Why put your business online? The answer is simple. In today’s business world, it’s essential that your business have an online presence if you want to stay competitive. Your prospective and existing customers use the internet for a wide range of purposes, such as researching products they need, then purchasing those items from the comfort of their homes or offices or anywhere else they may be. Spoiler alert: Your competition is already online and is using their internet presence as an extremely powerful sales, marketing, and promotional tool. Not being online puts your business at a serious disadvantage. Today, the question isn’t so much, “Why?” but rather, “How can you not be online?”
Sounds Like a Plan
If you plan to sell anything online, having an ecommerce plan is as important as your original business plan. Because you’re exploring new territory, making decisions about technology and marketing, and establishing a new set of vendor relationships, a well-thoughtout plan will serve you well.
The first step in writing an ebusiness plan is to decide what kind of experience you want your online customers to have. Think not only about today but also two and five years down the road.
Your ecommerce plan starts with website goals. Who are your target customers? What do they need? Are they getting information only, or can they buy products from your site? These key questions, asked and answered early, will determine how much time and money you’ll need to develop and maintain an online presence.
Second, decide what products or services you will offer. How will you position and display them? Will you offer both online and offline purchasing? How will you handle shipping and returns? Additionally, don’t overlook the customer’s need to reach a live person. A toll-free phone number should be prominently displayed that customers can call any time to get their questions answered by a live person.
As you explore the web for vendors to support your e-business, have a clear idea of how you want to handle the “back end” of the business. If you decide to sell online, you’ll need a shopping cart component, which is a means of handling credit card processing, and an organized order fulfillment process. However, you may decide that your site is informational only and you will continue to process transactions offline.
Finally, even if you build an amazing website, don’t assume people will find you on their own. If you simply build it, they will not come. If you want to develop a consistent flow of traffic to your site, it’s essential that you plan, execute, and maintain an ongoing and multifaceted promotional strategy that’s carefully targeted to your audience. This is in addition to the promotions, advertising, and marketing you already do for your brick-and-mortar business.
Steps to a Successful Web Business
More and more, some businesses start online only, or mostly online, since that’s where many customers are. If you expect to get much of your revenue through your website, according to Allen Moon, founder of On Deck Marketing, you’ll need to consider these seven steps for successful ecommerce businesses:
1. Find a need and fill it. Look for a market first, not a product. If your business will be primarily online, look to online forums and social media to figure out the problem you’re solving and how to best position it.
2. Write copy that sells. Find compelling and enticing ways to draw people in. Create urgency and appeal to bring people through the sales process.
3. Design and build an easy-to-use website. If it’s not simple, expect potential customers to abandon their purchase before they hit “buy.” Don’t go overboard with fancy interfaces that take too long to load or complex purchase systems to pay.
4. Use search engines to drive traffic to your site. Consider pay-per-click style advertising to start.
5. Establish an expert reputation for yourself. Give away free, expert content. Create articles, videos, or any other content that people will find useful. Distribute that content through online article directories or social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, or LinkedIn—or even your local chamber of commerce or Rotary Club.
6. Follow up with your customers and subscribers via email. Build an opt-in list so you can email customers with new products and offers.
7. Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling. At least 36 percent of people who have purchased from you once will buy from you again if you follow up with them. Offer them products and services that complement their original purchase.
The internet changes so fast that one year online equals about five years in the real world. But the principles of how to start and grow a successful online business haven’t changed much.
“The website should be viewed as an integral part of the marketing effort—as another ‘front door,’ if you will, into the business,” says Frank Catalano, a marketing strategy consultant and co-author of Internet Marketing for Dummies (For Dummies, 2000). “After all, the site is a way to distribute information, gather customer feedback, and even sell a product or service. Just promoting a website without regard to overall business goals and other marketing efforts is pointless.”
tip
Building and maintaining a well-designed online presence, particularly a website with an ecommerce component, requires a significant time and financial commitment. For more details on how to accomplish this successfully and professionally without spending a fortune, pick up a copy of The Digital Marketing Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Websites That Sell (Entrepreneur Press, 2017) by Robert W. Bly.
The Name Game
Once you’ve decided to have a website, one of your first “to-do” items is to make a list of possible website names or URLs. Then run, don’t walk, to the nearest computer, log on to the internet, go to your favorite search engine, and type in “domain registration.” You will find a list of companies, such as NetworkSolutions.com, GoDaddy.com, and Register.com, that will guide you through the simple domain registration process. For a modest fee ($8 to $75), you can register a domain name for one or more years. You’ll probably discover that GoDaddy.com offers the most competitive rates for domain name registration, plus the widest range of online tools and services that will help you plan, design, publish, manage, and promote your online presence. You can also check out a mega design-domain site like Squarespace.com, where you can register a domain and choose from hundreds of design templates.
If the name you decide on is taken, you’ll want to have at least two or three backup options. Let’s say that you sell flowers, and you would like to register your online name as flowers.com. A search shows that flowers.com is taken. Your second choice is buyflowers.com, but that’s spoken for as well. Many of the domain name registrars, like GoDaddy.com or Register.com, offer several alternatives that are still available.
From the available names, choose one that’s easy to spell and remember, and describes what your company does. Make sure, however, you’re not imposing on someone else’s trademark or copyrighted name. In many cases, the name of your company, with the addition of dot-com (www.[YourCompanyName].com) is a suitable domain name that you should definitely register.
save
Many domain registration services offer additional free or low-cost options. Domain parking, which holds your registered domain name at no charge until you’re ready to launch, is one example. Email forwarding allows you to use your new domain name to receive email, while domain forwarding directs traffic to an existing site or web page. You can also save money if you pre-register your domain name for multiple years.
If you choose a domain name that’s difficult to spell or that might easily be confused with something else, also register the most common misspellings, or what you think people might accidentally type into their browser to find your website. If you don’t do this, your competition might, and they could wind up stealing some of your website traffic.
Once you’ve chosen a name, prompts on the domain registration site will guide you through a simple registration procedure. You’ll generally be offered one-, two-, or three-year registration packages. Once you pick a domain name and start promoting it, you’ll want to stick with it. Otherwise, you’ll confuse your customers and could lose web traffic. However, it is appropriate to have several domain names linking to the same website. These different domain names can be used as part of separate marketing and promotional plans that target an audience.
Why is domain name registration imperative? Everyone wants a catchy name, so registering yours ensures that no one else can use it as long as you maintain your registration. For a small investment, you can hold your place on the internet until you’re ready to launch.
With your ecommerce name established, start telling people your domain name and promoting it heavily. Make sure you’ve done everything you can do offline to tell people about your site at the same time you actually go online. Print your web address on your business cards, brochures, letterhead, invoices, and press releases as well as on your product packaging and within product user manuals and advertisements. Stick it on other items, too, such as mouse pads, T-shirts, promotional key chains, and your company’s car or other vehicles.
Website Basics
Once you’ve registered your domain name and have a plan in place for what you want to offer prospective and existing customers online, the next major challenge is designing and building your actual website or online presence.
What makes a good website? Before getting enmeshed in design details, get the big picture by writing a site outline. In addition to basic text, your website can incorporate photos, illustrations, animation, videos, audio clips, music, and a plethora of other multimedia elements or content that will convey your information to your target audience in an easy-to-understand, visually appealing, and appropriate manner. The content you develop and publish should directly relate to and help you achieve the goals and objectives you’ve set for your website.
A well-thought-out site outline includes:
Content. The key to a successful site is content. Give site visitors lots of interesting information, incentives to visit and buy, and ways to contact you. Once your site is up and running, continually update and add fresh content to keep people coming back. But don’t overwhelm people with too many things to read or look at. Overly busy sites tend to turn people off. Clean design and easy-to-read are key.
tip
Even if you work from home or have a day job and are starting an ebusiness on a shoestring, customers need to be able to reach you. An answering machine or a voice-mail box that says “We are not in the office at this time. Our business hours are from [blank] to [blank]. Please leave your name and number and a brief message, and we’ll get back to you” is a simple solution. You should also set up an email auto-responder that will guarantee customers that they’ll hear back from you on the next business day or within a certain timeframe. It’s best to stay within one to two business days. The key is to set expectations appropriately.
Structure. Decide how many pages to have and how they’ll be linked to each other. Choose graphics and icons that enhance the content. Overly goofy icons and imagery can be a turnoff when your business wants to portray a professional feel. Conversely, if fun and ease-of-use is a selling point for your company, too-posed and too-professional images won’t match your persona.
Design. With the content and structure in place, site design comes next. Whether you’re using an outside designer or doing it yourself, concentrate on simplicity, readability, and consistency. Remember to focus on what you want to accomplish.
Navigation. Make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to browse the site. For example, use no more than two or three links to major areas and never leave visitors at a dead end.
Credibility. This is an issue that shouldn’t be lost in the bells and whistles of establishing a website. Your site should reach out to every visitor, telling that person why they should buy your product or service. It should look very professional, match the persona you want to convey, and give potential customers the same feeling of confidence they would get with a phone call or face-to-face visit with you. Remind visitors that you don’t exist only in cyberspace. Your company’s full contact information—company name, complete address, telephone, fax, and email—should appear on all or most of your individual web pages and be displayed prominently on your site’s homepage.
An outline helps you get the most out of your website design/ecommerce budget. It will also help you determine whether you, or someone in your company, can design portions of the website or if you need to solicit outside help. That way, when you hire someone, it will only be for the parts of the job that you’ll need to have outsourced.
At this point, you have two options: You can bring your detailed outline to a prospective web designer, or you could go the do-it-yourself route. Once a designer has your outline, the process will be more efficient, but creating a website from scratch can still be costly and time-consuming. Consider researching one of the many website or ecommerce turnkey solution services, which allow you to design, publish, and manage a website or ecommerce site by customizing website templates using online design and management tools. These services are inexpensive, powerful, and allow you to create highly professional websites with no programming skills.
save
You don’t need an expensive website designer—or any designer in many cases. Squarespace has become a go-to for many small and new businesses. It is a one-stop solution for creating a website and can provide quite a few extras, like ecommerce, hosting, analytics, and 24/7 support. A basic business website—which allows you to use Squarespace’s designs and templates; unlimited pages, galleries, and blogs; SSL security features; site analytics; fully integrated ecommerce (with a 3 percent transaction fee); and more—costs $18 per month. Advanced services for online selling run about $40 a month. Other sites like Wix.com and Weebly.com offer some of the same DIY website-building services and ecommerce abilities.
There are only a few possible reasons why you’d want to hire a website designer and/or programmer to have your site created from scratch vs. using a turnkey solution. One reason would be if you absolutely require specialized functionality (either on the front or back end of the site) that isn’t offered by the turnkey solutions. You might also feel uncomfortable using a turnkey solution, or feel you need to stand out from competitors in a way those solutions don’t allow. But, be cautious: many startups initially spend too much on a custom-designed site that wasn’t really required, and regret the decision since their financial resources could have been put to better use elsewhere. Instead, it’s best to rely on an inexpensive turnkey solution for creating, publishing, and managing your website. As your company grows and becomes successful, it’s then possible to transition to a custom-designed site if the need arises.
“A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.”
—HARVEY MACKAY, FOUNDER OF MACKAY ENVELOPE CO
Once you know what tools and resources you’ll use to create and manage the site, the next step is to organize your site’s potential content into a script. Your script is the numbered pages that outline the site’s content and how web pages will flow from one to the next. Page one is your homepage, the very first page that site visitors see when they type in your URL. Arrange all the icons depicting major content areas in the order you want them. Pages two through whatever correspond to each icon on your homepage.
Research Made Perfect
To create an effective website, you need to do your homework. Some good resources are:
Entrepreneur.com’s Online Business How-to Guides (/www.entrepreneur.com/topic/how-to-start-a-business/). This series of articles offers everything you need to know about starting, running, and growing your online business.
eCommerce Guide’s: How to Build Your First eCommerce Website (ecommerceguide.com/guides/starting-your-commerce-store/). These articles list everything you’ll need to get your online store off the ground.
Writing a script also ensures your website is chock-full of appropriate content that’s well-organized. Offer your visitors content that’s valuable, informative, and engaging—make it worth their while to spend time on your site. Provide regular opportunities for visitors to get more content. Whether you offer a blog, free electronic newsletter, a calendar of events, columns from experts, or book reviews, your content and the site’s structure become the backbone of your website.
As part of your website design, use graphics, colors, and fonts that make sense (not just to you but to your target audience as well). Subtle visual cues make all the difference in how visitors respond to your website. Surf around to research what combinations of fonts, colors, and graphics appeal to your audience, and incorporate pleasant and effective design elements into your site. Look at the sites of successful competitors for ideas. Originality can be great, but there’s a reason customers keep flocking to the same sorts of color schemes and designs—they work.
tip
When creating and designing your web content, you won’t go wrong if you follow three basic design rules:
1. Put the most important pages near the top.
2. Eliminate extraneous words and visual clutter from the content.
3. Use headlines, icons, bullets, boldface words, and color only to draw attention to important content, not to distract or confuse the web surfer.
To create a successful website, all the elements must work seamlessly. Sure, having top-notch content is essential, but it must be displayed in a manner that’s easy to understand, visually appealing, simple to navigate, and of interest to your target audience. How you present your information is important. It’s not just about what you have to say, but it’s also the manner in which you present that content that will either attract or repel your audience.
Success by Design
For a successful website, follow these general dos and don’ts of site design.
Do:
Make your site easy to navigate.
Use a consistent look, layout, design, and feel throughout your site.
Make sure your website works with all the popular web browsers (Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc.).
Avoid clutter; less is often more.
Don’t:
Use text and color combinations that are too busy or distracting. Anything that makes your site confusing or hard to read should be eliminated immediately.
Allow the content or links on your website to become outdated; update, fine-tune, and proofread regularly.
Finding the Host with the Most
Now that you have your site’s design and content creation well underway, the next step is publishing your site on the web. For this, you have three basic options. The first is to host it yourself on a computer that can be dedicated as a web server (or a computer that’s permanently connected to the internet) and has a dedicated broadband internet connection. This will prove costly to set up and maintain. For most online businesses, this isn’t the best option, at least in the beginning.
The second option is to use an established and reputable web hosting company, which stores and manages websites for businesses, among other services. There are several large and well-established web hosting companies that cater to a worldwide audience, including Yahoo!, Google, and GoDaddy.com.
Some companies, however, prefer local, small-hosting providers since they offer a direct contact—especially important if your site goes down. Most of these companies also offer domain name services, which we mentioned above, so you can sign up when you choose your name.
A third option—and the most popular (as well as least expensive)—is to use a website turnkey solution. As we mentioned above, this is a company that provides all the site development tools and hosting services in one easy-touse, low-cost, bundled service, which is entirely online-based. In other words, to create, publish, and manage your website, you don’t need to install any specialized software, and no programming is required. Using an internet search engine, enter the phrase “website turnkey solution” or “ecommerce turnkey solution.” Also, check out what’s offered by Yahoo!, Google, GoDaddy.com, and eBay.com.
aha!
If you know what you want to say but are not sure how to best say it, one option is to hire a copywriter to transform your idea into compelling text. If, however, you opt to do the writing yourself, the book Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works, Second Edition (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012) by Janice Redish is an excellent resource, as is Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand (A&C Black, 2008) by Gerry McGovern.
Whether buying from a large or small provider, basic hosting service—along with standards like domain name registration and email accounts—starts at about $15 per month but can go up considerably, depending on your needs.
Still not sure which host to choose? Consider other variables like the amount of disk space allocated to you, available bandwidth, number of email services offered, customer service support availability, database support, and setup fees. For even more information, check out CNET Editors’ web hosting guide, with discount codes for some, at www.cnet.com/web-hosting.
How much space do you need on your hard drive to store your website? Generally, 2MB can hold several hundred text pages—fewer pages when images and multimedia content are included. Web hosts typically offer between 50MB and 100MB of free storage. The better web host contracts offer more than that, say 500MB, which should be more than adequate for most situations. If you’re unsure how much drive space or bandwidth you need, check with your website designer or computer consultant before you sign on a web server’s dotted line.
aha!
Although people have gotten increasingly comfortable with the internet as a secure place for credit card transactions, a little reassurance doesn’t hurt. Have whomever sets up your shopping cart component provide a message to customers that details your company’s policy for protecting credit card information and customer/client privacy.
Keeping Up Appearances
Unless you’re careful when designing and programming your website, it might behave differently to different people. This is because web browsers (the software that enables net users to navigate the web) differ somewhat in how the websites they access perform. Make sure your website is fully compatible with Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, which are the most popular web browsers. Also make sure the content works well with the message you’re trying to achieve (and that it is readable on every browser) and is either responsive (so the typography automatically adjusts on a range of devices) or at least looks good on smartphone and tablet screens, not just laptop and desktop computers.
So, how do you know how your site is behaving? Whenever you have the chance to use computers with different browsers, check your site. Note differences in appearance, ease of navigation, and speed. Be sure to check compatibility with all browsers (and all versions of each browser) before launching your site. Nothing destroys your credibility like computer mishaps.
Ka-ching
The best part of ecommerce is that customers do the work while you make the sales. You’ve probably noticed that companies of all sizes, from SOHOs to the Fortune 500, use sticks and carrots to encourage web usage vs. telephone support for all sorts of transactions. Every time you serve yourself on the internet, whether it’s to purchase an airline ticket, a can of cat food, or 100 shares of stock, you’ve saved the seller money on salaries and, ultimately, office space and phone charges.
In fact, many ecommerce entrepreneurs turn to the web hosting companies we mentioned above to solve all their ecommerce needs, such as handling credit card transactions, sending automatic email messages to customers thanking them for their orders, and forwarding the order to them for shipping and handling—and, of course, domain registration and hosting.
warning
You can create the most incredible website in the history of the internet and incorporate cutting-edge content, but if your text is filled with grammatical errors, misspellings, inappropriate language, or misused words, it will immediately destroy your reputation and credibility. Make sure you edit and proofread your site before you launch it.
Another option is to incorporate an electronic shopping cart, which allows people to place their orders online and process their credit card payment. A site using a shopping cart program should have these four components:
1. Catalog. Customers can view products, get information, and compare prices.
2. Shopping cart. The icon works like the real thing. It tracks all the items in the basket and can add or delete items as the customer goes along. It’s like an online order form.
3. Checkout counter. The shopper reviews the items in their cart, makes changes, and decides on shipping preferences, gift-wrapping, and the like.
4. Order processing. The program processes the credit card (or payment option), verifies all information, and sends everything to the order and processing database for fulfillment
You can also incorporate a simple—and inexpensive—point-of-sale payment program like Square if you’re using the webhosts they have partnerships with. It might be worthwhile because Square and its competitors are often less expensive to use (see more on using these services in Chapter 28).
aha!
Here’s another idea to give your customers peace of mind: Look into third-party certification seal programs that let you post a symbol to signify that your website is using effective privacy practices. Leading firms offering these programs are the Better Business Bureau Online (www.bbb.org). Or you could display the Verisign seal, which verifies that your business has been approved to protect confidential information with industry-leading SSL encryption.
Final Check
You’re almost ready to launch your online business (or the online component to your traditional business). Here’s a checklist to keep you on track:
Keep your online and ecommerce strategy in focus.
Put full contact information on your homepage.
Make sure your online message is clear.
Keep graphics clean and eye-catching.
Make sure your website is free of glitches, typos, and dead-ends that frustrate visitors.
Ensure your site meets its objectives.
Enable visitors to get information quickly and easily.
Make sure your website meshes with the rest of your business.
Once your website is up and running, it’s time to get to the really important jobs. The first is attracting visitors to your site (generating traffic) followed by encouraging them to become paying customers. Promoting and advertising your site properly, and on an ongoing basis, will be essential for its success. To learn how to do all this and more, turn to Chapter 34.