Anyone running a succesfull eCommerce biz?

John,

If your background is in sales, or you have some real world sales experience, an ecommerce store is a great way to make money on the internet.

If selling is not your strong suit you may want to look into affiliate marketing.

Ecommerce stores generally are niche related enterprises. You can sell all kinds of products, but if they all fall under a single broad niche you will have an easier time getting and keeping repeat customers.

My site carries over 3,000 products from over 200 manufacturers, but there is a commonality that runs through the entire product line. I'm sure people have had success throwing up sites that carry everything from A-Z but I have never met anyone like that so I don't know how that model works.

I can tell you that repeat customers account for the majority of my business, and I would imagine most successful ecommerce stores count on customer loyalty, as well.

If you position your site to cater to a unique demographic, give it a little time to mature to point where your customers no longer search for what they want, they just give you the order, you will have a stable business as long as your your supply chain remains stable.

One of the elements of having an ecommerce site that many people are not aware of is that as a facilitator of commerce you can do it for very little out of pocket expense. In essence, you sell it first, you collect the money, you receive and reship the merchandise, and you pay your vendor 30 days later.

You can also look at dropshipping as an alternative way of moving the physical product. I don't do that, I keep that cut inhouse. But either way, having an ecommerce business rocks from my point of view.

KJ

One of my mentors runs a website called http://clogon.com

He sells clogging shoes...yes, clogging shoes.

Most of his products are drop-shipped but I'm sure he would be happy to help you with any questions. His name is Nate and you should be able to email him from the site.

I have had a ecommerce store for 7 years but it's my own product and I should have outsourced it long ago and instead "held on too long" because I couldn't see the quality go to the curb. Due to material being scarce, higher shipping cost and even USPS increasing again and the heavy hands on nature of packing orders, yadda yadda I have decided to modify it and move it toward a digital product. I had a good run with it!

I pretty much agree with KJ's response.

All of our products fit into a broad niche yet we are very successful 'targeting downward' into the sub niches. Keep in mind none of this has happened overnight, it takes time but well worth the effort.

The shopping cart software we use, and pretty much locked into for now, has much to be desired. Live and learn - But pass on the knowledge learned...

My recommendation right off, not all 3rd party eCommerce solutions are equal, so know ahead of time how you plan to operate your business. It is true in our experience that much of our income comes from very loyal customers, they really do just give us their business with little thought to the competition.

Knowing ahead of time how you want to use autoresponders, build lists, run affiliates, customize pages, use Paypal, Google Checkout, backend sales, and the list goes on and on - is very important to knowing which solution to choose. Or have built, maybe.

Here's a recent experience to illustrate my point...

This week our sales dropped off dramatically, came to find out our shopping cart provider 'updated' their software - this caused problems with our homepage loading fast, real problems.

We had to remove some custom code(been there for 8 months with nary a problem until this week) before the page loaded again. That code was responsible for list building at a rate we had not experienced before and I mean in $'s not subscriber numbers.

You will definitely be glad for taking time to choose wisely how you want to build your site. And what, if any, 3rd party software you might signup to use.

Ecommerce is really nothing more than buying low and selling high. That said, ecommerce is a business model that becomes successful when you watch your costs, get the best margins possible in your product line and Keep Your Customers Happy - not unlike other successful businesses you have admired.

It's a business. Stay focused and stay in business - lose focus and online it becomes difficult to turn things around real fast.

One more thing about customer loyalty - the Internet makes customer loyalty literally as simple as a bookmark.

Read that again.

Visitors become customers for all kinds of reasons, your job is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to become customers.

Some shopping carts I've seen are a convoluted nightmare to get through, in this case your visitor is gonesville... no bookmark, no loyalty, no business.

Make your site Simple to navigate, find products and very Simple to checkout. Visitors will reward you by becoming loyal customers.

Doug

I have several ecommerce stores and I build them for our clients.
My stores are very niche specific. I find it works better that way as I am able to optimize better for excellent organic rankings.

I offer PayPal and Credit card for payments - given the choice, less than 10% of my customers use Paypal for payment.

My primary shopping cart system is Zencart. They have frequent updates and a very active community. I went with a hosted system when I first started. It didn't take me long to figure out that was a bad choice. I moved as soon as I could.

Methods to get traffic is just like any other money making venture. Getting your product out there where buyers are looking. Over 80% of my traffic is from organic search results. Which is another good reason to build it right.
We also use PPC, shopping comparison sites and articles.

One of our stores has over 5,000 products in it but most are around 1,000 - 1500.
KJ - 200 manufactures? I don't have that many with all my stores combined. That sounds like a nightmare to me.
What in the world are you selling that you need to deal with that many manufacturers?

Personally I like to find a few that give me a good rate and offer a wide product line and then promote their entire product line instead of fragmenting my ordering. Once again each of my stores are very niche specific.

I have a few manufactures who drop ship for me but most of my product I stock. I get a better buy rate when I stock items and as long as the are turning over at a steady rate, it works just fine.
I like to control the shipping so customers get their orders "yesterday". Not all drop shippers are reliable - I already lived through that experience.

ecommerce is a different animal from affiliate marketing or selling info products. You will invest a lot of time in it.

Good luck

Niche ecommerce stores are a great way to get started. They are easier to market and build.