Yes, and I've been able to do it with a variety of businesses. When I started in 1998, with my main online business Healthy Foundations, I had no idea what to expect. And it has been surprising, and exciting, over the years to see it grow from nothing to a business that has continued to grown beyond anything I ever could have expected.
But my experience hasn't been unique, my clients have also seen their businesses perform beyond their initial expectations. The Futon Covers Online site was started on a whim, hoping to get a few thousand in sales a month. How much of a market could there be for futon covers? Well, back in the early days in 2004 he grossed $500,000, on futon covers. I couldn't quite believe it, but by drawing on a national market place he has been able to grow his business way beyond what we ever could have expected. And all these years later it is still doing a nice business.
I've had smaller successes with other ventures, but just as surprising. For example, the My Favorite Baby Carrier site (you can see how it was designed in the section on Designing Your Web Business), at its start went in a few months from no sales to over $15,000 gross for the month of May, 2004 - six baby carriers a day. Not bad for a site selling just one type of esoteric baby carrier, and certainly way beyond our initial expectations. And while loss leader competition did it in after 7 years, for a long time it averaged 10 orders a day -- again, way beyond our initial expectations.
Are these results typical? From what I've read they aren't. Most information I come across finds that most small business websites make little if any money.
Why do my sites perform when others don't? I think the important common denominator among the successful sites I've worked on that have done well is that they offer real "quality" for their users. All of these sites commonly get emails from customers that "loved" the site and really appreciated the depth of information offered, how easy it was to find information on the site, etc.
They also appreciated the personal feeling that they got from the sites - they could tell that someone really cared about the products or services and their customers needs and wants. While defining "quality" may be impossible, it is something all users on the web recognize when they see it - and these sites have it. It is this "quality" which distinguishes these sites from their competitors, and I believe is the crucial element in their success.
So my answer again is yes, you can make money on the web. But as a small business, you will need to really spend the time and effort to have a "quality site". Selling on the web is a very difficult event, especially for a small business. Getting someone who has never heard of your business to feel comfortable enough to order and enter their credit card information online is really difficult to pull off. Giving your visitors a high "quality" experience is the key element that can allow for web success where the inherent obstacles to a sale are so high.
This site is my attempt to talk about the elements that go into making a "quality" site. Essentially how to bring your unique knowledge and passion to your website in a way that is very usable for your customers and addresses their basic needs and wants. Hopefully you will, at a minimum, be a much better informed consumer of web design services after looking over the site.
For those inclined to try to design their own site or looking for help in getting their site off the ground, I hope the information on this site provides a good foundation for building a successful site.
I go into this question in some detail in my section on How a Website Can Work for Your Business, but the short answer is - Yes. I've worked with all sorts of businesses, from bricks and mortar retailers to totally internet based retailer, as well as professional service providers and even a restaurant (see my Portfolio of Web Designs). And in all these different cases a website has been effective. After working with these different businesses, I've come to this bottom line - if you want to maximize your business' profitability, you need a good, compelling website for your business.
But just having a website isn't enough. As I said in the previous question, it is vitally important that your site be one of those "quality" sites that users love. If you aren't going to make the investment of time and effort to make your site a "quality" site, then it is really not worth putting up a website.
In addition, unlike "Field Of Dreams", if you build it, nobody will come. You have to be prepared to spend money to get traffic to your site. If you can't budget for this, then you really shouldn't expect anyone -- other than those directly looking up your URL or those you direct to your site who visit your bricks and mortar store -- to find your website.
If you don't have these resources or interest right now to invest in making your site a "quality site", or in driving traffic to the site if you intend to use it primarily to sell on the web (rather than as a resource for your bricks and mortar customers) then it is probably just better to wait till you would be willing to make this sort of investment rather than putting up a cookie cutter site that has little chance of being profitable.
This is a hard question to answer, since I've been surprised by the kinds of diverse products my clients have been able to sell on the web. Our sites have sold everything from memory foam mattress pads to futon covers, baby carriers, and tai chi video. One common thread is that all these products have a basic amount of traffic or interest on the web. They are all also informationally driven products. By that I mean that people interested in them often have questions so use the web to research these products.
For example, the product I sell at my site Healthy Foundations, memory foam, is just plain confusing. So a good amount of people turn to the web, and ultimately my site, to help them sort it all out.
The Futon Covers Online site is a bit different - people here are searching on the web for a wider variety of covers and information than they can find at their local store.
The My Favorite Baby Carrier site has done well because Moms are very information oriented and on the lookout for the best possible baby carrier.
So I like to focus on products that have some sort of information component when I design a site for a small business. That way there is a reason for people to search for the product on the web. And these kind of products allow me to put a lot of content into the website. I think this is key because it allows me to not only give customers a great experience on the site, but brings the small businesses strengths into the site. This content will hopefully differentiate my site from all my competitors and give me a real edge.
Does this limit what you can sell on the web? Not in my experience. Usually, small businesses have a great deal of specialized knowledge about their products, and can bring the most mundane products alive with their passion and interest. So I would say stay with what you care about and know, and if that product gets enough traffic on the web you can sell it.
How to figure out the potential size of the Internet market for your product or service? There are a number of ways to get a pretty good handle on this. First, there are a couple of services that allow you to see the number of searches for particular keywords. To use these, the first thing you need to do is get together a list of the most important keywords that relate to your product or service.
Most times this is pretty apparent - for the Futon Covers Online site the most important keywords are "futon covers" and "futon cover". But these online services really will also help you get a very good idea of the keywords you will be focusing on. The two online keyword tools I user are Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker
I go into using these tools in detail in Step 1 of Creating and Designing your Web Business. These tools will give you a good idea of your most important keywords and a general idea of the amount of searches for each.
Once you know the general amount of traffic from Adwords and Wordtracker keywords tools, how does this translate into figuring out the market for your product or service? This is a tougher question, since traffic in terms of searches doesn't necessarily tell you how many of these people will actually visit your site, nor how many of these visitors will be serious buyers.
That is why I use these keyword tools usually just to assemble my keyword list and get a general feel for the traffic. But to really gauge the kind of traffic I could expect, I do a real world marketing test of these keywords on Google's AdWords. AdWords is really an amazing concept - it allows you to test, in real time, the real interest in your product or service. Most people, if they know of AdWords, don't really think of using it before setting up a web business - they think of it as a way of advertising to implement after setting up a web business.
But there is not requirement in AdWords that you have an actual website in order to run ads. So to do a market test, you can simply run an ad and then refer anyone clicking on to the ad to a relevant existent site (a competitor carrying this product for instance). For a few hundred bucks and the effort to really do the AdWords campaign effectively, you can get a good feel for the actual market for your item - how many visitors you could expect on a daily basis.
Once you know the visitor count, you can then figure out sales by estimating how many would visitors actually would end up buying. In my experience, really focused well designed small business sites can get 2 - 3% of visitors to convert to sales. With this information, then, you can get a prediction for sales and decide if the cost and time involved in getting the site up would be worth it.
This issue definitely crops up a fair amount. Many manufacturers wrestle with this issue since their bricks and mortar retailers complain about web businesses selling their products at a lower price.
I've run into this with almost every product I've dealt with, and each manufacturer seems to have a different philosophy or web strategy. Some don't care and allow anyone to sell their product for any price on the web, others sell to anyone but restrict the selling price, and yet others only allow certain companies to sell the products on the web.
All I can offer is that it is better to know this up front rather than running into a problem down the line. So talk with your supplier before spending money on your web business to see if they have any concerns or policies regarding sales on the web.
I really advocate trying to focus your web business on a niche in a particular market. You can find a detailed discussion of the reasons I believe a small business should focus on a niche in the section Laying the Groundwork: Think about your Niche Market.
But in brief, I believe focusing on a niche allows you to really use your unique experience and passion for your product or service to create a very compelling web business. And focusing on a niche will allow you to be a big fish in a small pond - and a lot of small ponds are still very profitable on the web. A niche business is also much more functional from a product fulfillment aspect as well.
Finally, a niche website is also affordable. A site focused on just a few products may only cost a few thousand dollars in web design fees to get running. But a more comprehensive site dealing with all the products in a market area might cost 10 to 20 times as much. It isn't unusual to hear bids of $20,000 to $50,000 for designing a site for a store selling a few hundred products.
As an example, I once talked to a woman who had already put up a site selling dog beds and other products. But while the site was mainly about dog beds, she also wanted to be a one stop shopping spot for all related products. So she also included dog clothing, accessories, dog collars, containment areas, etc. Several hundred products in total, rather than just a few dozen if the site had been just about dog beds.
And while the site looks nice, it was really costly to put up - over $20,000. For a fraction of that, she could have put up a site concentrating on her main product, dog beds, which accounted for most of her sales anyway. So I caution small businesses from trying to start out doing these sort of comprehensive, all encompassing sites. They are wildly expensive to get designed and also may not necessarily offer more profitability than really focused niche sites.
Instead, I advise starting with a small niche, and then if this site works you can expand into other market niches you also cover. The hard part, then, is trying to determine what is the most profitable niche to start with. Hopefully, you can narrow down the choices based on your own business experience on the type of products that sell best, their margins, etc. And then you can test the leading candidates for their traffic potential using the AdWords strategy I discussed above.
Starting a web business is very much like starting a regular retail business. It takes a lot of work, time, and usually money to get a web business off the ground. First, I adamantly believe that one of the keys to a successful small business website is the active interest of the owner in the project. I talk about this in the different parts the Laying the Groundwork section.
A small business' greatest asset for a web business is a terrific website, and this means that the small business owner's unique knowledge and passion for their business has to show up on their website. One of the biggest mistakes I think small business people make is that once they decide to do a website, they then turn over its creation wholesale to a web designer.
I think this is a recipe for mediocrity at best, and in most cases a recipe for disaster. Sites designed with little involvement from the small business owner have a cookie cutter feel that just doesn't translate into a website that attracts and sells customers. So be forewarned - if you want to try to insure that your site has the best possible chance of succeeding, you will need to put a great deal of time and effort into planning the site, making content and navigational choices, writing content, etc.
This is tough to say - it really depends on so many variables. But in general, a niche type of site may cost anywhere from $3,000 - $5,000 if you engage a good, professional web designer. A more comprehensive site can be $20,000 to $50,000 and up.
What do you get for this price? I have, in the main, been unimpressed with most sites I've seen designed by "professionals". While the sites usually do look good, they don't really perform all that well. And by this I mean they don't sell. I think this is because these designers have never actually run a web business selling real products. So their orientation is to the look and feel of the site, and not to the actual business side of the site.
One of my big hopes in writing this site has been to educate small business owners, so that if they hire a professional web designer they can get a lot more bang for their buck. Hopefully, this site will tell you what to look for in the design, and also get you to much more actively to participate in the initial site's focus and design to ensure that the site really does reflect your expertise and passion.
If you are going to go with a professional designer, I would look around to try to find some design companies that have already designed small business Ecommerce sites - and check out how successful these have been. Also, I would talk to them about how you envision the site, and also give them concrete ideas about what you expect in the site.
I know that it may be difficult to find a designer that has this kind of experience and is open to your input, but it is worth the time to look for this sort of designer since they have the best chance of giving you the kind of quality site you need to succeed on the web.
You can do it yourself - and I think in the best of all worlds this is the way to go. There is just no one that can create a website for your business or knows your business like you do. So, if you had all the tools and knowledge, you would be the best person to design the site.
Unfortunately, most small business people just don't have the time to learn everything they would need to know to create a successful Ecommerce site. And don't kid yourselves, despite what the get rich quick people say, selling on the web is really a difficult feat to achieve. Everything has to really work together well to get a total stranger to enter their credit card information on a website for a business they never heard of before.
Most small businesses who put up their own sites never get any volume of sales - they just can't make all the pieces come together (getting traffic, getting people into the site, providing the product information in a usable way, making ordering easy, having an easy checkout process, etc).
Is designing your own site really something you could expect to pull off? Probably not if you were starting on your own from scratch. But if you read all the information on this site I really think you could do it - especially if you use Wordpress as the software running the site so you can put up all the pages yourself.
If you decide you just don't feel up to designing your own site, or simply don't have the time, what should you do? Don't do what a lot of small business people do, which is turn to some cheaper "web expert" to design their site. Often this is a neighbor or friends teenage kid that knows how to design web pages, or perhaps someone at a university studying business or web design that can offer a good deal on designing a site.
I really think that this is a mistake. I just have never seen a good business website designed by one of these kinds of people. Designing an effective Ecommerce site is just so different in its focus and purpose than designing a nice looking, personal web page.
And people in business or web design schools just don't have the real life Ecommerce experience to know the ins and outs of effective Ecommerce web design. From someone on the front lines of Ecommerce on a daily basis, I'm here to tell you its a hard business to pull off - and you are much better off putting your eggs in the basket of someone with real experience making an Ecommerce website work.
So while I know it is tempting to go with someone willing to put the site together for a lot less, in this, as in life, you do get what you pay for. If you are going to need to get someone else to design your site, then I really advise going with an established web designer with a good amount of Ecommerce experience rather than hiring the teenage whiz or college student. I know that this may be much more expensive, but if you find the right person it is really worth the investment in giving your business a solid web business foundation.
The web has changed a great deal since I first started in 1998. Back then, almost all traffic came from one of two places - either from a search engine or from the Yahoo directory. And this traffic was free. The downside was that if you weren't found on the first page or two of the search results, or were buried in the Yahoo directory, you were dead in the water.
Now it is all changed. You no longer have to just hope for traffic from the search engines. Google's AdWords and Bing Ads allow you to place you ad on the first page of searches for your important keywords.
Some people bemoan this - they yearn back to the day when all traffic was free. But not me. I love it. These ads allow you to have some sort of consistent method for getting traffic to your site. The trick is in getting the traffic at a cost effective rate. And this is where AdWords complexity is a real boon. If you are willing to really invest some time creating and maximizing an AdWords campaign, you can have a great advantage over your competitors who aren't willing to put in this effort.
So how much should you be willing to budget for this? That is the questions I get all the time, because people don't want to risk spending too much on this kind of advertising. But my take on this is very different. The question should is not how much should I spend, but instead whether am I getting a positive return on the amount I do spend. That is, is my advertising bringing in sales that allow me a net profit over the cost of the advertising. If it is, then I want to keep spending as much as possible as long as I keep making a positive return on my money. So my answer is I want to spend as much as I possibly can - just as long as I keep making a net positive return.
And with the way AdWords and Bing Ads now work, it is really easy for me to track the profitability of my ad campaigns. Both of these programs have little tracker programs that will track the amount of sales you make - and let you see this related to your keywords, different ads, etc. It is really an amazing step up in being able to see how your advertising dollars work, and then using these results to tweak your ads and bids to get the best return possible for your advertising dollar.
I use AdWords, and Bing Ads to a lesser extent, as the base way I get traffic for any new site I design. Then I look at any traffic I might then receive because of good placement in the search engine results as gravy. I do try to design my pages to be search engine friendly and hopefully they will someday show up well in the search engine results for my important key words.
But you can't count on this - and even if you do finally achieve some success with the search engine results, it can all change in a day if the search engine changes it's formula as to how it ranks pages in its search results. I learned this all too well a long time ago when my Futon Covers client went from #1 for "futon covers" (where he had been for three years), to #400 in the big Google upheaval in November 2003.
Luckily he was back to #1 three months later, but this just pointed out how quickly things can change and that you can't place the success of your web business on the shaky ground of search engine result placement success. AdWords and Bing Ads are wonderful tools for getting traffic, and can hopefully be cost effective if you put some time into developing these campaigns.
So be forewarned, you will need to budget a good deal for advertising and be willing to aggressively spend on these campaigns. But you can track the effectiveness of these campaigns in real time, which greatly reduces their risk and really puts you in control of your advertising dollars in a way previously unknown.
It takes a great deal of time to set up a web business. Even if you have someone else design it, I believe that the small business owner needs to spend a great deal of time helping to flesh out and design the site to insure the best chances of success. Again, quality is key, and you just won't get the kind of quality site you will need without your deep involvement.
What does this mean in terms of hours? It is really hard for me to give you a general number, so I will give you a couple of examples to compare your project to. The first is the biggest project I've worked on, the Futon Cover Online site. When I originally designed it, we started with 100 products. I would guess that my client spent 50 - 100 hours writing up all the copy for the site, getting the graphics together or picture taken, etc. Then, it probably took me an additional 150 hours or so of my time to put the whole design together along with getting the ordering and shopping cart completely installed.
In contrast, my most recent site is the My Favorite Baby Carrier site, which is essentially about 1 product with a few accessories. My wife probably spent 20 - 40 hours writing the copy, getting the graphics together, etc. She probably spent another 20 - 30 hours working on getting all the business logistical stuff done (merchant account, 800 #, etc). We also spent 5 hours or so putting together our AdWords test that we monitored for a couple of weeks. I put in another 30 - 40 hours so far designing the site and putting in the ordering and shopping cart.
Hopefully, these two examples will you judge how much time getting your web business going may take. You may want to double any estimate since this would be the first web project you would be involved in.
As for the amount of time a web business takes on an ongoing basis, this really depends on you. If you treat the business like any other retail business, and there is a fair amount of traffic to the site, you can count of the business taking a few hours a day at a minimum. You will spend a fair amount of time answering phone calls and emails, as well as doing your daily orders and shipping out products. A few problems always come up (shipping, defective products, etc.), and I find this takes a fair amount of time as well. And you may also want to factor in some weekly, if not daily time, to work on your marketing (monitoring your AdWords campaigns) or working on your site.
But, once you have everything kind of working on a consistent basis, you may be able to scale back the amount of time you spend running the business. For instance, when I'm traveling I put my calls into voice mail which really frees up my day. And, if you simply can't take phone orders (you have another day job), you can just allow ordering only through your website. In my experience, this will affect sales 10 - 20%, but this may be worth the trade off. So if you chose to go this route, you could run your business with a minimal amount of time - perhaps as little as an hour or two a day. It may not be the way to go if you want to make this web business your sole source of income, but limiting it in this way may give you a way to start and then you can add more customer service options as the business shows its potential.
