Taking your neighborhood business online

I have been building small business websites for over 13 years. Thirteen years ago a neighborhood business website basically served as an online equivalent of the yellow pages. Call us to order! Now! Today, a neighborhood business website can often take a business national - and without the need for a bank loan. Unfortunately, most neighborhood business owners do not know how to optimize their internet potential.

So here is how it normally goes: We have this great shop that specializes in selling baby gifts. We cannot seem to keep the vibrating teething rings in stock. If we can sell these things online, just imagine how rich we will be. A credit card and a shopping cart and they are off and running. And six months later they have six orders to show for the effort. Where are all the customers? First, who are they? If you are not Mattel, people will not find you by accident. Second,the site attracts customers like a salesman waiting for the fax machine to print. Now what?

This is where the professionals come in. The neighborhood business owner consults the yellow pages (go figure) to find a company to hire for building the perfect online store. They are quoted $60,000 over 12 months to turn their site into THE destination for baby gifts. Twelve months later they have the best looking site money can buy and dozens of reports explaining why it only generated twelve orders. Renew now because it takes thirteen months to start seeing a trend.

To build a profitable internet business you do not want a graphic designer. Graphic design is for building a brand. Neighborhood businesses do not generate sales online because of their brand. Neighborhood businesses generates sales online based on increasing traffic and making it simple for customers to find products and place orders.

Time to hire an ecommerce pro. In the world of the ecommerce pro, graphics take minutes to create with Photoshop. Site design is based on proven architecture. I personally use eBay and Amazon for design ideas. Both are immensely profitable in ecommerce and neither breaks new ground in internet graphic design. Ecommerce pros spend 5 minutes on product and search optimization for every 5 seconds spent on graphic design. The sites typically are intuitive, simple and fast to load. The sites are typically focused and link HOW the customer finds the with WHAT they are finding (and ordering).

If your neighborhood business site is not seeing sales at least equal with what you do offline, then look into finding an ecommerce pro. If the pro begins the discussion with how neat the site will look, find another one. If the pro can show specifically what they intend to do to not only bring customers to your site but how those customers will find and order an item, offer them a commission of sales. Do not spend more than you are making. It is not neurosurgery, so do not pay for an surgeon.