Printer cartridge PPC ecommerce

[richofwombwell]

Hi All,

Currently selling printer cartridges via telesales from a home office making a decent return.

Only issue is generating sales calls !

Im looking to set up an ecommerce site that can run alongside XERO for my accounting and is easy to set up SEO terms for the products.

Im playing around with bigcommerce as a saas platform but was wondering if anyone had any tips or ideas ?

www.inksdirect.org.uk are running a similar campaign as it looks like they are running a google shopping ppc campaign which is exactly what I want to do.

If i was to get someone to build this for me with over 2000 products how much would it cost ?

I need it to be able to automate fulfillment if possible.

Cheers

Rich

 

[Nic Cordingley]

Hi Richard,

Depending on specific requirements we can build you an SEO friendly site working with Xero for around £2500. We have clients with the same set-up. There are several solutions for the auto-fulfillment side however this will depend on your set-up. As to the Google shopping campaign that would be pretty easy to set-up for you.

1. If you already have an Adwords account then you will need to set up a Merchant Center account and link them.
2. Next you would need to create an XML or API feed for the products you want to include. There are several mandatory attributes that must be included and you must be able to refresh this regularly to stay on the good side of the Google policies.

Happy to arrange a chat to go over this in more detail with our web team.

Best regards

Nic
Digital Consultant
Understand Digital

 

[RyanTrustSpot]

Hi Rich,

Your question is kinda like opening pandora's box, because an ecommerce site can cost anywhere from $100 to over $100,000 depending on theming, custom integrations, extensions, QA, etc.

If you're looking for a faster solution .. I'd recommend BigCommerce, get a nice theme for around $300. Maybe spend another few hundred dollars in custom extensions. Bigcommerce has Google Product Listings built into the system .. where you pay X for clicks (ie: PPC).

Realistically you can launch a new business using Bigcommerce for less than $1,000 and than devote your extra cash into a marketing budget to pull in sales.

One thing that will really help .. especially if you're running ads... is to show your customer reviews, so potential people clicking your ads know you're a trustworthy place to do business.. and thus a higher potential for them to convert. TrustSpot integrates with Bigcommerce in seconds .. and is 100% free to use.. Check us out = trustspot.io

 

[richofwombwell]

Thanks for the help guys. At the moment I'm in the stage of building the skeleton aspect for the site, its a bit of a long tedious process but I'm sorting out through spreadsheets and spreadsheets of data, matching up categories of printers and products as well as the page yield etc and pricing structure (of which I have to take the ppc cost in including the conversion rate per click).

The amount of data you have to sort through before you can even begin looking at the site is unbelievable.

I'm currently just working through one product category at the moment (brother) so I can get the product format right for importation of data. I'm also looking at woo commerce because of the ease of editing the core structure and functionality ( I know how to much around in css and html )

It's an unbelievably large workload to do on my own but I was wondering if anyone else had achieved it before.


My main thing is understanding PPC, I am currently unsure where I find out the average bid cost for the items on the google merchant feed as this is where I want my products to be placed.

All the fulfillment is done for me at the moment so if there is a profit in the ppc campaign then I will look to stock the goods in my self and buy in bulk from china.

 

[Dawn Osolinski]

Sounds like Shopify would be right up your street. Similar to Bigcommerce but more user friendly and with an external app (available on Shopify's app store) you can integrate your site with Xero. Let me know if you have any questions.

 

[Nic Cordingley]

Agreed with the Shopify/Xero suggestion. That's what we have been using.

As for the bid information this is a bit more tricky. There is a bid simulator however this is only active after the campaign is live and your products have been in enough auctions for Google to get an understanding of your/competitor activity. So you are going to have to do some test and learn.

Seeing as you have 2000 plus products in your feed it is probably unrealistic to set bids at the individual product level. The best way for you to to do this will be to create 'product groups' that cluster your products by similar profit margin.

Set your bids lower than you would for a standard search campaign and keep an eye on the 'impression share' to see what the growth potential is. As stated the benchmark stats and bid estimate will give you useful information however the key metric is the 'cost per conversion'.

**Remember when you work out your CPA value to factor in the average life time value of a customer rather than just the initial order otherwise you will end up with a aiming lower and missing out on potential sales.

 

[antropy]

Also take a look at OpenCart

 

[richofwombwell]

thanks antropy, im using opencart for my other store but i found it quite hard to get my head around. I have picked up woocommerce and I am coming some ways with it now.

The website is www.supercartridge.co.uk its coming along some ways now but lots of work to do im currently editing it live at the moment.

 

[richofwombwell]

It's not 100% responsive yet and the catalogues dont have images should be completed by the end of july i think at the latest.

Never done anything on bid campaigns but I am looking forward to it as an avenue of growth rather than telesales.

 

[richofwombwell]

I was looking at maybe putting up one ppc campaign just for one specific item that I know is a top seller to begin with to see what the conversion rate was and what I could do to improve the conversion rate starting with one product !