Hi,
Just about a month ago I launched my first E-Commerce site but have no sales yet, so I would like some advice on how I can change this. I am currently still on a slowlane/well paid job that I actually like and allows me great flexibility with this fast-lane venture as I work from home full-time and although usually very busy during the day I can use the quiter time work on the E-Commerce business, on top of the time I dedicate to it during the evening and weekends. I look after the end-to-end process by myself (product search, purchasing, website development, marketing, etc. etc.), and occasionaly I outsource some one-off activities via Upwork, a really great place to hire resources.
More info about the business:
1) As I said Iaunched the website about a month ago and sell my own products imported from China and branded with my company name. There are only a few competing company in the market in my area and on my personal opinion my product looks nicer/more original than theirs, although I certainly have room for improvement. Look of the product is as important as functionality as a large % will be bought as gifts. Problem is that is not always Christmas.
At the moment I have two suppliers (one in China and one in Pakistan) and on average selling price per item is about 75€, average cost including shipping to me is around 20€. Including variations, I have about 50 products on the website. I plan to continuosly add new products and expand, however I am quite selective and don’t just order/label bunch of random products just to make numbers. I have a great new product in the pipeline that should be ready by the beginning of April, after spending the past two months working on the design/requirements, looking forward to that, especially because this is a product that a customer could buy over and over again every few weeks, unlike the current products I have.
Budget for the businees is not an issue, what I invested so far in this business is <1% of my financial availability, so I am happy to invest as needed, but obviously not throwing money away randomly either.
2) Adwords: I started advertising on Adwords about 2 weeks ago. I had a 2-hours review with a Google Adwords specialist and currently have a CTR of just about 1.2%, costing me about 1€ per click. I got I also did some work myself (and keep doing) to improve my Adwords campaign and decrease CPC and more importantly start getting conversions, I know I have still large room for improvement though. I limited by budget to 15€/day for advertising for now. I got about 200 clicks in total so far.
I am based in Ireland (only 5 million people living here) and I have been targeting only Ireland at the moment, with plan to target the UK also in the coming weeks (as my Adwords campaign improve quality) and rest of Europe later on.
3) Other sales channells: I have an Ebay shop that cost me 22€/month in which I was selling a generic product (doing quite well) for the past couple of months. I was not planning to use it to sell my own brand products as I didn’t want my brand to be associated to Ebay but I decided to change strategy and upload my own products in my Ebay shop also a couple of days ago. The rank quite well for the UK/Ireland area with some popular keywords, so fingers crossed!
I opened an Amazon account last week (this is eventually where I wanted to sell primarily apart from my own website), but the section in which I want to sell requires spacial approval and my application was rejected as I don’t have enough stock to start with showing on the purchasing invoices I had to provide (I am only working with the initial samplesand have 1 pcs for each variation). I am not too worried about this as I should be able to get approval soon as the newly developed product mentioned above will have 500 pcs availability and will sort the problem. I can then upload all my products and start selling there. 4-6 weeks and I should be on Amazon so.
4) Advertising: at the moment Adwords only – my plan was to also use Amazon PPC advertising, but that is out of the window for at least another month.
I wanted to hold off on Facebook page/advertising for the first 6 months as it requires time to look after the page and ensure it is of good quality and prefered to invest money on Adwords/Amazon PPC instead that do not require much extra work once the Ads are active and optimized. Then after 6 months once the business is growing and gaining traction adding a further advertising channel would be good, however as Amazon is on hold for now I may decide to just kick off on Facebook already now.
No plans to use Twitter or Instagram for now.
I may in future even outsource the whole social-media side of the business, maybe by just getting a resource via Upwork for 2-3 hours/week.
5) SEO: basically non-existent. Not even if I search my company name I appear in the first pages. Should I invest in SEO improvement, rather than just paid advertising? The problem with SEO is that I feel that unless I get to page 1 or 2 in the search it makes not a huge different between been in let’s say page 3 or 300. All I have done for SEO is some work with a plugin called Yoast SEO in Wordpress, but best I manage is to get to “yellow” level in some pages, stayed in red in most (where red is bad and green is good). I did not spend too much time on it honestly though.
In my position, what would you do next to push this business forward and grow esponentially? Any advice is very welcome, thank you all for your help and support.
Just about a month ago I launched my first E-Commerce site but have no sales yet, so I would like some advice on how I can change this. I am currently still on a slowlane/well paid job that I actually like and allows me great flexibility with this fast-lane venture as I work from home full-time and although usually very busy during the day I can use the quiter time work on the E-Commerce business, on top of the time I dedicate to it during the evening and weekends. I look after the end-to-end process by myself (product search, purchasing, website development, marketing, etc. etc.), and occasionaly I outsource some one-off activities via Upwork, a really great place to hire resources.
More info about the business:
1) As I said Iaunched the website about a month ago and sell my own products imported from China and branded with my company name. There are only a few competing company in the market in my area and on my personal opinion my product looks nicer/more original than theirs, although I certainly have room for improvement. Look of the product is as important as functionality as a large % will be bought as gifts. Problem is that is not always Christmas.
At the moment I have two suppliers (one in China and one in Pakistan) and on average selling price per item is about 75€, average cost including shipping to me is around 20€. Including variations, I have about 50 products on the website. I plan to continuosly add new products and expand, however I am quite selective and don’t just order/label bunch of random products just to make numbers. I have a great new product in the pipeline that should be ready by the beginning of April, after spending the past two months working on the design/requirements, looking forward to that, especially because this is a product that a customer could buy over and over again every few weeks, unlike the current products I have.
Budget for the businees is not an issue, what I invested so far in this business is <1% of my financial availability, so I am happy to invest as needed, but obviously not throwing money away randomly either.
2) Adwords: I started advertising on Adwords about 2 weeks ago. I had a 2-hours review with a Google Adwords specialist and currently have a CTR of just about 1.2%, costing me about 1€ per click. I got I also did some work myself (and keep doing) to improve my Adwords campaign and decrease CPC and more importantly start getting conversions, I know I have still large room for improvement though. I limited by budget to 15€/day for advertising for now. I got about 200 clicks in total so far.
I am based in Ireland (only 5 million people living here) and I have been targeting only Ireland at the moment, with plan to target the UK also in the coming weeks (as my Adwords campaign improve quality) and rest of Europe later on.
3) Other sales channells: I have an Ebay shop that cost me 22€/month in which I was selling a generic product (doing quite well) for the past couple of months. I was not planning to use it to sell my own brand products as I didn’t want my brand to be associated to Ebay but I decided to change strategy and upload my own products in my Ebay shop also a couple of days ago. The rank quite well for the UK/Ireland area with some popular keywords, so fingers crossed!
I opened an Amazon account last week (this is eventually where I wanted to sell primarily apart from my own website), but the section in which I want to sell requires spacial approval and my application was rejected as I don’t have enough stock to start with showing on the purchasing invoices I had to provide (I am only working with the initial samplesand have 1 pcs for each variation). I am not too worried about this as I should be able to get approval soon as the newly developed product mentioned above will have 500 pcs availability and will sort the problem. I can then upload all my products and start selling there. 4-6 weeks and I should be on Amazon so.
4) Advertising: at the moment Adwords only – my plan was to also use Amazon PPC advertising, but that is out of the window for at least another month.
I wanted to hold off on Facebook page/advertising for the first 6 months as it requires time to look after the page and ensure it is of good quality and prefered to invest money on Adwords/Amazon PPC instead that do not require much extra work once the Ads are active and optimized. Then after 6 months once the business is growing and gaining traction adding a further advertising channel would be good, however as Amazon is on hold for now I may decide to just kick off on Facebook already now.
No plans to use Twitter or Instagram for now.
I may in future even outsource the whole social-media side of the business, maybe by just getting a resource via Upwork for 2-3 hours/week.
5) SEO: basically non-existent. Not even if I search my company name I appear in the first pages. Should I invest in SEO improvement, rather than just paid advertising? The problem with SEO is that I feel that unless I get to page 1 or 2 in the search it makes not a huge different between been in let’s say page 3 or 300. All I have done for SEO is some work with a plugin called Yoast SEO in Wordpress, but best I manage is to get to “yellow” level in some pages, stayed in red in most (where red is bad and green is good). I did not spend too much time on it honestly though.
In my position, what would you do next to push this business forward and grow esponentially? Any advice is very welcome, thank you all for your help and support.
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