E-commerce myths (part 1)

MYTH: MY PRODUCTS ARE AWESOME (I DON’T NEED TO MARKET THEM)

This myth seems to be very persistent among new e-commerce sellers. And on some level we can understand why. You just spent all that time building an awesome webshop, filling it up with cool products at competitive prices. There should be nothing stopping the customers from buying your products right?…Right? WRONG.

This means that even if you somehow found the cure for cancer and sold this as an actual product on your website, chances are it still wouldn’t sell because if nobody knows it exists, it won’t matter how awesome it is.

While it is said that word-of-mouth is among the best forms of advertising, it is super slow. And the thing is that for word of your products to go around enough for you to be able to make money from the traffic would take years.

What you need is a marketing plan that includes advertising, that will eventually, net your site traffic and ultimately, customers. This also means you will have to be prepared to allocate some of your time and money to achieve this goal.

Also worth mentioning is the trend involving many new store owners that is to jump blindly into the first advertising opportunity that appears. Without a solid plan, they often end up going nowhere.

There are many tools to make use of when advertising your products, tools such as SEO, social media, and email marketing. These are all tried and true methods of increasing traffic to your store, but they will all require some time before you start seeing results. Reminding oneself of this at times can be a good idea since many sellers tend to lose interest in a certain method if the results are not immediate.

Another good thing to remind yourself of is the fact that 90 % of competition consists of companies that have been at this game for years. They have spent thousands of dollars and might have entire teams dedicated to marketing alone.

A good thing to remember is that the marketing never ends, even after you’ve started making a name for yourself you will still need to make sure you are continuously reaching out to your target audience. If they’re not reminded of your presence from time to time, they will start shopping somewhere else.