Ecommerce 101 Part 2

Cookie Cutter sites vs Custom sites

Welcome to part two of my blog series designed to help you get your business making money online.  Today I'm going to talk about the main choices that you have to make when choosing your ecommerce strategy.  These choices are critical in deciding how profitable your ecommerce strategy will be and profit is the bottom line here isn't it.

Think about your Ecommerce website the way you would when hiring a sales person.  There are two types of sales people, order takers and business chasers.  Both have a place and it is up to you to decide which is prefereable for your business. The same applies to ecommerce websites.

The Order Taker

You could choose a cheap cookie cutter ecommerce website that is very good at accepting orders.  This is not a bad choice if you have a big existing customer base that you can simply direct to the site making it easy for them to place repeat or new orders.  This can be very profitable if you have an email list that you can market the site to at minimal cost. These types of site are generally not particularly Search engine Friendly nor do they offer great potential to gain from SEO campaigns.  This doesn't matter if you have an existing customer base that you can market to cheaply.

If you need to drive new traffic to this type of site that is much harder.  You will then find yourself spending large amounts of money on Search Engine Marketing strategies like adwords and the like as well as offline marketing, constantly monitoring the margin between what you are spending and the profits per sale.

The Business Chaser

This is the salesman most businesses wish they had hired. In website terms it is the custom website.  Now by custom I don't mean that you pay for a team of programmers to build you a new shopping cart application from scratch.  Website technology has move way beyond that and any website developer that wants to take you down that path should be avoided at all costs.  For example some years ago I was associated with a company that spent over $100,000 developing an online directory.  Today you can buy off the shelf applications that do everything that directory did and more, for under $200.

When I say custom website, I mean a website built using the latest tools and applications configured to give you all the functionality you need, in a Search Engine Friendly website that is easy to get well ranked on Google using SEO techniques and is easy to self edit and self manage if that is what you want.  This is really the only approach to take if you want to sell products or services to new customers who find you on Google.  It costs you more up front but a lot less in the medium term.

The other big advantage of this approach is that you can choose a shopping cart application that meets your business needs.  Now in this day and age you would think that all shopping carts would be much the same wouldn't you?   Well there not.  For example, do you want the website to track your available stock?  After all there is nothing worse than having to call a customer and tell them that you don't have the product they have ordered and paid for is there?  If so, do your products come with different attributes like sizes, colours, fragrances etc?  As strange as it might seem, the majority shopping carts don't track stock by attributes so the system can tell you that you have 300 men's tee-shirts in stock, but it can't tell you if they are all pink and size XXXL which is probably something you should know right?

So unlike the cookie cutter site approach, you get to choose the functionality you want.  You get more flexibility in everything from the way you display products to the way you structure delivery costs.  For a business with only a handful of simple products a basic Paypal shopping cart might be the best choice whereas a business selling a wide variety of clothes in a range of sizes and colours will need a more complex solution.

Now as I said, both of these approaches have their advantages and you need to choose the right one for your business.  I've seen many retailers who have taken the cookie cutter approach because they bought on price alone only to find that it just didn't work for them.  They then end up having to start over so the cheap solution ended up the most expensive.  I've also seen businesses with a very simple business model who have been oversold with a solution that is way too complex for their needs.

Prices for custom websites vary enormously but are often less than you might expect because of the advances in software in recent years.  But the important thing is that you choose the most profitable solution for you, not the cheapest or fanciest because profit is what its all about isn't it.