Tips For Choosing A Profitable E-commerce Domain Name

If you are starting a new e-commerce internet business, one question immediately pops into mind, what name should I choose? Have you heard of the saying in property, “location, location, location”? Most associate buying property with choosing the right location and it may mean that you make or lose money. Your e-commerce domain name is no different. Think of your domain name as your Internet property, which represents your business presence online. Choose a domain name that is customer friendly and easy to remember:

How To Choose A Profitable E-commerce Domain Name?

Keep It Simple And Easy To Remember
Most customers who look for a website want to remember something that is associate with the product or service you are offering. Unless you have a lot of money to spend on advertising like eBay or Amazon your best bet is to choose a domain name that represents your products and services. Use simple and easy to remember words that are spoken often by your customers. For example, your e-commerce business might be selling racing bikes so consider the domain name: racingbikes.com or roadracingbikes.com. Try to avoid names like joesracingbikes.com or smithsracingbikes.com even if your company is called that. We want to make sure your domain name is easy to remember and captures the widest scope of customers.
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Building A Successful Ecommerce Business: Your Future – Part 5

Over the last four posts we have been exploring the pillars of building a successful ecommerce business. If you have not read these posts, please visit them below as it will lay the foundation for this post:

Part 1: Find A niche
Part 2: Creating Content
Part 3: How To Write Quality Content
Part 4: Where To Market Your Website?

If you want to get more technical information about building an ecommerce website, please read: Moving Your Business Online.

We have discovered how important it is to research and find a niche market, and to build your ecommerce business from what the market demands rather than what you want. Then we discussed about creating unique content to attract the consumers to your ecommerce business and then learning how to write quality content using a step by step method. The second last phase was to market your website’s content and how to promote it virally to spread the information quickly on the web. Our final post is how an ecommerce business will impact your life and what will be the future of ecommerce.

The Impact Of Ecommerce On Your Life

Running a successful ecommerce business can be very rewarding and no doubt will provide you with financial stability, time freedom and the ability to pursue other interests. In my ecommerce business within the niche market of Dragonboating, I have been very able to dominate the industry by providing excellent customer service and meeting their needs. It has given me time to focus on other ventures that I am interested in and also the ability to purse my hobbies in my free time. To get it to this stage, I did apply the steps and systems I have discussed about in this series. If you take the time to follow through and apply everything that I have discussed about you will be on your way to running a successful ecommerce business. Whatever market you decide to purse, remember to take time out and balance your life with exercise, spirituality, personal hobbies and long term relationships with family and friends.

The Future Of Ecommerce

As we move forward in 2009 with a slowing economy there are greater opportunities that are beginning to appear. There will be businesses that fall away and disappear and the competition within those markets will start to shrink. Particular brick and mortar businesses who have higher overhead costs and staffing costs will feel the pinch even more. This is why there is a strong trend for entrepreneurs to start ecommerce businesses and to capture a greater market share. There is no doubt consumers will continue to spend, it is a matter of how well you can market your products and services and to provide them with excellent customer service. This is where I see the future of ecommerce and I have a very optimistic view that opportunities are everywhere.

Tyrone Shum
Optimistic About The Future Of Ecommerce

Building A Successful Ecommerce Business: How To Write Quality Content – Part 3

If you haven’t read parts 1 and 2, you should visit those parts first to understand the whole process before reading this post:

• Part 1: Find A Niche
• Part 2: Create Content

If you have been reading the previous two posts you will firstly understand the importance of finding a niche for your ecommerce business and how to do research for it. Secondly, I discussed about creating unique content that will be crucial to how well you rank in search engines, which will bring consumers back to your website to purchase more products and services.

In this post I will be sharing with you the method to write unique quality content for your ecommerce business. It is important to have a point of difference in the market so your ecommerce business stands out from the crowd. Otherwise you will be lost within the pool of millions of websites already on the Internet.

What Type Of Content Will You Need?

An ecommerce website is made up of informative content written within the homepage to product descriptions. These pages put together will form the foundations of your ecommerce business and helps consumers find your products and services. Listed below are some of the content pages an ecommerce website must have as a minimum:

• Homepage content
• FAQ
• About Us
• Contact Us
• Testimonials
• Shipping And Returns
• Conditions Of Use / Disclaimer
• Privacy Notice
• Terms Of Use
• Product Descriptions

Additional Sections To Boost Your Ecommerce Website Contents:

A post I wrote previously called How To Build Great Pillar Content For Your Internet Business? is a post I recommend reading first to gain a better understanding of pillar content. The post shows you the different examples of articles to write for your Internet business:

1. How To Article – shows people how to do a certain task or instructions on building something
2. Definition Article – defines a term in your industry
3. Present A Theory Or Argument – writing to present some unique thought
4. Release A Significant Resource – a report, podcast, video
5. A “List” Article – it’s very easy to scan and share. Can be a top 10 list or action points
6. Technical Or Visual Guide – a screen capture presentation or how to fix something using a video presentation. It is also a very detailed step by step blueprint on exactly how to complete a task.

You can apply these additional pillar articles to your ecommerce business to further assist in marketing your products and services. Most consumers enjoy reading how to articles which encourages them to take action, so remember to link your products to them within your ecommerce business.

How To Write Quality Content For Your Ecommerce Business?

There a few simple steps you can take to help improve the written quality of your content:

1. Page Structure
Search engines love page structure. The more your page reads like an outline the more search engines are going to like it. Put the most important part of your page (usually a product or category name for an e-commerce website) in a Heading 1 (h1) tag, put the next most important item in an h2 tag. This allows the search engine crawler (the computer that goes through your website to index it) to easily create a hierarchy of the content on the page. By doing this the search engine can determine what the topic of the website is and what any sub-topics may be.

2. Keywords
To find the right keywords to use requires you to find out what people are searching for. There are a number of free and paid services out there that will help you analyse what keywords will help your products be easily found. I discussed about the different methods to research keywords in the first part of this series in Determine The Amount Of Competition. Also you can run a Google search for ‘Keyword Analysis’ and you should find plenty of services. Once you know what keywords you need to include try to add as many as you can into your product names and descriptions. Though, and this is very important, never sacrifice the quality of your content just to cram in some extra keywords. If it looks like you just crammed a bunch of keywords on a page, consumers are going to be skeptical about buying your products. You want people to view your products because you wrote a quality description that included a few keywords.

3. Be Descriptive, Not Deceptive
Never compromise the quality of your writing or product descriptions to jam a few more keywords into the page. Make sure you maintain a balance of good keywords to solid and descriptive writing. Nothing will turn off a potential customer more than feeling like they were tricked into visiting your site because it is so loaded with keywords where the content doesn’t make sense. Don’t get so caught up in getting potential customers to your site that you forget what to do with them when they get there!

In the next post I will be showing you how to market your ecommerce business and to utilise everything we have discussed.

Tyrone Shum
Writing Quality Content

Building A Successful Ecommerce Business: Creating Content – Part 2

If you have not read part 1 of this series on how to find a profitable niche market for your ecommerce business, I would suggest starting at the beginning and reading it first.

In this post, I am going to explain to you why you need content and how it has a significant impact on your ecommerce business. Have you heard the term “content is the king”? If you have, then you will already know the significance it has on any website. This is what Wikipedia describes it as:

The phrase can be interpreted to mean that – without original and desirable content, or consideration for the rights and commercial interests of content creators – any media venture is likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design factors.

Content can mean any creative work, such as text, graphics, images or video.

“Content is King” is a current meme when organizing or building a website. Text content is particularly important for search engine placement. Without original text content, most search engines will be unable to match search terms to the content of a site.

Why Do You Need Powerful Content For Your Ecommerce Business?

The Internet is a huge web of words linked to each other in an amazing way that allows visitors to search information that they require. To sell your products or services online you need powerful content that will be easily found by consumers. Each time a consumer searches for a product or service, they want to find a reliable website that will provide the relevant information and accessibility. The different types of powerful content that can be provided are:

• A report describing the product’s or service’s benefits and advantages
• An article or review giving a biased opinion of the product or service
• A podcast of an interview done with an industry expert about the product or services.

These are some of the ways you can create powerful content that will attract a consumer to our website. This is why it is crucial to provide good quality content.

Leveraging Blogs On Ecommerce Websites

Since the introduction of blogs, the search engines have leaned towards indexing their content more frequently than ecommerce websites. Most blogs are updated daily and provide unique content for search engines, which makes it very competitive to achieve higher rankings. Therefore for your website to stand out amongst the crowd, you should be integrating a blog within your ecommerce business and writing unique content. If you would like find out how to integrate a blog with your website, read: e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging).

You can have unique content on your blog by writing to:

• inform consumers about new products you are reviewing
• what you are adding to your range in the near future
• interviews you conduct with industry experts
• new reports on how to use your products and services
• launch dates for your products and services
• what ideas and opinions you have certain products and services

These are just some of the ways you can utilise a blog. The beautiful thing about having a blog integrated in your ecommerce business is that search engines will love indexing your content and will move your website’s ranking higher much quicker.

In the next post of this 5 part series I will show you the different methods to write unique and fresh quality content that will drive lots of traffic to your ecommerce business.

Tyrone Shum
Creating Powerful Content

Moving Your Business Online

Most owners who start selling online usually have an existing bricks and mortar business. The reasons why a business owner may go online could be to expand their customer base, increase sales revenue, or just to have an online presence and I am sure there are many other reasons as well. I am starting to see a stronger trend from brick and mortar businesses to move online and use online e-commerce systems to run their business instead. Also, for new business owners coming online for the first time I see them starting a blog as a low cost and easy to set up alternative. Let’s have a look at some of the statistics. According to the 2008 Australian Commonwealth Bank Investment Trends Business Owners Survey, they found 42% of business owners had a website, but only 18% of them allowed consumers to buy online. I was quite interested to read this because it shows there are still more opportunities for business owners to capture their share of the online market.

Why Do Business Online?

There are many benefits in doing business online and I have outlined five most compelling reasons:

1. Make money 24 hours, 7 days a week. Imagine waking up and turning on your computer to see that you have made hundreds of sales overnight! In today’s time poor consumer market, we see people shopping online at any time of the day, so having a 24 hour, 7 day a week shop can capture sales you didn’t even know about.
2. It is easy for consumers to shop online and no more waiting in lines. One of the secrets to shopping online is no more waiting in lines to get what you want. Make it easier for consumers to buy from you and they won’t even need to leave their home.
3. Reduces your overheads. The cost of running an Internet business is quite minimal and once your systems are in place your customers become your most profitable asset. With no customer service staff and no overtime to pay, your Internet business can be very lucrative. I am an example of this, as my dragonboat business is an automated system with only one staff to run it.
4. Allows you to focus on a niche market. Some of the most successful small businesses carve out a niche market where they don’t have to compete on price alone. This allows them to expand their customer base globally and dominate their niche market.
5. Streamlines your systems and improves your cashflow. It is very easy to automate your systems with an Internet business as technology is so advanced that it can do virtually anything. It allows you to feed information into your back-end systems and allows you to control where money goes. Additionally cashflow will be improved with faster electronic transactions without having to wait to go to a bank to deposit the money.

Getting Started With Your Online Business

Once you have decided that your business is suitable for capturing online sales, you will want to begin planning how to put it together. There are many parts to an Internet business and more in depth knowledge to acquire, though here is a summary of the components you will need:

The Front End:
Another article I wrote discusses about the front end in more detail showing you how to capture leads: Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads. This will help you understand more about the processes involved.

• Setting up a website. This is the easy part, and also the presence of your business online. First step is to register a domain name, chose a hosting company and build your website.
• The shopping cart. Once your website is setup you can either have an integrated shopping cart with your website or add a shopping cart software. Both with do the same job, the difference is to do with how much you can afford to spend on the website. I’ll explain what is included in a good shopping cart:
  • Marketing tools and information including cross selling tools
  • Order management tools
  • Pricing rules allowing you to offer bulk discounts, special time sensitive pricing promotions and so forth
  • Stock management tools

The Back End:

• Payment gateway. This is important for you and the consumer to have. It is a secure connection between your website and the bank or merchant provider that will send private transactional details. A consumer will feel safe when they are purchasing from your website and provide security from fraud.
• Merchant provider. This is the financial institution that will validate credit card details and make the payment into your bank account. It can be either your banking institution or an online provider such as Paypal or eWay. Shop around to see what is suitable for your business that will provide you with the best package possible.
• Accounting system. More and more e-commerce systems have an accounting package module built in and also give you the option to export data into a well-known accounting system such as Quickbooks or MYOB. No matter what accounting software you use, make sure you have this in place as it will save you time and money over the long term.

There are more components that can be added to both the front and back end of an Internet business. I have provided a basic skeleton to get started for any business owner wishing to set up their business online. If you want to find out more about how to create a successful and profitable back end system to add onto these basic components, be sure to read:
Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End

Tyrone Shum
Helping Business Owners Move Online

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