Selling Something On Your Site The Smart Way…
a.k.a. “Don’t put the shopping cart before the horse”
There are a lot of neat things you can do with web sites nowadays that will save you time and help your business grow. From highly interactive to highly automated, if you can dream it up then it can be built.
But if you have big plans for your site, I’m sorry to say you’re probably going to lose thousands of dollars and months of time on it. Let me show you what I mean…
We’ll use shopping carts as an example, but this can be any number of web site features.
I hold a conference call each day where my site members can call in and ask me internet marketing questions. I often have beginning business owners tell me they need to create a shopping cart for their site so they can sell their products or services.
They “need” a shopping cart, or so they say.
This is the point where I usually ask them a question.
“Have you sold any of your products through the internet yet?” I’ll ask.
“No” they reply. “That’s why I need a shopping cart.”
Grow into it
Before springing for a full e-commerce solution, there are things you want to do first…
Start with a phone number that visitors can call. Place it on your web site and see if people from your web site actually contact you prepared to buy something.
If the call volume starts to become too much, move on to using “buy now” buttons from PayPal and Google Shopping Cart.
Maybe these simple solutions will work great for you and you can stop there. If you do outgrow those, there are simple shopping cart systems out there who can provide you with more flexibility like OneShoppingCart and Yahoo Shopping Cart (these are just two possibilities).
If those start going well, then (and only then!) you’re ready to consider building a custom shopping cart that integrates perfectly with your web site and has all the features you’re looking for.
Too often web site owners go all-out on a shopping cart system then they open their doors, thousands of dollars and months of work later, to the sound of crickets chirping.
This goes for anything…
Forums and user communities, elaborate emailing campaigns, backend databases, special applications, other custom programming…for most of your web site features you can start off very small and simple. When it becomes apparent that visitors are using that feature you can always get more elaborate and put more time and energy into that feature. There’s usually no reason to go all the way to the high-end solutions when the basics will do.
The point is this–if you try to build the perfect site all at once:
- it usually takes a long time to put it all online, and you’re missing out on potential customers during that time
- you lay out the money before the site starts contributing to your bottom line
- you often find out site visitors don’t interact with with the site like you expected, resulting in whole areas of the site that simply don’t get used
Ignore me if…
The only exception I’ve seen to any of this is if you’ve started and successfully launched several businesses in similar arenas and you know what to expect because you’ve been through the process many times before.
It’s when you’re venturing into the unknown that you want to take it a step at a time. Not only will you get up and running faster, but you’ll often find your site will naturally evolve into something much different that you originally expected. This is because you built it a piece at a time based on what your customers want, not based on what you thought would be best.