What would you do differently?

What type of problems did you encounter, that you wish you would have known about sooner?

Please, work back into your memory banks and hit up this thread with some good, or bad, memories you have about getting that e-commerce site running.

What would be the First thing you would select carefully when making your site. The hosting company? The Shopping cart? something else? I personally believe that its best to find a suitable shopping cart first, then work from there.

fill me in.........

I am in some respects in the process of starting over - all new design, content, fresh products, rethinking entire business model, ...

The hardest part for me has been providing customer service (technical support - necessary since I sell code I've written). I got so burned out on that I had to shut my business down to take a break.

Clearly stated policies on duration and scope of support included with purchase is highest on my list of priorities! I have been amazed at the extent to which people will take advantage and also amazed at how difficult it is to present information in a way that people will actually see it and read it.

I didn't anticipate the need for thick skin and a hardnosed business attitude. Still working on that :eek:

I can see how customer service can be crazy for you with that kind of business..

what else people?

I had the most trouble with the Shopping cart not doing what I wanted done, so I am going back and trying some other options there.

anyone know of a good shopping cart that has a goood CRM system going with it?? things like customer logins, award points system for repeat buyers. a Login process for the customer that would allow them to accumalate points they could use towards future purchases or services. an easy giftcard system you you purchase online and then use online or at the store. Any kind of Cart out there that can help with this? I still have not found the one I think we should use for this 1 project....

Shopping cart selection shouldn't be a problem with this great site: shopping-cart-reviews.com

Try Zencart - its one of the free and the best shoppign carts around, and you should find most features you are lookin for there. Of course, there are hosted solutions such as www.volusion.com if you are looking to pay.

marsd try http://www.magentocommerce.com/, is pretty cool and i think is even better then OScommerce, I wanna start building a new shopping cart soon and for while I have visit some many web sites and this one is sound to be the best....and also is free open source....

It totally depends on the customers needs really. Some customers are suited to off the shelf packages and manage to get a 90% fit for their requirements at a very affordable price. Others want ether advanced features and customisation and are looking to meet 100% of their requirements. You will of course pay significantly more for a fully consulted service but it gives you exactly what you require and the customer can be assured that when their requirements grow, they can be meet.

We offer fully consulted ecommerce solutions that we have developed in house from scratch. This allows us to meet 100% of our users requirements. One of the largest problems our customers have told us about is that they went down a route of using an off the shelf package and later realising that they are unable to achieve what they require.

I would certainly say selecting the ecommerce solutions id the first thing you should do, however you need to make sure that the hosting package you have is going to be able to support your requirements for a foreseeable future as you will probably incure more costs and hustle saving a small amount on a cheap hosting package in the interim.

Advertising budget was our biggest mistake. Not having enough cash and misjudging how much business you think you will get from running a particular ad with the budget you have.

Whatever you think you need to spend on advertising, treble it. And try really small test campaings first to see what kind of reaction you get so its not a total waste of money if it doesnt work out.

We took out an ad with a popular magazine specific to our customers that we thought would be a good runner but we didnt get anything back from it. Just went to proove that big circulation numbers dont mean that much.

Thats again a common mistake of many companies PCHeroes. People also tent to underestimate the complexity of running a marketing campaign and try undertaking this task themselves. Its similar to assuming because you have an art package that you dont need a designer to design your website ;). From our experience, the money our customers have saved from higher return on investment far out weights the cost of having a professional company managing your PPC campaigns.

We offer a full range of different online marketing services (http://www.tmesolutions.co.uk/online_marketing) and have qualified Google Adwords professional as well as people specialising in natural search engine optimisation (http://www.tmesolutions.co.uk/online_marketing/search_engine_optimisation).

For start up companies, or companies who dont want to wait a few months for natural seo to take full effect, we usually combine natural SEO for long term effect backed up with PPC while the natural SEO still waiting to take effect.

I could go on for hours about marketing and how important it is but as this is a general thread I wont get to specific.

Good topic, Mar. Learning lots from the replies.