Here’s a Little eCommerce Secret
June 5, 2009 by Audrey Kerwood
Filed under eCommerce
“HTML, Java Script, CSS, CGI, Perl, PHP…
Ahhh… technology. The hustle-bustle, the abbreviations, the wealth potential.
I can remember being in the shoes of the budding Internet Entrepreneur – the one who doesn’t program enterprise wide servers for a living. I thought to myself “ Am I going to need another degree to do this?”
Even today, the word “eCommerce” is the Buzz Phrase or Power Word used to loosely define what we all want to achieve on the Internet: “Sell Something for a Profit”.
Here’s a little secret of eCommerce: Opening an online store front was, for a long, long time, very difficult and expensive because…
…it kept people employed.
All of the web masters, programmers, graphic designers, flash animators, IT Engineers… each was needed to build and operate a traditional eCommerce store front. The expense was astronomical. I’m fortunate to know someone who works for a Fortune 100 company that was a pioneer in eCommerce. His company is huge… with an operational budget of many billions of dollars. The level of resources that his company brought to bear on their eCommerce project read like a list of Atomic Engineers. Spectacular titles, many with PhD scribbled after their names would spend hours hand coding cryptic characters into syntax editors to create a shopping environment.
He once told me the cost of one of their misadventures – Many Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars.
“Here’s the Thing”, he told me once, “The Store Front is tremendous! It looks great, it’s fast, it captures customer information, it can hold thousands of products… but it’s not working.”
So, I asked him what the problem was. He said, “It’s not making a profit”. I asked him how much revenue it would need to make to be profitable. He said, “How much money did you make this year”? It had been a very good year for me. He said “Triple That…”
Gag!!
Ultimately, that’s the problem. What my friend was soon able to take to his supervisors turns out to be the same reason that so many motivated, passionate, work-at-home hopefuls can’t quite seem to make their online efforts work…
“eCommerce is all about technology and when you want to open up an online store, you will need the technology, but that’s not your goal.”
Your goal is marketing and sales. The faces on my friend’s superiors twisted into degrees of anguish and amazement. “What the hell do we know about sales and marketing? We’re spending our money on technology!”
He replied, “My point exactly.”
People don’t seem to realize that selling successfully online is still the same process as selling successfully ANYWHERE.
- You must know where to sell it, and you find that out by observing what people are buying.
- You must know where to find your products so that you can sell them to people that are buying.
- You must know how your products benefit your customers so that they will understand why they are buying.
- You must be able to buy your products cheaply enough to make a profit.
You must serve and protect your customers after the sale so they will buy from you again!
Notice how there was not a single mention of SQL Databases, or DHTML, or Server Side Extensions?
This is how people get confused. When they start shopping for a service to host their online store, they get so carried away in the technology of it they forget that their first and most important responsibility is to get their product in front of the customer.
The truth is, the customer only wants a few things:
A Great Product at
A Great Price,
Shipped Quickly and Efficiently from,
People that they trust to spend their money with.
They couldn’t care less about how fancy your eCommerce shopping cart is; if you don’t have 3 out of the 4 things above, you have not got a chance to sell them anything. Here’s my point.You want to sell online? Then SELL online! Don’t you dare get caught up in all of that technological nonsense that web geeks tell you will make you money.
There is only one thing that will make you any money for your online store – Sales.
You want to make sales online? Figure out what people are buying and sell it to them. You want to make money online? Get your product in front of the right customers and CLOSE THE SALE!
eCommerce is just a tool. Get it setup right and leave it alone. If you want to make money online, go out and find some customers and get them to come to your “Tool.”
Ask yourself, what’s your goal online? Is it to make money, to build wealth? If it is, them why would you focus your efforts on technology? Focus your efforts on Making Money! No matter how good your technology is, unless you have customers, you will not make any money.
The quickest path to income online is to actually make a sale. All other things are secondary. Technology does not matter, so don’t chase it. You can get it already set-up with a built in customer base for less than dinner for 2 at the Outback Steak House. So, you no longer have any excuses to not sell online.
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That's the holy truth! But what makes all works? Maybe luck is also an important factor?
great post to bring back into focus what is important. I’m realizing that i love the techie stuff and creating sites but hate the writing content part which i guess is important! Perhaps time to do some outsourcing?!
I like the techie stuff too, building sites is one of my favorite parts of working online. You don't deny yourself the stuff you enjoy you just need to know when to say, "I've spent enough time on this." Outsourcing is a great way to get the less important stuff off your plate!
I like the techie stuff too, building sites is one of my favorite parts of working online. You don't have to deny yourself the stuff you enjoy you just need to know when to say, "I've spent enough time on this." Outsourcing is a great way to get the less important stuff off your plate!