Ebay & Amazon, now my own site.

[Matrim33]

Hello. this is my first post so pleased be nice. =)

I'm currently selling kitchen/restaurant equipment on Amazon and Ebay. I had a strong Christmas and I'm looking to expand. I have a large amount of customer email addresses saved and use them for marketing.

I have very little knowledge about setting up my own ecommerce site. I have talked with 2 people about getting started, one a design person, the other a website builder.

I think I have nailed down the price to have the site built in a way that I can manage. What I am wondering is how to best drive people to the site. I'm hoping to pull some of my current customers, but how do I best reach out to new customers?

I have a good product line with a great price point. So if I get the right people to my site (restaurant managers and people who enjoy cooking) I'm sure the site can succeed. I know you can buy adwords from google. But is that a good bang for the buck? How about advertising on Amazon? Or should I spend my time/money working on seo?

I'd love any advice you all have, especially if you have already tried any of these ideas. Thanks!

[CPC_Andrew]

Welcome to Webmasterworld :)

Besides paid search (which is definitely worth trying) you can list your products for free on comparison shopping engines like Google Product Search, TheFind, and Bing Shopping.

Google Product Search [google.com...]

Bing Shopping
[adcenter.microsoft.com...]
Check out this link first though:
[advertising.microsoft.com...]

TheFind
[merchant.thefind.com...]

Hope this helps.

[wheel]

But is that a good bang for the buck? How about advertising on Amazon? Or should I spend my time/money working on seo?

Yes, I don't know, yes.

Adwords/PPC can work, but it does take work - and testing (i.e. it won't work when you first try it). Find the PPC books by Brad Geddes and Andrew Goodman to get started.

SEO is broken down into two things, on page optimization and link building with the second one becoming more important the more competitive of a market that you're in. The first fix for that is to read the link building forum here (go back at least a year, maybe two, read every post). After that, attend a pubcon. THere's one coming up in a week or two, there's another in November I think in Las Vegas.

The other things you mention are really web versions of traditional marketing, so you're instincts should serve you well. Doing a mailing to all existing customers pointing them to your website is a real good start. You may make some sales right there.

[Matrim33]

Thanks for your input. I guess I will just play around with a little of everything and see what works. As I start with all of this I will definitely be on here asking more questions =)

[digitalv]

A good place to start: [ronrule.com...]

[Novus]

You'll have your work cut out for you SEO wise. My company puts a lot of business through Amazon. They usualy outrank me for every product, with the exception of newly released products. I get a few weeks grace at number 1 then generally slide down as more major shop sites take our product.

I posted in another thread that I was competing, but shortly after the page started to slide in the serps and i was the original author.

Our products have only been on amazon for just over a month and already they blasted apart the figures that were being generated by my site.

With that being said I wouldnt want to loose the site, its never a bad thing to have. but it cant compete with amazon.

To be honest ive inherited a poorly built and badly optimized site but im starting to believe, that it couldnt match amazons sales. even if it was rebuilt and optimzed.

[JohnRoy]

@digitalv - I think this is not for everyone.

Step 4: 30 Days of Pay-Per-Click Marketing
DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! Even if your margins are so thin there is no way you can ever profit with PPC, and it’s specifically not part of your overall marketing plan, in this first 30 days you still need to do it. Commit $3,000 to this test – that’s just $100 per day – because it will teach you what keywords convert into sales and test your site’s navigation and overall effectiveness among targeted buyers. You did put on the Google Analytics code, right?

Note in his opening comments "I’ll reveal the five steps I use whenever I launch a new site" - so he's someone who is doing it already, not a newbee.

[digitalv]

Why wouldn't that be for everyone? Some words will get a lot of traffic, some will get a lot of sales. It takes a LONG time to optimize a site for the search engines, but setting up PPC takes minutes. So its better to figure out what keywords are getting sales, not just traffic, as quickly as you can. Then focus your SEO efforts on those words.

[JohnRoy]

Agree.

If they know what they're doing - fine.

But not everyone and not every site can see how their 3k goes down the drain with nearly zero roi. It's more practical to give it for a pro to handle.