Forum Moderators: buckworks
I used a cheap shared hosting and orders were collected via Paypal. Generally, it looks a bit naff and not very professional. However...
I am now looking into creating a more professional looking and hopefully more profitable site to sell my widgets. So, what do I need? Well, from investigation it appears I will have to have the following:
1/ hosting with ssl secure server
2/ account with someone who is recognised and trusted like Worldpay.
I intend to use Oscommerce to create the site as it looks pretty good, so at least that is free. However, the other two seem to drag the price up to well over a thousand pounds for the first year (set up fees and monthly payments for the year).
My main concern is that to proceed with this project would amount to a major financial gamble given these extremely high cost. If I include the costs of advertising the site (through Google Adwords, for instance) and the cost of the stocking the site, I would need to sell a heck of a lot in order to just break even!
I do not include the massive amount of time for the whole thing which would be completely wasted if my turnover from the site was, say less than 6000 pounds for the first year.
Anyone else have some comments on this. I mean, am I seriously underestimating the potential for internet sales here. My existing site must surely put people off buying because of its shabby appearance, but would a professional looking site offering secure payments via a reliable and recognised company such as Worldpay really make such a difference?
Incidently, I should point out that the items which I sell are the sorts of low to middle value items which seem to be the sort of thing which people are willing to buy over the internet.
Anyway, sorry about the length of this post. If anyone was sufficiently interested to have still be reading. Please post a response to let me know what you think.
With the Select Junior plan all credit card data is handled securely by Worldpay. We do over $100K / year on our small little operation without SSL.
Also, OSCommerce allows you multiple payment gateway, allowing you to do an easy migration.
1) Move to the "professional looking site" using OSCommerce
2) Continue to use paypal
3) Determine a point where Worldpay looks affordable and migrate to it
Define "low to middle" .. to me that ranges from say $1 to $1000.
I'd tend to save on hardware costs and spend more on programming / integrating a package. If you can do the programming / integrating yourself you should save a lot of money and make it worthwhile.
If your original site looks "not very good", chances are that your new one won't be that great either.
If all you want to do is sell widgets, have you thought about taking on more of a "supplier" type role? If your product is a viable option for web sales, there are various programs you can join where other people sell your products on their web sites and you just provide order fulfilment.
Your markup won't be as high as retail, but can still be very lucrative.
You'll still have the risk of buying stock, but will get away without having to shell out for an ecommerce site.
As far as the potential for sales goes, it's a balancing act. The more "niche" the widget, the less competition you'll have, but the less the overall interest (and therefore sales). The more popular the product, the more intense the competition and thus the harder it'll be to make sales with good profit.
We only use a dedicated server now because of the increased speed, not because of the SSL certificate.
If you are doing 6000 GBP through PayPal, you should be doing much more that that with a merchant account.
First a couple of clarifications:
Shri:-
By "low to middle value items" I mean items which would retail from 5 GBP to about 60 GBP - most items would be about 15-30 GBP.
Frank_Rizzo:-
Since posting this topic I have managed to find a good company who offer virtual servers for a very reasonable price. Actually, I was already with them, but this package seems to be what I am after. It offers SSL. And I am able to use more than one domain (useful as I have a couple of sites and this works out cheaper than shared hosting for the two individual sites).
Aircut:-
In general, I believe my business to be a "professionsal one". I should point out that the main focus of my business is wholesale of widgets to retail outlets in the UK. I have all the information I need to run this side of the business, however, with the interenet I still have a lot to learn. I can - as you put it "project costs", I do not unfortunately have the information to project income. However, I am determined to this myself rather than outsource. A couple of reasons for this: 1/ I have developed an interest in web design and all related topics as a result of building my first site. 2/ Money, I'm afraid that I just could not afford to take the massive gamble of outsourcing all of the work to someone else.
I actually enjoy tinkering around with my site and scouring these pages for the little perls of wisdom contained here.
But, having said that the problem of uncertaintly remains. For example, if I invest 2000 GBP in the bricks and mortar side of my business I will be putting my money into purchasing physical goods - the value of which will not diminish over time. However, when investing this money in developing, publishing and promoting an internet outlet for my widgets there are too many things which I cannot forsee.
I mean, if I develop a site which looks fine, is clear, well written and layed out, offers the potential customer confidence and security, etc. will I be able to shift the stock? I know that this is the big unanswerable question, but well I have to ask it nonetheless. I mean, if I take the risk it is better to take it with a bit more knowledge that I have a present. This is why I am appealing for information and am happy to read anything anyone has to say about this topic. A few of the big questions I have at the monet are:
- Is an ecommerce site sustainable through Google Adwords alone?
- Should I put up the site, promote it via search engine submission, get a ton of links, etc. and then wait for 6 months or a year in order to build up a certain level of organic traffic before start with Worldpay and Adwords?
- Are there any UK-based alternatives to Worldpay who offer a similar service at a lower cost? I would like to have a site which does not divert to another to complete payment (i.e. like Paypal).
Personally I would AVOID boosting your monthly fixed expenditure as much as possible. This is the main reason why most dot com failed back in 2000. Yes, there is ALOT of money to be made online, but these money DON'T come instantly. It takes time/effort to build up a strong momentum in traffic and sales and if you have a high overhead, your business probably won't last long enough to reap the rewards at the end.
I recommend getting your own SSL certificate. It costs very little, and it gives your customers one less excuse to not buy from you. Shared SSL is NOT recommended personally, because your customers will be brought to a "different" URL than yours, and it brings a negative effect on conversion rate.
If you are serious about bringing the "professionalism" to your dot com, find a transaction provide that LETS you do the transaction seamlessly, by seamlessly I mean you don't bring your clients to another website. This enhances the comfort level for your customers as you appear to be big enough to handle your own transactions.
You should also find a webhost that provides good traffic statistics. This is essential if you are doing PPC with Adwords/Overture, as you must be able to figure out how well your ADs convert to sales in order to be successful.
Try not to think 6000 pounds for the first year is little. As I said the money don't always come instantly. Sites going through a growth of 500% per year for many consecutive years is NOT uncommon. I am sure many webmasters on webmasterworld has even higher growth than this.
Wish you the best of luck in your new venture!
2. Do you want to wait for six months for something to start happening?
3. There are benefits of using a 'hosted' payment link. We use Verisign payflow link. Cart abandonment is actually quite low. Customers can see in the adress bar that its a proper no-BS secure page. It takes the load off our site. Also, integration is as easy as typing in the url of the payment page into your cart, and you do not need to worry about an SSL
You can do it... just research or sticky some of the folks here.
Yes. But there is a learning curve and if it is purely an Adwords venture, invest in a good analytics package or pay someone to set the analytics and systems up for you.
>> Are there any UK-based alternatives to Worldpay
Have you looked at HSBC?
>> Should I put up the site, promote it via search engine submission, get a ton of links, etc. and then wait for 6 months or a year in order to build up a certain level of organic traffic before start with Worldpay and Adwords?
Yes. But I would not recommend it.
I'd recommend starting with a budget and marketing plan. Unless you have an existing site, don't anticipate B2B (you said it was wholesale to retail) traffic which comes mainly from the Big G.
We started our business with a X amount of marketing budget (X < US$5K ).. this was throw away money. Money that over a few months would have been spent on entertainment, gadgets etc. This was divided into a 12 month SEM budget... with two parts an experimental part and a ROI based part.
The next part of the budget was to put a large percentage of the profits BACK into the business. The percentage decreased every quarter but the growth meant that more was put in, in absolute terms.
Get an accountant and a business savvy peer review the plan.
Once you have a plan and it works... you can then replicate.
a good looking, well laid out, properly optimised website that ranks well in the search engines will bring the buyers in and you'll make money (assuming of course that there is demand and the price is right blah blah blah)
a home built website that looks naff will deter buyers - a site that doesn't rank well won't be found by buyers - the wrong payment system will deter buyers
don't use systems / software / whatever just because it's free - choose the systems and software that you need and that work for you - if they cost money, so be it - but you must make the right choices to succeed - make the wrong choices (just because something's free) means you're likely to fail
personally i think worldpay is a good choice - it makes it easy for shoppers to give you their money -much easier than paypal and includes everything you need - and if you work out the costs properly you'll find it's not really much more expensive than paypal - and plenty of shopping carts that integrate with worldpay
with worldpay, you don't need SSL and you don't need a dedicated server - there are lots of good hosting deals around so won't cost you a fortune
personally i hate oscommerce - it can be customised but it's awful to modify - there used to be problems with search engine rankings due to sessions in URLs and same titles / meta tags on all pages so unless this has been cured with the more recent releases, you'll need to add a lot of patches / modules or whatever they call them - also i don't like the way it makes you register for an account before buying and how it asks a lot of unnecessary information like my gender - the quicker and easier it is for a shopper to buy, the more likely they are to buy
as for your products, people can and do buy just about anything online - there's some guy in wales selling fresh air online ........
and for adwords / overture etc - use them - yes they cost money, but they also help you make money - if you do it right, you'll make much more than you spend
1/ I have developed an interest in web design and all related topics as a result of building my first site.
if you're in business on the net, you either need to be a professional developer / SEO etc or hire in a professional developer / SEO etc or learn one hell of a lot in a very short space of time
2/ Money, I'm afraid that I just could not afford to take the massive gamble of outsourcing all of the work to someone else.
you may cut your grass or decorate your house or pump up your car tyres - those are simple jobs for most people - but do you do absolutely everything yourself? do you not trust anyone else with anything? who fixes the brakes on your car? who services your central heating?
if your business is going to be your livelihood, why DIY it? it doesn't matter too much of your decorating isn't up to scratch, or you cut the grass too short, but when when you're running a business, mistakes cost money.
like aircut says, if you want to be professional, act like one!
We used Worldpay without a SSL cert installed. It is only after some customers complained that we installed an SSL cert on our shared hosting account. However, it is still not clear whether the increased cost was justified.
i can't see how you could justify SSL with worldpay - you just don't need your own SSL - if it was something to do with warning popups, you could have cured those by uploading images to the worldpay server .....
$50 for the payment processor, $20 PA for hosting, $60 for the secure cart, $30 for a template.
I find a small supplier whose willing to take well, small initial orders from me.
It need not be pricey
