new eCommerce and Magento blog
Now live and kicking, a new eCommerce blog: http://www.boostingecommerce.com.
Aimed at beginning and intermediate eCommerce and Magento business owners and users!
Magento e-commerce management with TaskManager
Running an e-commerce shop is a difficult process with lots of small and large tasks. We know as we’re doing that ourselves as well. In order for us to manage our to-do items better we have developed a Magento extension. Now that we have field tested the module with great success it’s time to release it publicly!
The module is called TaskManager and can be found on www.magetaskmanager.com.
New e-commerce player in stealth preparations
Behind the scenes a new Dutch e-commerce website is actively being finalized. We’ll do a soft live somewhere this summer and will seek more publicity in the fall of this year. Actively searching a good product-market fit will be the major focus in the coming months / year. Our blog will provide random updates when there’s news!
Cart2Quote.com in beta
We’re in the process of finalizing a quotation module for Magento called Cart2Quote. It offers the store owner the possibility of capturing requests for quote as well as regular orders. The store owner can then send quotations based on those requests, and final offers can be purchased through a regular payment process.
Such functionality is highly sought after in the B2B market and tailors Magento a little more toward this very promising market segment.
Signing up for the beta at cart2quote@gmail.com ensures a 50% discount on the final module when it goes on sale. (Provided you are an active beta tester of course.)
GroupDeal, deal performance
The collective buying power site GroupDeal is live for about 1.5 months now. We’re having a lot of fun arranging deals and seeing which ones get popular and which ones don’t.
Currently it seems deals only get really popular (say more than 60 purchases) when they:
- Are oriented primarily towards women (might be due to our current subscriber base)
- Are for well established brands
- Tie into current events (holidays etc.)
- Have a huge discount
These may seem like open doors, in the future when there have been some more deals we’ll see how these factors can be made more concrete / quantified.
Risk, reward & growth in e-commerce
Within the e-commerce / webshop market, there’s a whole range of concepts to try. As with anything worth investing time / effort / money in, between the different choices there’s a large gap between risks and potential benefits. Here’s a short idea of what I mean (indicatory, not exhaustive):
- Lower risk: standard shop, buying and selling products in established markets that are not yet saturated. Do the marketing and customer service right and you’ll grow gradually over the months – years;
- Medium risk: standard shop, buying and selling products in relatively untapped niche markets. Do the marketing etc. right and you’ll grow quickly if the niche has potential;
- Higher risk: new shopping concept (social shopping, private sales, etc). If the shopping concept clicks with enough people, you have a hit. Meteoric growth, but because it’s not standard there are large risks. More cash investment in IT is needed up front because it is not a standard shopping concept, and clever marketing is needed to make the shopping concept clear to people and to trigger them to shop and invite friends.
Actually a pretty standard dilemma of where to place your priorities; additionally high risk projects also tend to need a quick time to market.
Serious shop demands serious analysis
The average internet entrepeneur grossly underestimates the time and money investment required to start a webshop in a proper fashion.
There is a plethora of reasons, but the main reason is a lack of analysis before starting implementation. Get informed as an e-retailer: know the possibilities and limitations of e-commerce and the different e-commerce software systems. This leads to more understanding with your implementation partner and as a result less communication overhead.
The most useful information for an implementation partner is to have a clear idea of your demands and wishes and write them out in a detailed specification. An independant e-commerce consultant can facilitatie this as well, or larger companies may employ an e-commerce manager. By getting requirements clear before choosing an implementation partner, quotes of different suppliers can be compared easier and the quotes’ required budgets will be less.