One of my first ever consulting jobs was on an ecommerce website that specialised in selling children’s furniture.

It was run by a husband and wife team from their home and most of the furniture was shipped straight from manufacturers directly to customers.

This was quite a few years ago, probably around 2005, so ecommerce was still a fairly new endeavour at that time.

Their site was basic, they had no ecommerce platform at all and had manually built each page by hand, this lead to many issues for them.

For example, payments were handled through Paypal, this meant they had to manually insert a Paypal ‘buy now’ button on every product they sold, pricing had to be manually entered into the code of each button separately, not an easy thing to maintain over the long term.

Another issue was managing customers and orders, the only notification they received when an order was placed was the standard Paypal payment email.

Once this arrived they printed it off and manually wrote down the details in an order book, next an email was composed and sent to the customer confirming the order, this was also printed off.

All printed emails were then filed in a filing cabinet.

Emails were then sent to the suppliers to place the order, manually again, and then you’ve guessed it, this email was printed and placed in the file.

When I arrived I couldn’t believe how much work it took them just to take an order, I asked the obvious question ‘Why don’t you move across to an ecommerce platform?’ the answer was that they were too scared of losing their search engine rankings!

Now on the face of it this could seem a reasonable answer, their thinking was that if they lost their search rankings then it wouldn’t matter how they took orders because they wouldn’t have any.

The problem for them was this was not the right decision.

They were drowning in paperwork, getting stressed out and customer service was suffering because of it.

Their SEO concerns were valid in some respect however with some planning and a bit of on-going care the rankings would be maintained, at worst there might be short period of fluctuating positions but it would have been sorted within a few weeks.

They should have bitten the bullet and moved across but they didn’t.

I didn’t end up carrying out much work for the couple, we parted on good terms though and I wished them all the best for the future.

Periodically afterwards I’d check on their site, just out of curiosity more than anything else. They never seemed to move across to a platform and I always imagined they were still buried in paperwork.

To be honest I kind of forgot about them for a few years however I recently fired up their website. I was pretty shocked to find that the site was gone and in its place was a landing page advertising the domain name for sale at SEDO.

I checked back the WayBackWhenMachine and from what I could tell they never moved to an all in one platform.

I’m not saying that this was the reason for the business failing however it certainly couldn’t have helped.

Their lack of a proper ecommerce platform will have restricted their growth prospects. Imagine if they had invested all that time they wasted messing around with paper systems and updating their manually built site into working on building their business, they could have been so much further down the line.

This is a sad story with a cautionary message behind it.

Yes, they should have moved to a proper platform but that’s not the real thing to takeaway, they should have had the ability to step back from the day to day running of their business and make the right decisions to enable them to move forward.

Unfortunately they lacked this vision and I think they paid the price.

Don’t make the same mistake, business is hard and full of tough decisions, but you need to make them and have the ability to see the long term gain over the short term pain.

If you have an on-going problem that is sucking up your time then you must deal with it, it will be worth it in the long run.

(Image Credit: mattwi1s0n)

With the available pool of unregistered domain names getting ever smaller a lot of new businesses end up going with longer names or decide to use one of the newer domain name extensions.

I’ve already covered why you should stick with the most commonplace extensions, and having a long domain name has its own set of drawbacks including looking spammy and being difficult for customers to remember and type in.

What option do you have then?

Well, why not consider buying a premium domain name?

When I talk about premium domains I’m really talking about ones that have already been registered but may be available for sale privately.

There are various websites that list registered domain names for sale, popular ones include SEDO and NameDrive, but a quick Google search will bring up others.

Let’s say I wanted to setup a new website selling computers, if I can’t find any decent unregistered names then a quick SEDO search for the word ‘computer’ returns over 38,000 results, plenty to look at then!

Adding the term ‘buy’ narrows the search down to almost 800 results which is a bit more manageable

If I sort by list price then there are some expensive names there however moving through the pages gets you to some pretty cool names for realistic prices.

For example, the name thepcshop.com is listed at $1,500 USD, yes it’s not cheap but what a great name for an ecommerce site.

Lower down the list prices you can find desktopcomputershop.co.uk for just over £300 or buyanewpc.com for under $500 USD.

Bear in mind that these are the asking prices for the domain names and you can usually submit any bid that you want so you should be able to secure a name for lower than the list price, sometimes well under.

I once came across a name for a project and the asking price was around £2,000, after a bit of negotiation I had the name in my possesion for under £700.

Premium names can be worth the cost for the branding potential alone in my opinion but they also have another fairly major benefit if you are clever about it.

Exact Match Domain Names

For many different reasons which I won’t go into here, the search engines usually give a ‘boost’ to a website which has the same domain name as a search term.

For example, say you had a site on a domain buyanewpc.com, with only a minimal amount of SEO work your site would rank very highly for the search term ‘buy a new pc’.

These domain names are often called ‘exact match domains’ and whilst an exact match domain for a very popular search term can be more expensive they can also be very valuable for your business.

For arguments sake lets say that you paid for a PPC advert for the term ‘buy a new pc’ and it cost 70p per click. If it got 100 clicks a day that would cost you £70 which would equate to just over £2,000 a month.

If you bought the domain name, spent £1,000 with an SEO company to ‘promote’ it and you achieved the no.1 position then you would probably get more than 100 clicks a day on it at an on-going cost per click of £0.00!

In less than half a month’s AdWords spend you would have a valuable asset to your business which would generate more and more clicks over the longer term for only a fraction of the AdWords cost.

Taking all this into account, premium domain names can start to loook like a very attractive proposition for your new business.

You should at least consider them, what do you think?

Forced Registration Is Bad

One question that gets asked regularly is should you make customers register for an account on your website before making a purchase?

There have been lots of studies and testing into this and the outcomes are pretty conclusive, yet so many sites still get it wrong!

The short answer is that in most cases you should not force potential customers to register before making a purchase, here are the reasons why:

1. Long Forms Turn People Off

Just like in the real world, when someone is confronted with a form asking for lots of details most people are turned off.

There are few things more boring than filling in forms and it’s exactly the same online.

If you knew that a product was available at two different places and one needed a form filling in before buying and one didn’t, with everything else being equal you would most likely go for the one without a registration form.

2. Testing Results

There have been lots of split tests carried out on checkout procedures where people have tested a checkout process with registration versus one without it required.

Pretty conclusively the results show customers prefer not having to register, see some of the tests for yourself here:

• Get Elastic – Checkout Split Test
• Forrester Research – Checkout Registration Report
• Get Elastic – Shopping Cart Abandonment Reduction Tips

3. Privacy Concerns

If I want to buy something online then it’s pretty much a given that I will have to give out my delivery address and contact details, along with payment details. I know this upfront and am prepared for it.

When a site starts asking me for extra details such as mother’s maiden name, alternative email addresses, or shopping preferences then I think, what are they possibly going to do with all this extra information other than bombard me with more sales messages.

The eCommerce site doesn’t need this info to complete my order so they shouldn’t be trying to force me to give them it in order to make a purchase.

4. Interrupting Checkout

There are enough interruptions in the online world and too many competitors just a short hop skip and a click away.

You should always be striving to make sure your sales funnel is as simple as possible, moving from browsing your products to entering payment details should ideally be as easy as possible.

Adding in a long form interrupts this sales process which will never help your sales conversion rates.

5. There Is No Reason To Do It!

Taking into account the above, there is one final reason not to force customers to register…

There is absolutely no reason for it!

Most of, if not all the information you need to create an account is entered during the process of a normal checkout process anyway.

Why not let people checkout normally without a registration form, then at the end offer customers the chance to create an account by simply entering a password.

The account can then be setup automatically as you can reuse all the details you already collected for the order without requiring users to enter it again.

This is the best of both worlds and should be how most eCommerce sites work, unfortunately it isn’t. There are countless examples of sites which don’t adhere to these best practice guidelines.

How does your site handle registrations?

Despite the fact that Google has been running its AdWords program for over 10 years now, some people still struggle to understand exactly what it is and how it works.

Read on for an overview of Google AdWords and how it plays a massive part in the online advertising world.

History of AdWords

Google started life as a search engine, it scanned the Internet and built up a database of websites that it discovered, it then used sophisticated computer algorithms to rank these sites based on a variety of factors for different keywords and phrases.

This allowed anybody to go to Google, perform a search and return a list of sites which matched their search terms.

This functionality is great for end users however businesses that didn’t end up at the top of the search results received hardly any visitors from Google. This eventually led to the search engine optimisation field developing with people attempting to artificially ‘push’ sites up the rankings.

Google saw an opportunity to insert paid adverts around the normal search results for which it could charge businesses, AdWords was born.

Which Sections on Google Are AdWords Ads?

When you perform a Google search you usually get a set of Google AdWords ad’s returned along with the normal search results.

The following picture shows a search results page on Google, the sections highlighted in blue are Google AdWords adverts:

As you can see they take up a lot of space on the page.

How Do I Get My Ad Shown?

To show your advert for peoples searches you need to sign up for a Google AdWords account, you can then create adverts and insert the keywords which you would like your ad to show up against.

There are many intricacies to the AdWords billing system however in basic terms you decide the maximum amount you are prepared to pay for every click on your advert, this is called the Cost Per Click (CPC). Once your ads are running Google basically decides exactly how far up the results you are shown based on how much you have bid.

As mentioned, it is more complex than this and positioning does depend on more than your bid prices however we will go deeper into this in future articles.

One other thing to mention is that you only pay when somebody clicks on your advert, if it gets shown 1,000 times but gets no clicks it costs you nothing.

The Benefit of AdWords

AdWords is a revolution in advertising, being able to display an ad for your product or service at the exact time that somebody is actively searching for it has never been possible on a national (or even global) scale before.

Because it is closely integrated with Google Analytics you can drill down and see exactly how effective your various ads are performing, this can help you create a highly effective advertising system for your business.

Potential Downsides

As with everything there are some downsides to using Google AdWords.

It can be expensive. Very expensive. You have to be careful when setting up ads and bid prices, set bids too high and you can quickly spend a lot of money. I’ve seen examples of people burning through hundreds or thousands of pounds in the space of a few days with next to no return on it.

It can also be quite an effort to manage large campaigns. I have run accounts which have had literally tens of thousands of keywords and hundreds of different ads spending up to £10,000 a month before. Managing this yourself could almost be a full time job without the proper skills and experience.

Some areas are also very competitive, you sometimes find AdWords is simply not a good match for your business. For example if you are selling branded products you will find much larger businesses running AdWords campaigns with bigger budgets than you have employing dedicated AdWords experts. This can make competing very difficult.

A final negative is that once you stop paying Google, your ads stop. Run out of budget and your AdWords presence vanishes instantly, there is no direct residual effect from this advertising.

Overall AdWords can be a massive part of your business, it should be at the very least considered by any business with an online presence. It doesn’t work for everyone, but on the flip side there are countless examples of business which would die without their AdWords traffic.

Do you use AdWords for advertising your business? How do you find it?

Things have been a little quiet on the eCommerce blog for the last week or so and for that I apologise.

I have made some progress with the blog though, firstly we have a new design which I feel is far superior to the old look. Along with the design we have been able to incorporate some better styling elements in posts which will make them even better!

For anyone interested I use the excellent Thesis framework for the blog which is a really powerful wordpress implementation and leads to nice looking and coded sites.

Over the next few months I aim to expand on what I’m calling our foundation articles, these are more informative posts which explain a concept or procedure in more detail, all with an eCommerce angle of course.

I’m also going to be experimenting with some screen capture posts and possibly full motion video sections where appropriate so look out for them and let me know how you find them.

Finally, I’m putting together some more ‘owner interviews’ to give real world insight into eCommerce sites and operation by founders themselves.

If you know anyone suitable, or like the idea of being interviewed yourself simply let me know.

Thanks again for reading and I wish you all the best with your eCommerce adventures.

Darren

P.S.

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Is making your customers experience as painless as possible.

Sounds easy? It should be, yet so many sites get it so wrong.

I’m going to pick on a company called Scan, they sell computer hardware and related items and we occasionally buy components off them for our business.

Over the past two days I’ve had two similar bad experiences, both exactly the same but for different orders, combined with the fact that I’ve never liked their site I thought I needed to vent (constructively of course!).

Overall their site design is okay, they have a very busy homepage but you can quickly tell what type of items they sell. I’m sure most visitors want to see component options and prices so the top category menu probably works quite well for them.

In my eyes though they have some fundamental problems:

1. Product Navigation & Display

Although I think the expanded horizontal top navigation is a good starting point, once you select an option you get a pop out window from which you have to then tick the subcategories that you want to view.

I don’t like having to make this selection upfront, I don’t like the tick boxes and often there seems to be little difference in some of subcategory descriptions making selection something you have to really consider.

When you get to a product listing page the initial screens are full of adverts, text or links to learn more about the components, meaning products are pushed right down towards the bottom of the page.

Finally when you use the filtering tools, which are further up the page than the products so you have to keep scrolling back up and down, you click filter and it seems like nothing has happened. It has actually filtered the product results but you can’t see them unless you scroll back down again…

Scan's Horrible Login Form

2. Logging In To Your Account

Scan must have one of the worst login forms I have ever used. Just logging in to your account (which you need before you can buy…) involves entering your first name, last name, post code, mothers maiden name and password all in separate boxes. They even split the post code entry into two different boxes… WHY?

I have no idea why they feel the need to ask so many details, it’s easier logging into my online banking!

The layout of the login form also means that every browser I use (Chrome, Firefox & IE) can never automatically fill in the details for me, they get the odd box filled in but never the whole form.

3. Checkout Form

The major fail here is that they automatically add something called Scansure Proctection to every order. It’s basically a month long insurance policy to cover you in case you break any of the components whilst trying to install them.

I’m not against offering this service, I’m sure it will give some people extra peace of mind however I don’t like that they assume everyone needs it. For our standard order value the cost is often over £30. When you try and remove it they flash a further confirmation button in front of you asking if you are sure…

Firstly, I wouldn’t have clicked it if I wasn’t sure, and secondly they are now forcing me to notice the extra charge, find the option to remove it and then reconfirm it, 3 steps which shouldn’t be required.

One thing which is good is that you have the option of specifying a delivery date and time from a calendar and option boxes, this is very convenient and is something I wish more sites did, (I should do it on my site as well!).

4. The Biggest Customer Service Failure Ever!

The other things mentioned so far are annoying, in my opinion Scan could fairly easily resolve the issues and I’m sure it would help with conversion rates etc… however these pale into insignificance compared with the major problem they have.

Stock levels…

When you look at the Scan site for a product everything is listed as either ‘In Stock’ on ‘Pre Order’.

For ‘In Stock’ items it doesn’t show how many they have available, so you try and buy 3 of the same graphics cards, add them to your cart, complete the long winded login and checkout process and go about your day, until…

7:30pm on the evening you get an email saying ‘Delayed Order Notification’, it goes on to inform you that due to ‘a temporary shortage in stock of the following item(‘s) ‘  you won’t be receiving your order as planned. They hold the entire order and don’t dispatch anything! That’s fantastic when you’re relying on components to complete customer orders…

They let you checkout, take the money from your bank account or credit card, wait until you have left work and all their customer support lines are closed then send you that email, how frustrating!

You log into their site yet again, getting even more annoyed at how crap the login form is, and try and find out more info on the order, guess what? There is no information at all, they even have a link on the account menu labelled ‘Outstanding Products’ but its empty, the order details give no indication of a problem either, the only choice is to wait until the phone lines open in the morning.

This happened to me on Monday of this week, when I called the helpful guy said that their site doesn’t know how many items of each product are available, this is shoddy, he also couldn’t tell me why when I made the purchase before lunch time that it took until the evening to inform me of the problem, leaving it too late to arrange another supplier.

The customer service guy seemed to have a bit of a bad attitude when I asked them to just send the 1 graphics card and refund me for the other 2, again not a great way to entice me to use them again.

The problem (for me) is I needed a fairly specialist part yesterday and they were one of the only places to say they had some, as I was in a rush I quickly dropped an order for 2 of them, guess what? The exact same thing happened again. Argh!!!!

Sort it out Scan!

As a company we spend literally thousands of pounds each month on components (sometimes well into the tens of thousands) yet I always try to avoid Scan because of the pain of using their site and the massive customer service failures which their competitors never seem to have.

The things I have pointed out here could easily be sorted out but Scan’s site has had these issues for at least a couple of years, imagine how much money they are leaving on the table because of this?

When designing or running your site try and spend some time making sure you don’t annoy your customers, it’s hard enough to win them the first time and you need them to keep coming back.

To be honest, most people who I talk to have already started an ecommerce website or have decided that they want to already, still, it’s worth taking a while to consider whether ecommerce is for you.

Starting Up A New Site

Let’s clear this up straight away, launching an ecommerce website is a big undertaking which shouldn’t be underestimated.

Starting with the site alone you need to decide on an ecommerce platform to use and a design route, be it a pre-constructed template or a unique design crafted by a designer.

Depending on your choices the cost for this can run from a few hundred up to a few thousand pounds or more.

You also need to organise a domain name and some hosting for your site, you can outsource all of this to a web design agency but this will usually incur additional fees.

Seeing as we are talking about ecommerce then another basic requirement is the ability to take payments. Most platforms making linking up to a payment processor fairly straightforward however for the non-technical it can still turn into a bit of a headache.

Jumping through the hoops to get a merchant account and payment processor can take a while, even if you choose something like PayPal as your option.

Once you have these basic prerequisites in place you need to load up all your products and content.

There is nothing more boring than loading products, trust me I know!

Have you got product descriptions ready or do they need writing? What about pictures, do you have good quality pictures? Are they the right size?

Finally don’t forget about the required content pages such as your terms and conditions, privacy policy, returns policies and about us pages, all are important and need thought before you can launch.

Got to this stage? Think you’re done? Think again!

Marketing & Promotion

Marketing your new website is the single biggest aspect people don’t consider before starting an ecommerce project, and it can easily be the most costly.

Once you have your shiny new site how are you planning on getting people to it?

SEO is a long term strategy which will not give instant results. In a fairly competitive sector you can basically forget about generating sales from SEO efforts for a minimum of 6 – 9 months, and that’s with a decent budget being spent on it from day 1.

Often SEO will only start contributing to traffic after a year or two of hard on-going work, the only shortcut here is to throw money at it but that’s simply not an option for most new start-ups.

PPC or Google AdWords is a more instant traffic source however it needs to be setup and managed properly otherwise it can end up being a money sinkhole.

In some sectors AdWords can be a nonstarter if I’m honest, if you have a lot of competition from big players such as Amazon then unless you have an exceptionally managed PPC campaign and a high converting website you could quickly run into trouble.

Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook offer low cost ways to market your business but don’t make the mistake of thinking you can rely on these sources to generate lots of sales, they may eventually become a good referral source for customers but a lot of work is needed here along with a solid strategy for growth.

Obviously we have only scratched the surface of online marketing techniques here, and there are many other online and offline methods which need to be considered alongside the above.

Daily Running

Okay, let’s say you have an ecommerce site and have lots of traffic coming into it who are converting into sales, mission accomplished? No way…

Depending on your products and volume you could easily need a team of people to help run your site on a daily basis. If you need to employ people then you are obviously going to need premises, insurance and all the other costs and time associated with managing staff.

If you intend to manage it on your own then you will still have a ton of jobs to manage.

Dealing with customer enquiries can sometimes be a full time job in itself, for my site I can easily spend half a day or more responding to enquiries at busy times.

When orders come in you have to establish and follow your internal processes to verify the validity of the order, prepare it, arrange delivery, take payment and communicate all this back to the customer.

That’s just the basic tasks. Other jobs which should not be forgotten about include keeping product descriptions up to date, adding new products, managing suppliers, keeping track of inventory, dealing with returns, testing different designs to increase conversion rates, or tracking the effectiveness of your different advertising methods. The list can seem never ending.

Think about something simple like adding a promotion or offer on to the site. You will most likely have to create banners, load them into your sites design, adjust prices on promotional items or setup discount codes. This process alone can quickly swallow up lots of your time.

Apologies for the seemingly negative article. Ecommerce can be very rewarding both personally and financially, don’t get me wrong, I love it and earn a very good living off it, but it is a lot of hard work.

I think a lot of failed ecommerce businesses would never have been started if the owners realised exactly how difficult it can be.

Don’t let me put you off though, if you’ve got to the end of this article and are still raring to go then good luck to you.

Hopefully if you read through some of the other articles here you can find some hints and tips to help you get started or progress your ecommerce business even further.

Here is why you should be offering products related to your core range and how I stumbled across this to my benefit!

In any business it’s important to make sure the product or service you are offering is what your target customer base is looking for, ecommerce is no different to this.

First things first, let’s assume you already have a core product range to offer people

Once you’re up and running with your store you should pay careful attention to what other things your customers may want, there could be big opportunities here to increase your range and offer supplementary products to your existing customers.

There are a few ways to try and find out what customers want, the easiest being simply asking them. You could do this when customers phone in with enquiries or orders, I find chatting with customers one of the best ways of researching my market.

If your store has an internal search box you should be able to pull up some kind of report on what people are putting in as search terms, this can quickly give you an insight into your customers intentions and wants.

Also, try looking at the search term keyword reports in Google Analytics or if you run AdWords campaigns look at the Matched Search Query Report, both of these can help with this kind of research.

Other methods would be to look at your competitors and see what other types of products they offer, or try Googling for your products and see what comes up in the results, there may be something there.

Once you have found related products you could try and find some drop shippers for this product, the margins may be small but it can be a quick and easy way to test if you are actually able to sell them. If this works out well then you could go down the route of stocking the items yourself thus increasing your margins.

Remember that if you offer customers a one stop place to buy all their related items then you are naturally going to increase sales on your existing products as well as your core product range.

When I started Multiple Monitors the original plan was just to sell the monitor arrays (screens, stands and cables). It didn’t take very long to realise that people who bought these also wanted the computers to go with them.

I didn’t want to start selling computers online for various reasons, the main ones being the ridiculously small margins and potential for problems!

Eventually I contacted a 3rd party computer supplier and struck an arrangement for them to supply the computers on our behalf. This didn’t work out very well, the computers were not very good and changing supplier didn’t really solve the problem.

The only way forward was to supply our own range of PCs which we built in-house. Obviously this was a fairly big undertaking for us but one I was happy to take on because the market had told me that the computers would sell.

At a rough estimate I’d say over 70% of our sales now include a computer either as part of a bundle or by itself.

It may seem obvious to sell PCs with the monitor arrays but trust me, at the time I was adamant that I didn’t want to go down this route, I wouldn’t have the business that I have today if I hadn’t paid attention to my market.

What other products could you offer your customers?

If you’re new to ecommerce and websites you can read my guide to domain names and why you need one.

Another question which seems to come up a lot when somebody is picking a domain name is which is the best extension to go for?

Domain Extensions for SEO

Technically it shouldn’t really make a difference to a websites SEO potential which domain extension it has, in reality though it does seem to.

For SEO I would stick with ‘.com’, ‘.co.uk’ (or your local geographic extension if you’re not in the UK), ‘.org’, or ‘.net’.

These in my mind are the main ones and are proven to rank highly time and time again.

Note that I’m not saying that sites rank highly because of the extension, I’m simply pointing out that there are countless examples of websites with top rankings using these extensions.

Whilst the newer extensions might offer you the chance to get a catchier sounding domain name, it is very rare to come across them in the Google search results.

I know there will be exceptions to what I’m going to say, but in researching this article I couldn’t find one example of a ‘.info’, or ‘.biz’ website ranking on the first page for any competitive term I could think of.

The counter argument to this is that because the newer domain names tend to be on newer websites (by default) then they will start ranking well at some point in the future. This may be true, but why bother starting a site with anything other than what is proven to work unless you absolutely can’t avoid it.

Domain Extensions for Humans

If you’re like me then you will just expect companies to have the ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ version of their domain name by default.

Speaking with some non-technical folks I have heard it said that people don’t really trust websites that don’t have a ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’.

This is believable to me because there is a widespread fear of fraud on the Internet and in particular with eCommerce, if people are not sure of something the natural reaction is to fear it and be hesitant, you don’t want this for your business.

Another issue is the one that was raised by the new ‘.co’ extension. If you only have the ‘.co’ version and someone is trying to find you then they are far more likely to type in ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ as this is what they are used to doing.

Domain Extensions for Businesses

If possible you should look to secure as many versions of your domain name as possible, this will ensure no competitors can snap up a closely related name and profit off your name or service.

I have vetoed domain names for projects before because I couldn’t secure the ‘.com’ or someone else was trading off a similar name under a different extension.

You also have to be a little careful of trademark infringements here as well.

If you have a large competitor trading off redwidgetsco.com and you buy redwidgetsco.co.uk and put up a site selling items in a related field they could have a case to come after the domain name through the courts.

It’s a big area for discussion and the easy advice is to shy away from any potential issues by being aware of this upfront.

Getting a domain name off somebody else through the courts can take years and be costly, I wouldn’t ever recommend that you rely on this as an option, that’s why it’s best to secure as many variations of you main domain name as you can whilst they are available.

I think that covers most angles of selecting a domain name extension, to conclude I would always recommend getting the ‘.co.uk’ and ‘.com’ if possible for UK based businesses. If one or the other is unavailable then you need to make a call on whether it could potentially affect your business further down the line, if so then perhaps an alternative name may be better.

What are your thoughts on domain name extensions, do certain ones put you off?

This is the first in a series of interviews with eCommerce website owners / managers and Rich of Just Keyrings has been kind enough to share his thoughts with us:

“Let’s start with a little bit about Just Keyrings, when did you launch the site and what made you decide to get into the Keyring market?”

Just Keyrings was launched by a colleague as a side project because he enjoyed design and making new websites. His background in printing gave him an insight into the market opportunity and it grew from there really. Specialising in one product so specifically has been our selling point and it works for several reasons. People like our website because (if you’re looking for keyrings) it caters for exactly that and secondly our expertise over the years have become second to none.

“Is this your first business?”

Yes, this is my first business.

“How do you market the website currently, which method do you feel works best for your site?”

We’ve spent a lot of time concentrating on ‘white hat’ naturally SEO. Our retail shop is based solely online so it makes sense to market this as much as possible. After several years of trading we’ve built up a significant customer database who we regularly keep in contact with, but for us it’s important not to send out endless marketing promotions and normal last minute offers.

“What have been the biggest challenges with your business so far and how have you overcome them?”

We swapped our CMS, redesigned the website and swapped servers just under a year ago and we completely dropped out of search engine search results. We spent months working night and day trying to overcome this. A word of advice here would certainly be to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Expand your revenue streams.

“What’s your goal for Just Keyrings over the next year?”

Our services have expanded over the years and we now work with blue chip companies with big budgets and tight deadlines. Providing a reliable and professional service at this level is a goal we’ve been working towards for many years. Now we would like to be the only logical choice for any company looking for promotional keyrings.

“If you could give one piece of advice to somebody who is thinking of getting into ecommerce what would it be?”

I’d advise starting up your own business to anyone with the heart and drive to make it happen. The hours are long and tiring and you will never switch off from work, however hard you try, but the rewards and feeling you get from success are unbelievable.

With regards to ecommerce specifically, it’s a slow game and frustrating one at that. There are a million people who claim to know everything about SEO and a million more willing to take your money and prove it to you. Every market and business is different and some people will benefit more in certain areas than others. For example social media, While we would always advocate the use of new technologies (especially social media) it’s still important understand how best to reach a specific market. Sometimes this means using tried and tested methods, sometimes something unique and original. More often than not it’s a mixture of several approaches that works best. The ultimate objective will always remain the same: spread the word about your business and encourage promotion of your products or services.

“Thanks for your time and sharing your experiences with us.”

I hope you like this insight into Rich’s eCommerce business, I always find it interesting hearing about other peoples stories.

Have you got any questions for Rich? Post them in the comments and I’m sure he’d be happy to get back to you.