It's a Business, Not a Boomtown
In the early days, towns used to pop up and go bust overnight. Even today, you can go out West and see actual ghost towns, the remains of an unsuccessful settlement, in the middle of the desert. The reason why they exist is gone, be it silver or oil, but their skeletons remain, and the wildcatters who founded them moved on long ago after the local resources discharged up.
Likewise, you have to decide upfront whether you're a fly-by-night wildcatter or a businessman. Businessmen make educated judgments and invest in a community, as a e-commerce site owner, you too have to make a decision whether or not you're going to invest in the web, hold on past the easy money, and go for the long term value. Customers trust business people who have a dedicated outlook towards long-term growth because they know they can count on them to be there.
It's All About "Strategery"
Remember when your old man asked you, "what are you going to do with your life?" It was an important question and still is. The key to everything e-commerce is having a plan. You've got to have a plan. An e-commerce site without a real business plan is like a ship without a rudder. You're going to run aground ever. You need to know what you're going to sell. You need to develop a reputation for reliability with your suppliers. You have to honestly ask who are your target markets and what do they look like demographically.
As an e-commerce owner, you need a solid understanding of what your core demographic wants, how your product or service fits in and how you can make your products a regular and repeatable business model. You need to ask these and a hundred other tough questions before opening up a e-shop only to discover that no one's interested in your 'canihazacheezbrgr' themed Snuggies.
Do not Be Afraid to Get Social!
Uncle Ernie always swore that color TV was just a fad, and he'd probably say the same of social networks, but Uncle Ernie is wrong. The social web connects people in new and interesting ways, and networks like Facebook, Twitter and So.cl are making consumer communication and corporative knowledge sharing a vital part of any company's online strategy.
There are new new online market sections with avid consumers waiting to spend their hard earned money on everything from Tweeters tweeting about Kim Chi taco food trucks in LA to mixed media crafters in Tacoma, who sell through sites like Etsy or Pinterest to global consumers. And they're making serious bank; no kidding. It's a real game changer because for once it levels the playing field for vendors like yourself. You just have to learn to use it to your advantage.
To Err is Human to Forgive Divine
Lastly, be sure that you dedicate yourself to lowering the bar as much as possible. Complicated websites are like the roach motels of the modern internet era. Too often e-commerce site owners clutter up their pages with unnecessary amounts of navigation, catalog items, gobs of text and images in the hope of luring buyers by having as many hooks in the water as humanly possible.
This approach reeks of desperation and just confuses the heck out of consumers, who, as quickly as possible, just want to get their item and pay for it and post pictures of cats on their Facebook page. Try to use a minimalist approach and make it easy to recover from mistakes. You can buy online store templates . Clean pages, logically laid out and well ordered make it easy for your buyers to successfully make a purchase.
