I was asked recently by my friend to recommmend a web designing firm to him because he is interested in selling some of his products online. If he had asked me about this 5 years ago, I would have readily handed out my contacts. But looking at the sheer number of web hosting/e-commerce sites today, it really doesn’t make any sense for anyone to invest hard earned money in what will probably be a several months project (due to testing) that may need serious/costly maintenance (after launch and the problems surface) WHEN you can purchase one, off the rack, ready to go, for a lot less money down.
IN THAT CASE, WHY NOT JUST SELL ON E-BAY/FROOGLE/ETC.?
If you’re not sure about whether you want to make your business a real going concern, then by all means, stick with the auction sites and the shops you can set up inside. The traffic is good and the cost minimal. However, if you actually want to create your own brand, it doesn’t make sense to be hiding inside a department store beside the discount racks when you can have your own flagship store for less than US$80/month.
SO WHAT WORKS?
One of the companies I took a serious look at is Interspire whose cheapest service costs US$24.95/month. It’s cheaper than ashopcommerce.com which is offering its most basic services at US$49.95 and provides a fully functioning e-commerce site, fully customisable, professional look & feel, and here’s the clincher- is risk-free for 30-Days (v 10 days for ashop), ample time to determine whether your product sales will be successful or not.
MORE GOOD STUFF
Interspire also takes care of the entire initial setup (transfer of products from an excel file) for a modest one-time fee (US$49.95) so if you’re absolutely clueless about back-end systems, you don’t have to worry. They also provide the hosting and on-going management of the e-commerce site as well as technical support, not just for you, but for your clients.
FOR THE GEEKS, they also have:
- Integrated META tags module
- Static HTML Catalog Generator module (creates HTML pages for every product)
- Unlimited “informational pages” with auto linking in the store – no FTP upload required
- Available Professional SEO module – which allows you to specify unique Title, Keywords, Description, H1 tag and HTML page name for each Category, Product and Static page in the store.
- Lots of included features and hundreds of add-ons from third party developers
- 100% uptime guarantee, hosted at Datapipe and Rackspace data centers.
- MY PERSONAL FAVOURITE: You can ADD multiple sites under the same account and doesn’t every serious internet based marketer have several sites?
ADDITIONAL MARKETING BOOST
Probably the most costly aspect of selling something online is marketing. Aside from having a good strategy in mind on where to buy ads, which blogs to pay for reviews, what are the best key words, it’s good to be integrated to product data feeds that will bring people from the popular shopping sites (Froogle/Google Base, Yahoo, Shopzilla (Bizrate), NexTag, Pricegrabber, Share A Sale, Shopping.com, Shopferret, Affiliate Future, RSS 2.0) to your own. Finestshops has this service so if you’re seriously looking to set up, I highly recommend them.
You can check out companies which have used their services as well.
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