I love the idea of owning a website that is dedicated to shopping. If you have the products and the ability to set up a competent shopping website you will almost certainly always have a winner. To correctly put this type of website into its own category here I say that it must be a website that has a shopping cart system in place and where you actually pay for the product on that website.
While the hard parts of owning a shopping type website are tedious you gain one massive advantage and this is the fact that if your marketing is done correctly you are in a position to drive very targeted traffic to your website.
Here are a few pointers that you need to consider with the ownership of a shopping website
Choosing your niche
The different types of products that you could put onto a website that are sell-able as a real deliverable product are many, but naturally your decisions on what that product is and how big the actual stock-holding should be is your decision. You could arrange to have drop shipping done and this method is becoming more and more popular with the owners of shopping websites.
Setting up a good template
If the products that you sell are not many your flexibility in the choice of your website becomes much wider. But if you plan to have a range of thousands of products then you need to buy or design a custom template that is capable of handling all those products.
That all important initial impact is critical as most people judge your entire business within those first few seconds and your business will live or die on that judgment. However you need to decide beforehand on factors like are you selling specials or selling on price or do you want to create an image of luxury to get a higher price out of the buyer.
Checking on daily prices, links etc
Two factors are going to be vitally important to the daily running and therefore the profitability of your website and they both need to be carefully controlled.
The first is to be continually aware of factors like price changes, and inventory. Never let yourself be in a position where you end up having to deliver hundreds of an item at the “old” price. Constant vigilance on these daily fluctuations is so important to the health of your business. I suspect that you are fully aware of this.
Money flows
You are going to need to set up a very sophisticated shopping cart or payment system as you need the buyers to not have any obstacles in their path as you obviously want it to be very easy to make a purchase. You will also need to make it clear to your buyers as to what all the charges are and things like delivery charges so as to have to whole system running smoothly.
Marketing and traffic
Finally the most important factor is that you need to drive huge amounts of traffic to this sort of website as your profits will depend upon all this traffic. I would suggest that you build a few other websites that are very product keyword strong and use those websites to direct your traffic.
Naturally one of the best ways to get your traffic is to run a carefully controlled pay per click campaign and control the flow of your visitors in that way.
