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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?

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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!

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