Ecommerce Pulse

Before starting an online store, it's important to find out if there is enough demand for your product. I would highly recommend NOT ordering $10,000 worth of doggy snowsuits from a Chinese manufacturer without first knowing if people are going to want to buy them! Spending money on R&D or inventory without first determining demand is a great way to flush all your startup capital down the toilet.

No matter how great you think your idea is, make sure you know some solid facts about the demand for your product before investing a lot of time and money in your idea.

I'm going to explain several different ways to test market demand, but it's probably best to use some combination of these.

If you already have an online store, and are looking for ways to improve it, here's a checklist of 8 quick, actionable items you can do today to grow your business.

Is a blog really that important for your ecommerce store?

When you start an ecommerce business, you might think that you just want to sell your products and not worry about things like writing good blog posts and attracting a following. It's tempting to throw up a blog because everyone's doing it, and then fail to update it regularly with quality content. After all, you're a store owner, not a writer, right? Plus, you have more important things that demand your attention.

I'm Leighton.

A few years ago I graduated from college and married my beautiful wife, Ryan. My degree was in Graphic Design, but I wasn't quite sure what type of job I wanted to pursue. My wife is a true globe-trotter, having grown up as a daughter of missionaries and having lived in Paris, Benin (that's in Africa), New Jersey, and Haiti before she went to college. She did not like the idea of settling down in America just yet, and I was eager to explore the world as well, so shortly after getting married we decided to find jobs as English teachers in China.

A call to action (CTA) is where you encourage the visitors to your site to take a specific action. A call to action might be something like "Sign up for our newsletter" or "Browse products."

As an ecommerce website owner, you eventually want visitors to purchase something, so your calls to action throughout the site should funnel your visitors towards making a purchase. The final calls to action will be "Add to cart" and "Checkout," (or something like that).

In my experience working with numerous budding ecommerce entrepreneurs, I've seen one mistake trip people up over and over again. It's something that we've probably all experienced at some point in our lives (in general life circumstances), and if you aren't careful there's a good chance it will kill your chances of success with ecommerce. What is this dangerous problem?