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Testing New Products - eCommerce Recommendations

by doorty
6 replies
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I've been looking for products online that I think will have a growing demand, but I want to test to make sure there is interest before connecting with a manufacturer.

Essentially I want a fake online store that saves the customer's email and says "out of stock" (or similar) when the user goes to checkout. Most importantly, I want to be able to track when the customer clicks the check out button, so I know which products have the most interest.

Does anyone know any existing solutions for this? I can do web development, but I'd like to find an existing solution. Preferably a solution where once I get confirmation of demand, I can just flip a switch and start accepting payments.

Brent
#ecommerce #products #recommendations
  • Profile picture of the author sweetcrabhoney18
    As an online shopper it seems mean. How would you like someone doing that to you? It'd kill your reputation instantly.

    Why not do a survey instead? Make it into a giveaway to increase the likelyhood of a person doing the survey. You can even use those paid to do survey sites. Seems both cheaper , easier and something that would actually work to confirm if the idea is good or not.

    Best of luck with your endeavors.
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    • Profile picture of the author doorty
      Originally Posted by sweetcrabhoney18 View Post

      As an online shopper it seems mean. How would you like someone doing that to you? It'd kill your reputation instantly.

      Why not do a survey instead? Make it into a giveaway to increase the likelyhood of a person doing the survey. You can even use those paid to do survey sites. Seems both cheaper , easier and something that would actually work to confirm if the idea is good or not.

      Best of luck with your endeavors.
      Interesting concept for the survey. I'm not sure how that would work in practice considering I want to know if they would actually buy it at a given price.

      I don't think it would kill my reputation to test on a couple hundred people. For the ones that actually ordered, I could just email them letting them know it was back in stock.

      I'm curious how other people get into a new line of products without a lot of upfront overhead.
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      • Profile picture of the author sweetcrabhoney18
        Originally Posted by doorty View Post

        Interesting concept for the survey. I'm not sure how that would work in practice considering I want to know if they would actually buy it at a given price.

        I don't think it would kill my reputation to test on a couple hundred people. For the ones that actually ordered, I could just email them letting them know it was back in stock.

        I'm curious how other people get into a new line of products without a lot of upfront overhead.
        You're not an online shopper then. Surveys are what big companies use to do the same thing. Focus groups and surveys. Look it up and spend some time doing research. You want to waste a buyers time and money just for research ...? Doesn't that seem mean to you?

        There are magazines and books that discuss how to test pricing and pricing strategies. They might be able to guide you to something that isn't going to hurt your market or your store but help you do the right there.

        If its a landing page however there is such a thing called A/B testing . Might be worth considering.

        I really hope you don't waste " a couple hundred people's" time. I'd hate to be on the other end of that shopping cart and know the real truth behind that "out of stock " last minute notice. Would piss me off so much that I'd leave a bad review everywhere I could. But that's just me.
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        • Profile picture of the author doorty
          Originally Posted by sweetcrabhoney18 View Post

          You're not an online shopper then. Surveys are what big companies use to do the same thing. Focus groups and surveys. Look it up and spend some time doing research. You want to waste a buyers time and money just for research ...? Doesn't that seem mean to you?

          There are magazines and books that discuss how to test pricing and pricing strategies. They might be able to guide you to something that isn't going to hurt your market or your store but help you do the right there.

          If its a landing page however there is such a thing called A/B testing . Might be worth considering.

          I really hope you don't waste " a couple hundred people's" time. I'd hate to be on the other end of that shopping cart and know the real truth behind that "out of stock " last minute notice. Would piss me off so much that I'd leave a bad review everywhere I could. But that's just me.
          Thanks for the input. Maybe I need to do some more research. My understanding is that it is completely different to ask someone in a survey, "would you buy X" compared to saying okay "give me $ for X."

          A landing page is an option. I was just hopping one of the eCommerce solutions would have this "test" feature built-in.
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  • Profile picture of the author AnamikaSharma
    Buy a few nuber of products that are in demand and test them by selling. You will get the definite result.
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  • Profile picture of the author Himanshu1988
    Why don't you provide a serch engine that will serch for the given product from all popular e-commerce website & then provide the best price. Amazon has one in India (Online Shopping India: Shop Online Books, Mobile Phones, Clothing, Watches, Laptops, Furniture, Tablets & More at Junglee.com). Same way there is a serch engine dedicated for finding chepest books (Compare book prices in India. Buy books online from Indian bookstores | IndiaBookStore.net). Ones you have sufficient data ask an data mining expert to give you meaningful result. Your likely to make more money by applying the above technique rather then the one you have mentioned. However you have to invest heavily initially. But the best part is you can also recover the cost by selling the data (final product of data mining process)
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