A Beginners Guide to Surviving Online Retail
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The idea of working for yourself running an online retail business is very appealing, both from a work / life balance aspiration but also for the potential financial rewards.
We've covered previously how to build your own eShop and how to open your own eCommerce shop, but once up and running with your retail business, how does a beginner go about surviving in these highly competitive online retail markets?
A Guide to Surviving Retail
With a newish business it is difficult to know whether you are doing well, doing badly, how you compare to your immediate competitors and what else you should be doing to grow your business.
But don't get disillusioned if you are struggling for orders with your new retail business. The most successful online retail business we've had involvement with so far hardly got an order for the first 6 months, 5 years later it generates six-figure revenue for the full time owner.
There are several important factors that impact on your business, and having a basic understanding of them and how to address them will go a long way to helping you surviving online and growing your online retail business.
Spending Patterns
Its important to understand basic spending patterns such as;
- Peak spending on nearly every market from mid-November through to the end of the first week of February.
- Monthly spending peaks in most markets the 7 days either side of payday, the end of the month.
- Spending increases on seasonal special occasions such as Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Fathers Day and also to a lesser extent Bank Holidays.
- There are market-specific peaks such as products popular during the summer holiday season, niche markets like snow boarding for example has a specific window before and during the skiing season during which spending increases.
Reading the last point it highlights the importance of researching the market you are selling into. Understanding the buying patterns of your target customers will help you maximise sales at important times of the year and help define when to invest in advertising and PPC / CPC eCommerce Marketing.
The order totals you achieve by maximising your activity during peak spending periods is multiplied by your online retail shops' visibility factor.
Visibility Factor
The visibility factor describes how easy it is for potential customers to find your shop, such as;
- How many of your shop pages are indexed on the search engines.
- What search engine page your shop appears on for primary keyword and phrase searches.
- How well you use PPC / CPC eCommerce Marketing across search engines.
- The number of well placed reciprocal links with appropriately themed and well ranked websites.
The great thing about the visibility factor is that you can attack it on two fronts. The long term and arguably the more important technique is search engine optimisation. Basic but often time-consuming actions such as swapping links with other websites, increasing the quantity, quality and relevance of your online retail shop and other actions described in our related articles all help increase the visibilty of your online retail business over time, particularly through improving the position your website appears on the search engines.
In order to increase your retail businesses visibility in the short term, advertising and marketing are a must. The extent of your advertising is only limited by the amount of money you have to spend, and by understanding the spending patterns of customers within your market, you can gain the biggest return through targetted marketing.
The underlying point is, surviving online retail even during difficult economic times like these, by adopting best practices like knowing your market, targetting your advertising at the right times, getting your product mix right and adopting a long term strategy to increase your visibilty will all help you not only survive online retail but hopefully increase the pace at which you can grow your business.