and manage price point fluctuations by monitoring your competition in real time and ensuring that your product priced are automatically adjusted to be competitively priced as the can be, then your in with a good chance of selling in these marketplaces and making profit. There are many tools out their to help business succeed selling online, it's a matter of choosing the most effective ones.

 

[cariman]

I will try to say how I would if I would be in your place.

I would make some videos and I will uploaded on youtube and other tube websites because is free,and I would try to rank for the best keywords.

Other thing I would do is a fan page and promote that page on facebook.Is cheap if you do some research about how to promote your fan page for 2-3 cents.

Pinterest,twitter and other social websites because is free.

 

[Core List]

I invested £150 in the beginning to set up the company as I had little to invest.

I'm doing it the hard way as business loans and savings were not available to me but in some ways this means I'm making more prudent decisions.

This is good advice. Unless you have had first hand experience at business or know your market really well or lots of money to invest, I would take a similar approach. As you can tie up lots of capital in the wrong areas unless you have experience in what works and what doesn't.

If you are starting out, prioritise.
These are generally my priorities for my websites
1: Targetted traffic. (Getting the right people to your site that may buy your product.

2: Functional website (Making your site functional so it is easy to browse, find what the user needs and purchase in a safe and secure manner and letting them know this.)

3: Design (Spend money on a logo, but restrict spending on web design initially. Put more money in to 1 and 2)

4:Refine (once you are up and running, work on refining everything and don't ever stop. No business I know is a set and forget, you must always work at it.)

Regards
John

 

[Deleted member 158328]

As has been said before every business is different and without knowing what you are selling it is hard to advise.

From my experience -

Make sure your site is search engine friendly - use Google's webmaster tools and make sure you've got a site map.

Be careful using adwords - you can waste a lot of money.

Monitor the ratio of the number impressions to the number of visitors to the number and value of orders. You can work out how much to pay for advertising from this.

Think about paying a specialist PR agency - they can get you a lot of copy in several sites / magazines for the cost of a single advert.

Use multiple channels such as Amazon and eBay - they are recognised and trusted brands. You can always advertise your site with the packaging you use once you have sold to these customers.

Use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Scoop.it and Pinterest but only use the soft sell on these sites.

Don't expect to make a million in a fortnight - you need to work at it.