Do you have problem to start your own online store? Did your last storefront software ended up losing you money? We had problems with building an internet web store when we first started. We have heard many horror stories too. Here is a story of our client that you probably can relate to and also can serve as a reminder to us all. 
John (real name protected for a reason) had an idea to sell some t-shirts on the web. Yes, t-shirts because he thought everybody wear t-shirt so he should have a good market to sell to. Forget about this idea being profitable or not, but let us focus on the money he spent to start the business. Firstly he went to a web designer to design his website. He spent about $2000 for that.
After that, the web designer advised John to get a web hosting account so he can preview his storefront prototype live on the internet. John ended up at subscribing to a hosting plan for a year with Godaddy costing him about $120. Any other web host will cost about the same, be it Hostgator, Lunarpages, Bluehost, Hostmonster, iPowerWeb, or PowWeb because 1 year is the shortest period these companies promote and prefer people to pay. Next, John hired a programmer or web developer who installed an open-source shopping cart, did some customization to fit John's business needs and installed the shopping cart on John's web hosting service. That was another $3000. Added to that was the payment processor charges like RBS Worldpay setup and miscellaneous integration charges which is about another $700.
To cut the long story short, after all the money spent and time consumed, John's web store plan did not follow through because he failed to realize the marketing part of the business plan. He spent a total of about $5820. He lost them all. Luckily for him, business idea did not involve keeping any stocks.
After sitting down with many online store startup owners, we came out with these steps to avoid.
Did You Make One of These 13 Web Store Startup Mistakes?
These are 13 sure ways to lose money on your e-Commerce venture
- Your store management panel cannot be accessed from ordinary browser.
- You cannot quickly setup a store, but require help from web designers, PHP developers or may be more people.
- Be ignorant on which providers the majority of top 500 Internet Retailers are using.
- You do not check if your Shopping Cart Software is built on good server to ensure reliability.
- Software installation on your desktop is required – hence can be maintained from only that PC/Mac.
- The e-Commerce solution cost thousands for design, customization, search optimization etc. before your business can start.
Read more...
