How not to launch an e-business

18th
OCT

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Online Retail, Social Media

A recent article at Inc. suggests that the easiest way to launch an e-business is not to have a great business plan but buy a website through a broker on which to launch it. I’d like to suggest that ‘easy’ is not a good route to business growth and that buying somebody else’s mistake is an unlikely way to achieve success.

Inc. suggested Ebiz brokers and eBay as the best places to find sites. There are more established locations to find sites for sale such as Flippa and Dalton’s Weekly

Looking at the ecommerce section of business brokers sites can also show up potential opportunities. UK brokers include:

Knightsbridge
Avondale.

Even if you can find a good site (and if they were going concerns with a good customer base why would they be on the open market, rather than brokering a goodwill deal with a competitor who can see their value?), there are inherent risks in this approach:

1.   The observable traffic on a site you purchase may have no value or even a negative value, if it’s not convertible
2.   Search engine rankings are fragile and Google, in particular is tough – if there are hidden dangers in the site you buy (cloaking, embedded automatic content generators, black hat blogging), stripping them out is costly and even when they’re gone, you’ll find yourself penalised by the Google algorithm
3.   The seller wont always give you the full story – it’s all very well asking questions but it’s quite another thing to get honest answers: when e-commerce fails, very few site owners are willing to own up to their mistakes in front of a buyer, even if they recognise them.

There aren’t any shortcuts to starting a successful online business. The business fundamentals have to be right

•   Products
•   Pricing
•   Promotion
•   Reaching the right customer base
•   Customer service.

If any of these are less than excellent, online customers find out quicker than any others, and spread their disillusion faster and wider than any others, using social media to inform a wide audience about your failure. They may be low barriers to entry in setting up an ecommerce business but without a clear strategy and unique selling proposition why will customers buy from a new online business?

If the fundamentals of the business are right, services like Volusion can help build a scalable online business. Volusion is an all in one software solution which already powers 30,000 online stores. It takes a lot of the headaches out of starting an online and, unlike many other solutions, it is targeted at UK merchants.

However if your aim is build the best possible online experience for your customers, starting from scratch with a bespoke website may not be the cheapest or easiest option but in the long run it still might be the best one.

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