osCommerce templates,Zen Cart templates,CRE Loaded templates
Click to go back to the site, to the collection of free e-commerce templates and premium oscommerce,cre loaded and zen cart templates.Can an online shop help you overcome crysis?
Everybody is facing hard times these days, from small shop owners to large companies, see what’s happening in the auto industry for example these days. Everybody is cutting costs, trying to lower expenses, letting the usual part with increasing the profit for later.
Considering this, can online business be the answer to this crysis? Can an online shop help you overcome it considering the fact that the costs for an online shop are lower than for a normal shop? I would say that you should consider this as an option to your brick and mortar shop.
Online shops have the advantage of a potentially huge market that you can reach way easier than with a normal shop, costs are way lower because you skip a whole set of things you would need otherwise. You need less employees for an online shop, you need less money to start the shop (think Zen Cart and a Zen Cart template for example, or Magento and a template for it), you don’t need the location, you build it from scratch, considering the fact that you need to build the site, but given the open source solutions that I suggest, costs for building the store should not be that high.
All these conditions gives you a head start comparing to a brick and mortar shop and should help you overcome the crysis with a bit of a plan and a bit of money. Because, remember, online shops are cheaper but…not that cheap!
How Much An Ecommerce Site Really Costs?
I was reading this morning an article about ecommerce websites and about building a business out of it. The author is a professional consultant for online websites. What he pointed out is the fact that you can not build a website with just $500 or $1000 because it would require way more than this to have a professional ecommerce website.
You can start from Zen Cart and from a free Zen Cart template, OK, and work your store around one, but that’s not enough. See, on the internet you see all kind of 1 man ecommerce sites that work pretty well, but if you want to start a store that has real merchandise, stocks, employees, etc, it is way more than this.
The fact is that at that level you need an experience that goes way beyond your web skills, it comes to business skills and to organizing teams, because any store that has stocks requires more than 1 person running it. Think of the fact that you need
- somebody to handle orders
- somebody to handle customer support
- somebody to handle the actual products being packed and delivered
- you need hard contracts with delivery companies, etc.
- accountant
- hard contracts with suppliers
All these require money and skills. Business skills, that is. You need to know how to run a real store before starting a large scale ecommerce website. The fact is that such a site needs to be started right, once you invest money in it, needs predictions of profitability, a business plan, a marketing plan, etc. You need to know how much to invest in int when you start it, how to promote it and when it will become profitable.
Of course, virtual products such as Zen Cart templates, free or premium, or e-books, or online services don’t require the same number of people that a shop with physical products would require, but still you need people and money for it.
Have you ever tried to imagine how such an e-commerce site would be built? How much money would you need for it? I guess most of us run small stores, like this one here, small shops that don’t require many people behind it, 1 or 2 usually make the store run pretty good.
Have you thought about it?
Be smart, set a goal for your business!
One of the most important steps in building a business is setting up a goal.
This is true when it comes to ecommerce websites, maybe even more than in offline businesses. You have to set up goals relative to the business itself, to the traffic you expect, to the sales that you expect, everything.
Setting a goal is very important because it tells you where to go. You need to set a goal that follow a few simple rules, in order to actually work. The goal that you set for your business must be:
- measurable - you can’t just say I am going to have sales. That’s no goal. You need to set a goal something like I am going to sell 5 products per day. Or 10, or 15, only you know how much you need to sell in order to have a good business there.
- reasonable - OK, I guess you know it already, you can not expect to have 100 per day sales starting tomorrow. It is not something that you just dream about and it just works. You need to set up a goal that you can reach, otherwise you will get discouraged. The fact is that even if you don’t reach it, and you only reach half of it may help you, since it is a big step forward. Personally I set a goal of 5000 visits per day for a website, in 6 months. I reached only 800 per day, but hey, that’s not bad at all, is it?
- time framed - you can say that it’s the same thing as measurable, and in a way it is. But set a time frame for your goal, don’t just say I am going to sell 100 products per day. Say I am going to sell 100 products per day by the end of this year. That’s a goal.
Setting a goal it is not always an easy thing to do, but it helps you a lot, if you work to achieve it, you will get there. You will have a target, you will need to define a way to get there, find means and develop procedures to reach your goal.
Be smart, set a goal for your business!Now!
Every two sites are different. Try running an osCommerce template site and a…charity templates site. You’ll see!
I was thinking the other day about the efficiency of one line of business or another. Speaking about ecommerce websites, because fater all, that’s my very topic here, I can say that each site is different. Each domain has it’s own particularities, the effort to run a business in a particular niche may be different than running another business in another niche.
I should know, after all, I have more websites, and I can tell you that indeed, every one of my sites is different.
One of the rules of efficiency says that once you have an efficient flow of revenue, you should try to duplicate it in order to multiply it. After all, you already know the business, right? You already know how to handle it. Well, this is not always right.
I mean, let’s say that you run a business related to free osCommerce templates,or free Zen Cart templates (not being far away from what I do,isn’t it?) and you decide to start another site on,let’s say, charity web templates. You may say that hey, I know the business, free web templates businesses do this and that and we’re there… Well, you should reconsider your opinion. The fact is that running a charity templates web site may be totally different than the previous example, with Zen Cart or osCommerce templates.
You will see that you will experience different conversion rates to whatever you use to monetize your site, you will experience different revenues from the advertising providers, you will see in some niches, visitors know more about web sites than in other niches and this may lead to less revenue for you in some cases since savvy users are not always the best shoppers.
But the good news, cause there is a good news also, is that you should just jump on the wagon and start that other site you planned, even if it may be a bit different than the one you have, it will give you new and exciting thrills and it will greatly improve your overall ecommerce experience.
And it will be a lot of un!
Tracking visitors in offline stores?
Ecommerce is a very interesting line of work. I mean it is a measurable actvity, you can count almost everything there. Just think about it. It is more difficult to count the number of people that entered your phisical store, but it is way easier to count how many people entered your online store. There are so many tools to do this, isn’t it?
That means that is is way easier to keep track of how sales are doing. You should think about your phisical store, how hard it is to actually know the conversion rate. What could you do? Count how many people entered the store for the full month and see how many sales you had? Well, not very easy, isn’t it? How could you do this? Install a counter on the doorway? Or ask your seller to count people, if it is a smaller shop? It is difficult to count how many people entered there, how many are returning, and well, what’s the behavior, where they went, what products they visited…
My marketing teacher told us in a class about how some store thought to track this: they gave people on the entrance some peanuts and let them go free through the store eating peanuts, then, at the end of the day they followed the areas that were the dirtiest in the store…Damn, I hate this kind of counting! This only proves people are messy, imagine how you should do this in your store with peanuts…Hilarious I’d say.
See, in an ecommerce shop you just put a tracker. Easy enough, isn’t it?
Ecommerce after winter holiday
It is very interesting to watch how things go after winter holidays. I mean, I can tell you that in December, sales went up with a comfortable percent, for ecommerce web templates as well for other products I am selling, such as exersaucers, for example. The advertising revenue decreased in December, that’s my own observation, probably people were willing to pay less for it since sales increase anyway.
However, in January, after the winter holidays, I can tell you sales for web templates, ecommerce or other types, decreased. The same for baby exersaucers and other similar products. But, the advertising revenue went back where it was before December. It is a very interesting fact, in my opinion, something very interesting to observe.
I guess, everybody who looks at it from a statistical point of view can say the same. It is said that everything that is motinorised grows. I guess you all monitor your business, no matter what you sell. The fact is that if you don’t, you should start right now. You will be able to tell a bit later how things go. This will be a great gain for your business, because being informed about how sales go is one of the best things you could do in business.
How were your sales in December and how are they in January? Do you see the same changes I see? Or is it different?
The most important feature of an ecommerce site
Following up a comment posted on an article of a few weeks ago, one of the readers of this blog pointed me to what could be like THE MOST IMPORTANT feature of an ecommerce website. The fact is that not the shiny look of the website or the large collection of products sell, but trust sells.
Trust is indeed the most important feature of an ecommerce website. If you can’t connect to the persons behind the site and if you can’t trust the site, how could you possibly buy from that site? Think about it and start building this very moment the trust your customers need.
Remember, ecommerce is a virtual process, apparently there is no human touch, or at least not as visible as in real life commerce, where you can connect to the commerciant, where you see the person selling you the product right in front of you! No, here you don’t see the person behind the site, you can not even tell if the site is real, if it belongs to a real company or it is a shadow site, copied, built by a student during the night.
So, what is needed in order to sell, is trust. Build trust in your site, in your products, make your customer understand that you put a lot of heart and hard work into your products and shop and you will sell. You will sell not because you have the best products or the best ecommerce platform, or the nicest ecommerce template, but because you connected to your buyer and he or she understood you are a real person running a real business. And for that, my dear friends, you will have sales! Think about it!
Did Your Christmas Shopping Habits Change This Year?
Because I study this ecommerce environment, I am always curious about how things go in this direction. So, I would be curious to know what kind of gifts have you purchased this Christmas, or what gifts are you going to purchase. Did you spend much money on gifts?
I mean, considering the fact that we are going through a tough period, where financial resources are limited, we could consider people won’t spend much money for presents this year, but I can tell you that the shopping centers are full. Really. I guess you already know it. Right across the street from where I live, a new one will open tomorrow, so we can not say there is no money, cause there is!
So, do you buy expensive gifts? Do your shopping habits change because of the financial crisis? I don’t speak here about you buying ecommerce website templates, but regular gifts for those you love (even if let’s say a professional Zen Cart template can make a great gift for those who appreciate it).
Let me know!
How Do You Feel This Period From The Point Of View Of Sales?
One of the best period for ecommerce, I guess all of us working in that field, is this period at the end of the year. Nothing compared to December, really, nothing. I sell here ecomerce web templates, and it is working well, but the fact is than in other fields of activity, like gifts, clothes, sometimes people sell even 10 times more than their usual and there is no joke here. Of course, not everybody, so December is not like the universal sale increase factor, there are fields where sales don’t increase, I guess that for swimming equipment December is not that good, but OK, I don’t sell swimming suits, so I can’t really tell.
But, for the rest of us, people selling various other products, it is a good period. However, this December, considering the general status of the ecomony all around the world, I’d say things worked well, until that point. However, from some points of view, I would have expected better, but hey, at least it’s OK, not going down. But on other areas, it’s OK.
It would be interesting to know how you feel your market during this period of mixed trends: on one hand December, the mother of all sales, on the other hand the economy that doesn’t work so well now, not everybody jumps to buy things from the internet.
What do you say, how you feel it? What’t your point of view here?
New Category: Magento Templates
We have just added today a new category for our ecommerce templates, themes for Magento ecommerce platform. Magento templates can be purchased with a 10% discount, the same way any other templates can be purchased. You can see the full list of themes here. We try to expand it day by day so sty close to us, to see what is new.
For those of you not familiar with this ecommerce engine, try visiting their site to learn more about it. You will find there tutorials, examples, screenshots, features, capabilities, information about what it means. Then come back to us and have the theme you like, to make your site look nice!
We will be here!