eCommerce - Nothing More Than a Catch Phrase

Ecommerce is the buying, trading, selling and bartering of goods, services or income on the internet through electronic transmission or satellite broadcast. Buying a CD on Amazon is Ecommerce, applying for a job at jac-recruitment.co.uk is ecommerce. It is a catch-all term used by pantywaists that describes normal business in a new way. It is used to make themselves look more intelligent than they really are. When a market analyst invents a new catch phrase that becomes part of the lexicon of society, they receive a free tee shirt emblazoned with their catch phrase and a picture of Pamela Anderson's buttocks.

There are several points for successful selling online are written as following:

A product that people want to buy at a competitive price. It seems like a no-brain but there are a lot of people with a product that stinks. Do some competitive research, find out what other people are charging for a similar product, check out their shopping cart and domain name.

A call to action on your main page. Do not use a flash intro and do not spend anytime on your front page doing anything but convincing people to buy your product and give them a simple link to do so.

A way to let people find your site. Just uploading a site and adding your URL to the search engines would not do it. You need to optimize your site for the search engines. Do a search for "SEO tips." You may want to consider buying relevant keywords through Google or Yahoo, just follow the links to advertise on those sites and you will only have to pay for clicks. If you have a bigger budget you may want to consider finding an advertisement network and spending money to place your advertisement on other sites. Also do your best to get other people to link to you, either because they like your product or because you want to compensate them for traffic via an affiliate program (check kowabunga.com or cj.com).

Keep them coming back. Gather emails from all customers and follow up with a monthly newsletter encouraging them to buy a complimentary product or an upgrade. Give them a discount on future purchases as well.

Measure your success. Get a free web analytic package at Google.com and use it to see what is going on with your site. It will also help you track any advertising efforts. Test different landing pages or advertisements to see which perform best. See where your best converting traffic is coming from and spend more money on that channel.

If you do all these things you will be successful. Try to find products that have good margins especially things you can create by yourself like e-books. With just a little maintenance you can let the site do the work for you.