I have been on meetings many times with people that wanted to build an eshop for their business. After a lot of talking i really wanted to ask them. Are you sure you need an eshop? But i didn’t. I let them ask themselves after i first explained them what an eshop needs to work.
First of all we need to make something clear. If you have money and you don’t care, then you don’t have to read below.
This is a basic principle in any business venture. If you have the money then you can move onto your investment.
So if you want to build an online store then keep in mind that you will need to give everything you have. And i am ma not only talking about money.
Eshop needs time.
Data entry
In your physical store you need to organize your products on the shelves, to renew their prices and to make them appealing to customers. This is exactly what you should also do in your online store.
Online store is a store..
Scenario:
You have 2000 products that you need to enter to your eshop platform. Every product should have a small description – presentation, a couple of photos and some custom fields. (for example for a clothes store, a blouse has color and size)
Let’s say that you have all the above and you are very quick. It will take at least 5 minutes to enter each product. This is 167 hours just to do your eshop data entry.
Unfortunately things are not so simple. It is almost certain that the photos of products that you already have will not meet the requirements to be uploaded to an online store. Whether they are huge in size so they will slowdown the page load or they will have bad quality and will not attract customers. So either you will need to shoot new pictures or will have to edit those that you already have.
So there are some new data here. Every product among with the photo editing will take at least 15 minutes to enter it on our eshop platform. So let’s do some calculations. 500 hours or about a month for our products data entry.
Attracting customers – competition
Here things are much harder for an eshop than a physical store. If you have a physical store built on a road with much traffic, you are ready. If someone goes for a walk and see your products he might buy them. If you haven’t build your physical store near a road that has traffic, then either you will do some advertising or you will close and sell your store. End of story.
Eshop leaves on the desert..
Many people that aren’t very familiar with internet mistakenly think that is very easy for someone to find a webpage or an eshop out there. No it’s not. Is very difficult to find an eshop online because the competition is very hard. Except SEO that is very important you should mostly run advertising campaigns. This is the only way to build your clientele and sell your products.
The only good thing is that there is a great field on social media for advertising. So you will need a marketeer to take care of your campaigns, if you want to succeed.
If you spend 1000€ to build your eshop you will need 5000€ for advertising and marketing.
If you spend 1000€ to build your eshop you will need 5000€ for advertising and marketing.
It needs care
An eshop needs a lot of care to to be done correctly and much more to succeed.
You should manage immediately your orders and shipment if you want your eshop to survive with all the competition out there.
You have to spend a lot of hours staring at your eshop platform on your computer screen, planning your next move. Your eshop should be updated regularly. Advertising campaigns, banners, offers and photos. Everything should change all the time so you can find the formula of success.
Conclusion: Are you ready to give a lot of time to run your eshop? If so, then go for it. If you think that it will run by itself then don’t even bother to start.