Excited to start your ecommerce business? Take these three simple tips on board to ensure success
Starting your own ecommerce business is a fun and rewarding experience.
And being a new entrepreneur is particularly exhilarating, simply because everything is fresh, you’re raring to go, you’re full of optimism and altogether very excited!
However, sometimes, it’s easy to get a little over-excited – and often about the wrong things!
As someone with more than 12 years of ecommerce experience I have most definitely made my fair share of mistakes. So, it makes total sense for me to put you on the right track from the start so that you are able to make money with your online enterprise.
Below, I’ve chosen 3 rookie mistakes that are all too easy to make and then explained how to avoid them.
Your profits are not pocketable – not yet!
Oh, it’s so tempting to take your profits and go on a spending spree. After all, you’ve earned it haven’t you!
But, to grow your business you need to reinvest the money you make. Not only that, you must reinvest wisely.
This may mean for example, not making the purchase of the new computer you’ve got your eye on, and instead investing in some advertising. There’s no point having shiny new equipment if you haven’t got any customers and you’re not selling any product.
By re-investing profit you’ll give your business the chance to grow. Once you are sustaining a regular profit, then and only then, should you pocket a percentage.
One social media platform is not enough
Don’t make the mistake of choosing Facebook over Twitter, Instagram over Pinterest. Where social media is concerned it’s very easy to make the mistake of concentrating your marketing efforts on only one.
The main reason for this is because it is of course time consuming to be managing posts on multiple platforms and keeping track of posts and engagement rates!
However, by using multiple platforms, you do achieve a competitive advantage and can avoid your competition out-performing you.
Keep it manageable – 2 to 4 social networks is about right – and will help you avoid disaster should one of those platforms disappear one day.
Marketing should be your main focus
Don’t waste precious time perfecting the design details of your ecommerce store. Whilst a good design and easy navigation is key, you don’t need to have an all-singing, all-dancing site with bells on it.
It’s your advertising and marketing that brings in the customers and ultimately the profit, so you should concentrate on actively posting on social media daily, several times a day if you can and contacting magazines and blog owners about featuring your products.
Put your store, brand and products out there – that is the way to find customers.
Finally, a bonus tip – stop procrastinating and just start… right now!
This is actually the biggest mistake new entrepreneurs make, and that is delaying the launch of your ecommerce business! Often this is down to fiddling about with unnecessary design tweaks, procrastination over products and strangely enough, the fear of making other mistakes!
Of course you’ll make some mistakes, however it’s likely you’ll get over them fast, learning as you go.
Have a lovely Bank Holiday Weekend!