Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Yes you need ecommerce. Why? Ask yourself this: If ecommerce wasn't profitable, why are so many ecommerce e-tailers appearing?

A lot of local businesses such as market sellers, arts and crafts shops, clothing shops and corner stores believe that they don't need ecommerce and simply rely on the physical traffic they receive at local markets. If the business is content on limited sales and limited growth potential, then that's fine. But those are the types of businesses who really need ecommerce the most. Why not make sales when you're not at the markets? You could sell while you're asleep!

Especially in travel accommodation and tourism, businesses are no longer able to simply rely on passing foot traffic, referrals and telephone business to succeed. When was the last time you selected and booked a holiday without using the Internet? Last minute booking websites make being online essential to compete for the lucrative holiday accommodation market and to get a slice of mind for the travel dollar.

In Australia and New Zealand, holiday destinations in remote locations are finding that adding ecommerce to their website not only allows them to be found by overseas tourists in North America (who are heavy users of search engines for travel and accommodation bookings) but get access to the lucrative domestic holiday market that is growing heavily at the moment.

Don't be deterred from the past - learn from it

Many people say that they are deterred from setting up an ecommerce website because of the failure of so many dotcom ecommerce websites in the late 1990s. Those failures were because those companies offered poor customer service, poor navigation and were not prepared to put in the effort selecting the products to list, setting their prices, writing appealing descriptions and updating their site regularly. You can learn from this and make your site a success.

Ecommerce has the opportunity to make money

The bottom line here is that if you're committed to putting in the effort, ecommerce websites can make you money with little cash input and ongoing management. If you build a site with high traffic, an appealing design and good products you can eventually sell advertising on your sites too.

If you're not online, you're losing money. It's that simple.

To get started with your own ecommerce shopping cart website, talk to Osc Works today.

How do you make money from an ecommerce website? What kind of e-commerce solution do you need?

Why are so many businesses adding ecommerce to their website? New ecommerce websites are appearing every day and turning retailers into etailers. What's more, many existing businesses are realising that they need to have an ecommerce website to stay ahead of their competition.

Luckily it's not too late to get online and there is tremendous potential for any business to grow and reach new customers through taking advantage of customers who want to buy it now online.

How do you make money from an ecommerce website? What kind of ecommerce solution do you need? How much money you can make will largely depend on the effort you're prepared to put into selecting and listing products, writing appealing product descriptions, choosing your prices, checking out what your competitors are doing and ensuring your site is easy to navigate, leads customers easily through the checkout process, and the order fulfilment process is not too onerous for you.

Done well, an ecommerce website can provide significant financial returns with limited initial investment and ongoing involvement.

How do you make money from ecommerce? Here are some ideas for an online store.

What makes a great ecommerce website business?

Why are so many businesses adding ecommerce to their website? New ecommerce websites are appearing every day and turning retailers into etailers. What's more, many existing businesses are realising that they need to have an ecommerce website to stay ahead of their competition.

While almost anything can be sold online (look at the success of auction sites), some things are particularly suited to online stores as they help small local businesses compete on a level footing with huge multinational corporations.

That's because no matter where you are physically located, in the online world people visit the same places to find things - search engines and directories. If you have a good site, make it easy for customers and have outstanding customer service, people will keep coming back.

Things that are particularly well suited to ecommerce websites include:

• B&B, Hotels and Holiday destinations in remote destinations

• Arts and craft stores

• Hand made jewellery

• Artists - protecting your identity online

• Market stall sellers - sell on the days you're not at the market

• Costume hire companies - let customers find and hire costumes from the safety of their home

• Pizza delivery and fast food - if you deliver a website can be as valuable as your phone

• Gift hamper stores - especially with Christmas coming up

• Book and DVD stores

• Sports retailers

• Naturalists, Homeopaths, Massage Therapists

• Fashion and lingerie

• Computer software suppliers - find new customers, especially if you're a small local software producer

• Florists - reach out to customers sending flowers who don't live locally Selling clearance products from other failed businesses

• Setup and Sell businesses - creating an online business, running it for a short period of time until it's established and selling it. This is a business strategy used by Investment Banks and Property Developers to great effect. By buying, trading and selling website businesses you could too

• Ecommerce resellers - you could buy ecommerce websites at wholesale rates and sell them to your own customers as if they were produced by you. If you're interested in this, Osc Works is leading the way in Australia for ecommerce website wholesaling.

Basically anything that can be viewed online makes a great opportunity, especially for people working from home. And if you have multiple sites you can advertise the other sites using banner adverts on your first site - further driving traffic and links to your site too.

How to get started - making money

Your site can make money if you put in the effort up front. Some things to think about are:

• Give your customers great customer service through having an easy-to-navigate online store, a prompt and easy-to-use payment system and efficient follow up after an order

• Ensure your ecommerce website is easy to manage and has the features you want

• Choose an ecommerce provider who can offer an easy and secure payment method for your customers.

• If your site becomes big enough you may be able to make money from it through selling online banner ads - or allowing search engines to put paid Google Adwords placements on your site.

• It pays to think about your long term needs rather than short term ones. A lot of businesses make the mistake of building a simple website with the view to clipping ecommerce on to it later. But those businesses invariably end up having to rebuild their site - it's usually easier and more cost effective to build an ecommerce site first and then turn off the payment functionality until you need it - that way you can showcase your products and it's an easy transition when you're ready to trade

• Also check out our Ecommerce Xmas ideas.

It's easy to get online if you approach starting a website in the same way as if you were opening a physical store - choose your partners carefully and make sure the ecommerce solution you choose meets your needs before you spend money on it.

Avoid Auction Listing and Success Fees

Setting up an ecommerce site usually comes down to answering a simple question: do you want to keep paying listing and success fees or have your own website and control your content and profits.

If you're a small business selling a niche product then auction sites are an easy way to get started in business as they have access to sometimes thousands or millions of potential customers on their doorstep. But auction sites have some severe downsides:

• You have to pay a listing fee for every product you showcase for sale

• Every time you make a sale, you have to pay a success fee - often a percentage of your sale price

• Some customers may not view your business as reputable as it does not have its own online store - this could limit your growth potential

• You miss out on potential customers who do not visit auction sites.

Having your own ecommerce website is easy to get started. For example, at Osc Works, we help businesses get online through developing a professionally designed site based on their logo and business colours, offer a huge range of advanced features like gift vouchers and have an easy-to-use content management system for adding products and updating their prices. We also offer a payment plan to help cash-strapped businesses get online without a significant up-front investment.

Once your site is online, you'll be in control of the profits you make as it will be your products that are listed in any way you want, and you won't pay success fees every time you make a sale.

Auction websites are a great way to start if you plan on selling a couple of items at home, but for someone serious about growing and running a successful business, an ecommerce website is far superior.

Dropshipping is an arrangement between a retailer and a wholesaler or manufacturer. It means that when a customer purchases goods from the retailer, the retailer accepts payment from the customer but the wholesaler or manufacturer delivers the product directly to the customer. The retailer then pays the manufacturer the wholesale cost of the item.

What is dropshipping and how could it help?

Dropshipping is an arrangement between a retailer and a wholesaler or manufacturer. It means that when a customer purchases goods from the retailer, the retailer accepts payment from the customer but the wholesaler or manufacturer delivers the product directly to the customer. The retailer then pays the manufacturer the wholesale cost of the item.

Advantages of dropshipping
The advantage of a wholesale dropship arrangement for someone running a website business with an online shopping cart is that little or no stock needs to be held on site. This can greatly improve cash flow and reduce costs of finding storage facilities for stock, getting insurance for it and all of the hassle of dispatch.

For manufacturers and wholesalers, a dropship agreement effectively gives their product another reseller with no additional costs for them. It also saves time, effort and delivery costs in managing regular and bulk deliveries of product to retailers - compared to the cost of using inexpensive courier or express mail services to get products to customers.

Disadvantages of dropshipping
The disadvantages to drop shipping are that these agreements can make manufacturing or wholesale purchase quantities difficult to predict for the manufacturer or wholesaler and that in many cases the cost of delivery is on-charged to the end customer which could affect sales for large products such as furniture that would be expensive to deliver. You may also have to manage situations where there are backorders if there is a delivery or manufacturing problem at the supplier's end - which could lead to returns if it takes too long to produce more stock of that item.

Ecommerce businesses: dropshipping is usually worth it if you're careful
For ecommerce website businesses, the benefits of drop shipping agreements usually outweigh the disadvantages. The wholesalers look after delivery, which is one less administrative hassle and there is no stock management either.

Products well suited to drop shipping include books, computer parts, lingerie, adult toys, clothing, bicycle parts, office products or anything that is easy to deliver to customers.

Dropshipping in Australia and New Zealand
Dropshipping can benefit your ecommerce business a lot, but you have to be careful where you're buying from. It pays not to assume that local dropshippers are the best for your profits, or your customers.

For example, as the wholesale and distribution market is not as competitive in Australia and New Zealand as it is in the United States, some drop shippers in Australia and New Zealand can get away with charging high prices that leave little mark-up opportunity for etailers like you to make money on them. Some may be discount stores selling clearance stock and others may be purchasing from other wholesalers to become middlemen under the guise of dropshippers. This also applies to Asian dropshippers who may have low costs of production, but have realised they can charge high prices and still be cheaper than their competition.

It pays to shop around for dropshippers. If you can find the right one for your business, it will make selling online easy. If not, you'll be struggling to make profits on your income and still holding an advantage over competitors with physical stores.

If you can find reputable US dropshippers who will sell to Australia and New Zealand you may be better off going down that route. You will have to check the postage costs using this item however, as you may still need to hold a bit of stock to make the overall costs low enough for you.

For some products it can sometimes be cheaper and faster to purchase at wholesale prices from the US through regular wholesale arrangements than dropshipping, so make sure you investigate the total cost and turnaround times with the supplier you choose. There is plenty of information on the Internet about finding reputable drop ship wholesalers in the US, so we would recommend a bit of Googling before you get going.

Dropshipping is a powerful business tool for your ecommerce website business - if you use it carefully.

Talk to Osc Works about the dropship centre built-in to our new Platinum ecommerce package.

Starting a new business? Here are some starters for ten.

Business ideas suited to ecommerce

Want to start an ecommerce business or expand an existing business, but not sure where to start? Want to get your business online but not sure how? Here are some e-business online business marketing ideas that could get you started.

• Wedding favours - People are always getting married all year around and table decorations are big business. People often want something custom or special on their tables, so it's an ideal small business idea. What's more, 'wedding' is one of the most frequently searched terms on Google.
• Florists - in quieter parts of town an ecommerce website can help get you busy again. Let customers overseas send flowers to the people near you, and they will benefit from your local expertise and freshness of the products you sell. Through the Internet you can offer optional extras too, and increase the value of each sale.
• Set up a drop ship business - if you put in the work finding wholesalers who will drop ship (deliver directly to customers) you can save money holding and managing inventory. Many wholesalers have minimum initial orders then will order in any units your customers desire. Items like computer parts, office equipment, lingerie, pet food, bicycle parts and clothing are well suited to this kin of business model.
• Gift hampers - hampers are particularly well suited to online purchasing, especially if they contain well known items from electronics to confectionary. Experiences (bungee jumping, car rides, hot air balloons, wine tasting etc) are a great online purchase too.
• Artists - sell your art online. The Internet is a fantastic way to reach new customers for your work, and to build your name. Secure a domain name with your name and protect your identity online.
• Arts and crafts. Instead of relying on tourist foot traffic, reach out to the world. Get customers before they reach the shores of Australia and get them buying more. Offer them a discount voucher for your store when they purchase something online and they'll not only buy from you online, but buy in your store too. Offer them another discount voucher in their store to buy from you online after they leave.
• Antiques. With an ecommerce website you could sell antique furniture from your home, cutting overheads right away.
• Manufacturers. If you are already manufacturing anything - jewellery, electronic parts, clothing, beverages, confectionary, mechanical parts, sports equipment and more - an ecommerce website can help you find end-customers and resellers. B2B ecommerce stores can help you sell to retail stores too and set business rules and prices for each group of customers you have. Anything that can be delivered can be sold online.
• Anything that is unique or niche - cloth nappies, your own fashion label, hand made clocks, collectibles, confectionary, antiques, musical instruments, fishing equipment, hand made sleepwear, children's clothing, used wedding gowns, lingerie – an ecommerce website is ideal for showcasing them.

If you're thinking about getting started with an online store, look at the leading auction websites and see what sells. Then think about selling those items with your own store, where you list as many products as you want, pay no listing or success fees have your own professional design and retain your own profits.

If you're interested, talk to Osc Works first. People perform web searches when they are ready to buy products, so why not take advantage of it today. Visit the Osc Works website, look at our ecommerce website packages or our portfolio and contact us to find out how we could help you.