I'm looking in to starting a niche e-commerce company that would sell real products via the Internet. Being new to this, I've obviously got some questions and I was hoping the DP community could help me out with some answers. What methods do you use to promote your ecommerce store and which are the most successful? How are your the conversion rates? What payment methods do you accept? Within the US, what shipping companies do you prefer to ship via? Ballpark, how much money are you making per month and how long did it take you to get to that point? At what level do you keep your inventory? Only a few of each item at first, then slowly increase quantities as you better know the demand? Any and all advice would be hugely appreciated.
1. SEO and brand management/awareness related marketing 2. Through the roof 3. UPS, fed-ex, snail mail should come standard in most shopping carts 4. Up there as well, depends on the demographic 5. Hard to answer that one without knowing what you are selling, what your margins are etc. That is the merely the tip of the iceberg. If you need to be covert about it out of the gate you can shoot me a pm and I can point you in the right direction. I am an e-commerce consultant. I do this about 14 hours a day for folks. There are range of things to consider before you get to your series of questions. Business models should come before one line of code is written or things get designed. hope that helps, Nigel
Few tips for you could be: make the URL of the website Search Friendly, Ensure proper meta tags are added to all product. With respect to accepting payments, you can go though paypal.com (API) or authorize.net. Recently my customers have trouble getting approved by authorize.net. They are getting very picky. if you do not want to keep inventory, you can find a drop shipper
i've question wich one is better using Wordpress with plugin wp-commerce or another CMS for E-commerce (prstashop for example)?