How to research an ecommerce business idea. ECommerce Articles | June 21 Cheap Jerseys China , 2009
Ecommerce is well known as being a low overhead route to market but that doesn't mean that you can be complacent about your business model.

I'm going to give you some ways in which you can test out your ecommerce business idea before you get in too deep.

A common way to set up an ecommerce site is to start with your business idea, talk to a design or web agency who will provide you with a project proposal to design and build your website. Once built and paid for you then begin to wrestle with ways to generate traffic to your new website Cheap Jerseys Wholesale , given that the site is new and has few (if any) inbound links you'll soon be setting up your Google Adwords account and paying for visitors on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis.

Given that you've just paid to design and build the site and are now paying for your traffic, this isn't a good time to find out that there simply isn't the demand you thought there would be for your products Cheap Discount Jerseys , or that given the cost of traffic and overheads you can't make a profit on what you sell.

Let's look at some ways of avoiding a situation like this. By taking a range of steps using existing online tools and services you can get some real world research to find out a bit more about your potential market, and then with a minimal investment test how receptive that market is to your proposed products and price point.


Step 1. Where is the search?
Your first step should be to write down a list of the phrases you believe potential customers would use to find your products Cheap Jerseys , once you have these phrases use some online keyword research tools to find out how much traffic there is for each term, as well as the level of competition each phrase has.

You need to bear in mind that the figures for search volume will vary dependant upon where you go for the figures and the marketplace you are looking at. Google's keyword research tool is geared towards Adwords and by default will give you figures based upon their 'Broadmatch' setting which includes similar searches Wholesale MLB Baseball Jerseys , and as such by default gives unusually high traffic figures.

I prefer to use Yahoo! or Wordtracker for this kind of information as the figures are more realistic, if you do use Google's keyword tool then make sure you enclose the search term in speech marks as this will match the phrase directly.


Step 2. How many competitors are there?
You might find that you have a healthy search volume Wholesale Baseball Jerseys , but then if this is an already well mined niche with many existing competitors you will be at an immediate disadvantage as your competitors will be trading with an established website and you will be starting from scratch.

There are 2 pieces of information we will need for each phrase to give us a complete picture of the situation. One is the number of direct competitors who are already in Google's index for the phrases we are interested in and the next is a keywords effectiveness index (KEI) which combines search volume with competitors volume to derive an index figure which highlights the potential of each phrase in our list.


Step 3. Get to grips with the competiton
Not all search phrases are created equal as some will have more sites competing for them than others.

Imagine you have a search phrase in your list with 100 searches per month, are you competing with 10 other sites for that traffic or 10 Wholesale Majestic MLB Jerseys ,000,000 other sites? By using an effectiveness index you will see at a glance where there are gaps in the competitiion and if you decide to go ahead with your new ecommerce site you can use this information to help optimise your website for these phrases.


In order to find the number of competing sites for a search phrase Wholesale MLB Jerseys , do a search in Google with the search phrase in speech marks and take a look at the "Results 1 to 10 of about xxx" the xxx figure is the amount of websites that are in Google's index for that exact phrase.

The KEI equation is searches x searches competition = effectiveness for example 100 x 100 10 = 1000 KEI which is a great opportunity as ultimately you have 100 searches with only 10 direct competitors for that phrase. Whereas 100 x 100 10,000 Wholesale Jerseys From China ,000 = 0.001 KEI which is dreadful!

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