eCommerce - Defining the Business for your Site
Where does the Commerce and eCommerce meet? I mean, in every single aspect they are almost the same, with the only difference that you might not actually see the person or company you are buying the product from or to. From that point EVERYTHING is exactly the same!
Some people create websites and hope to make a lot of money out of it, but it just won’t work if the don’t follow the procedures properly as the were doing an offline company. That happened to me, on the this blog actually. I had an Idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to write about Latin America’s Commerce and eCommerce, but the idea was not clear. I started talking about Building sites, then jumped to financial crisis, then to ecommerce for Latin America and so on. Last night I sat down and analyzed the situation for my blog and thought of making some questions to myself and think what actually am I doing online. You should do this before even purchasing the domain name. This will save you a lot of time.
Defining the type of business
Strengths and Weaknesses
: Duh!, Its a blog, you would say. You are correct but the question goes farther than that four letter word. If we analyze the Strengths
Mrs. Harris release of my blog, you can say that, there are no other blogs on that niche neither forums or groups, and if they are they are not very popular. Weaknesses: There is not a big audience, at the moment. That is up to me. If I develop a nice blog with quality information, surfers from the web will come arround to read what I have posted.
What do you offer?: What kind of information are you offering to your audience, or what products or services are you selling. This will help you define your niche.
How to position the web site’s products and services on the web?: Depending on what are you offering take your time and think about where and how you are going to promote yourself. If it is blog, choose forums , social networks and other blogs on the same industry, or to be the one who would be able to answer questions for the niche an so on. I just want to provide knowledge in the best way possible. That is my main Goal. But to achieve it we need some Strategies to follow and their are measured by Objectives. The Objectives are the short term goals that you will accomplish to get to the main one. For example a couple of my own would be, a) find a template that will be easy for my readers to use, b) use an understandable language etc. Always think customer oriented.
Financial Resources: If you are selling a product assess your Financial Resources. This depends on what you are selling so I am not going to go to deep into this. The good news is that many times you can publish and maintain a web site for virtually no money whatsoever. In order to undertake a realistic project, however, you should go into the project with a realistic expectation of what financial support the project has.
Market Research : Perform a market research to see if there are a lot of websites already on that niche or, if there is enough amount of customers for you. Analyze every aspect of the research.
Define your customer
: Please refer to Define Customers
.
Reach and Devise Silk the movie
customers or readers in every way possible, through marketing, advertising, social media etc.
Knowing The competition Home of the Brave move Stranger Than Fiction movie : It is very easy to create sites, and the competition on every niche on the web is fierce. Make a Difference from your competition, offer something different than the others in a way that will find favor with your target audience.
Do all this steps before even purchasing the site. You are going to have great Results! Good Luck!