Starting an Online eCommerce Business
June 12th, 2007 RustySomeone asked me for advice on starting a web business selling traditional goods and services. This seems a common enough topic so I thought I’d share on my blog.
This is just my 2 cents…
You have several options that, of course, vary with investment. Anything I don’t link to can be googled!
First, let me state that I am a Microsoft slut. I use almost exclusively MS products for website development. I am not going to recommend many MS products because the cost of entry is significantly higher. Long term, however, the total cost of ownership is much less. In my experience, the first website you build is going to be redesigned when it’s time to grow again. That would be the best time to consider investing in commercial software. However, if you decide to use a custom website solution and find someone who wants to build your site in Asp.Net, go for it. On the other hand, I have also become quite a fan of Open Source. The community supported products tend to innovate just in front of commercial offerings because individuals are solving their own problems and then sharing rather than evaluating the revenue potential of a new feature. It’s a toss-up, at this point, and I say decide on cost over 24 months.
The one thing I will recommend immediately is idealize Google. Do what Google says. Follow their guidelines. Make your site Google-friendly. Be a good Google citizen (no SEO spam). They will reward you.
Website Engine
You’ll need something to build your website with. The days of static html pages are pretty much over. Basically, you need something that generates html content from a database (you probably already get that). Here are some options. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
1) eCommerce Portal - Yahoo Business / Shopify
I’m a big fan of Shopify and think they would be a good place to start. http://shopify.com
They provide a business portal for free. If you outgrow their services, you can build a custom website later when you’ve already grown some revenue. Yahoo also provides a business website solution that appears to be relatively easy to use and effective for managing something like what you described.
2) 2) Customized Content Management System (CMS) Website – Drupal, Umbraco
A community favorite is Drupal http://drupal.org/. This will give you more freedom to do whatever you want without the complexity of a built from scratch website. You’d need to have someone familiar with PHP ( and ideally Drupal ) set it up for you at first. Its mildly technical. If you are pretty savvy, you could probably figure it out. However, your time is better spent writing your business and marketing plans! Drupal requires PHP and MySQL which are both free and provided by any hosting company worth considering.
Umbraco is relatively new and less mature but its written for Asp.Net. A local Atlanta software boutique uses their product exclusively for content management and is able to produce web apps very profitably using it. As a side note: they also exclusively use Brazil for out-souring for many reasons I won’t go into here.
3) Custom eCommerce website
This is the most expensive of the three and probably the solution you’d eventually want to grow into. This may very well be an extension of something like Drupal with tie-ins to a Shopify portal, face book, etc. Ultimately, nothing off the shelf will provide absolutely everything you need. The idea is to start with the most important 70% and then build the rest as it makes sense.
See if you can find a website address that is available that fits your brand. If you can, and it won’t cost you $10K, register it now. If you find a url that rocks, register it for 10 years. Many search engines take the length of registration into consideration when raking a website. To start building some content and introduce you url to the search engines, I’d recommend using WordPress to get a blog up and start adding content related to your T-Shirts and environmental causes. Any new Url will remain in the Google sandbox for about a year. That means you won’t be able to build organic (search engine sourced) traffic right from the first day your website comes to life. The way to plan ahead for this is to set up your domain name as soon as possible and start blogging on it. I use GoDaddy for domain name registration and WebHost4Life for my personal hosting. This is a good parking solution that will help you get some traction for when your site officially goes live. It only costs $15 / mo plus one time domain registration. You’ll need more robust hosting for a transactional website but you can move it anytime.
Finally, the trend today is to have a website that represents your online business. The trend is to have a web identity that carries across various online communities that may stretch outside your site. You should probably be considering how you could access existing online communities such as mySpace and FaceBook where they live.
I hope that helps you get started.