Ecommerce Pulse

I'm very excited to share with you that I've recently settled on a niche for my new online store. For the past two months or so, I've been doing a good bit of brainstorming, research, and analyzing of ideas for potential products to sell, and I think (slash hope) that I've done a decent job of selecting a niche.

I am absolutely thrilled to share this episode with you, as I've had the chance to interview one of my entrepreneurial role models, Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com.

We talk about a number of topics that are relevant to beginner ecommerce entrepreneurs, as well as some points that I think you'll appreciate even if you're more experienced in ecommerce.

In the past year, I've had the amazing opportunity to start my own business, work from home, and enjoy the freedom of being my own boss. Right now I'm sitting in a hotel lobby, sipping coffee and working on my laptop, since my wife and I are currently traveling and working on the road. It's an incredibly free feeling to be able to pick up and travel whenever we want to, not having jobs to tie us down. I've always had that entrepreneurial bug--always having a new business idea and wanting to start something new--but it wasn't until this past year that my business grew enough to support us full-time.

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.

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).