new website

13 years ago

How many items are you wanting to sell? I would recommend the Joomla/virtuemart combinations, unless you have TONS AND TONS of products, then I would recommend using magento.

Thanks

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miked

13 years ago

Wow.

Your question is simple but the answer is not.

The answer is .... it all depends.

Are you currently selling products off-line from a brick and mortar store? How are you currently selling products?

Who are your customers? What is their profile? Where do they currently go to find similar products?

You need to do some product/market research first before considering a website. Find forums where your prospective customers hang out. Your product must solve a problem. Where do your prospective customers go to currently to solve that problem?

What is the market like with respect to competition? Specialty product? Or are you competing against companies with lots of muscle and advertising dollars?

What is your advertising budget? How are you going to promote online sales?

Do you have a marketing funnel in place? Going from cheaper items to more expensive?

Try to provide more details and we might be able to give you better directions....

Good luck!

Mike

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collmax

13 years ago

Hi Miked,
Thanks alot for your post. We are currently not selling from physical address (mortar and brick store).
we want to establish a complete online store. What we do is use certain software to do market research and see what product people are buying online, see if we can get suppliers to buy from at cheaper rate and then market it online. Haven't started yet. we are still doing research and building stock.
what we are not yet figuring out is how to promote these product when we start selling. Our budget for advertising is very lean. We are banking more on organic search engine traffic etc
Are we doing things the right way.
what more can we do, or whats the right step to take.
Thanks alot

Thanks
1 reply

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Ken Durham

13 years ago

Originally Posted by collmax

Hi Miked,
Thanks alot for your post. We are currently not selling from physical address (mortar and brick store).
we want to establish a complete online store. What we do is use certain software to do market research and see what product people are buying online, see if we can get suppliers to buy from at cheaper rate and then market it online. Haven't started yet. we are still doing research and building stock.
what we are not yet figuring out is how to promote these product when we start selling. Our budget for advertising is very lean. We are banking more on organic search engine traffic etc
Are we doing things the right way.
what more can we do, or whats the right step to take.
Thanks alot

My first bit of advice, do not "bank" on organic search traffic. You may be in for a let down or long wait or having the rug pulled out from under you. Search traffic should be secondary and icing on the cake.

Use discussion forums, article marketing, Facebook, build your mailing list with newsletters and giveaways, video marketing, affiliates, etc...
You will want to hit as many avenues as possible. Many avenues only cost in your time.

No set theme to the products?
You will want to brand yourself as a trusted supplier of products at better prices. Concentrate on excellent customer service to give you an edge. Give discounts and rewards for returning customers. Use a points system for a refer a friend campaign also. There are many ways to generate traffic for low cost, besides the searches. Just get your name out everywhere so when someone sees your business name they think of a good deal with friendly, helpful service.

Know your competition as well as you know yourself. What are they doing to generate traffic? You will find that most of the larger companies only get about 30% of their traffic from organic searches. Affiliates, PPC, and brand awareness are their key to large amounts of traffic.

You can also get coupons for PPC trials at Google, Bing, Myspace, not sure about facebook.

Concentrate on your plan before going live. Know where you are headed and what you are going to do before you get there. It tends to eliminate the headless chicken syndrome.

The best of luck to you in your venture.

Ken

Thanks
1 reply

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romioshiny 13 years ago

I am working to make a web site on marketing. I put many things such as blinking hyper links, flash buttons, and use dreamweaver for designing. I am still working and make it extra ordinary.
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Kysersoze

13 years ago

I sell a couple of physical products and built websites specific to those products. It has been a great success for me and I rarely spend money to promote the site. I do a lot of SEO work to rank for popular keywords on the first page and the products convert well for me.

It seems you still aren't even sure what products you want to sell, is that right? If that is so forget about how you market the products, you first have to decide what you want to sell to know how to go about it. I would suggest picking 1 to 5 products to start instead of trying to have a bunch. Be good at a few and master those products before jumping in and getting overwhelmed. It's especially important for you since you do not want to spend much money on advertising. Just getting one page with a specific product to the first page can be daunting, imagine if you have a huge line, patience is key. Crawl, walk and then learn to run.

Oh and make sure you can actually compete in the market you are selling. If you pick the wrong product with a ton of competition you won't be a happy camper.

Good luck to you.

Thanks

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wondergirlseo

13 years ago

Originally Posted by collmax

am planning to start selling physical product online, presently building stock and thinking of how to launch a successful online supplies website.
Is there anyone who has idea about how to go.
Thanks

Do a google search for a good dropshipper.

When you find one, look for the terms of their sales....

Make sure their terms don't put you in a bind when a customer

buys something and wants to return it, etc.

Thanks
1 reply

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Baron1 13 years ago

I am new on in this forum and also new to make out the web design.i really need to understand how to make a website design.
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zeeshi570

13 years ago

you can use joomla and can use any virtuemart compatable template

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harryplat

13 years ago

I have just decided to create a new website with the help of PHP and Joomla. The web site is for E commerce and I think to add the best Javascript for it.