Ecommerce Pulse

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.

The following article is a guest post written by Daniel Clutterbuck of Webtise.

The prospect of starting a business alone can be daunting – how can one person cover marketing, sales, finance, IT, stock, delivery and more? It’s difficult, that much is true, but it’s not impossible. Thanks to technology and a few handy tips and tricks, anyone can start up their own business without too much trouble. As long as you stay organised and focused, you can get your business to a level where it will soon be running like clockwork. Here are some great tips to get you started:

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.

Adding tabs to your product pages is not difficult--all you have to do is copy and paste a little code here and there. There are two different ways of adding tabs, depending on how you want them to function, so continue reading about the two methods below.

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.