Early Entrepreneurial Ecommerce Errors

The simplicity of the modern Ecommerce store can be both its charm and its detriment at the same time. Anyone with a dream and the desire to do so can build and open a Magento Ecommerce site in no time at all and for little to no money. As such, entrepreneurs with a taste for business and perhaps a good deal of experience too are unsurprisingly diving into Magento to branch out their efforts, only to find in at least 50% of cases that things weren’t quite as black and white as expected.Why? Well, quite simply because designing even the most gorgeous Ecommerce site on Earth doesn’t in any way guarantee success. It takes years in business online to learn the ins and outs of what really matters…or you could of course simply benefit from the wisdom of those that have already earned their stripes!      Strategy Comes Before FeaturesMagento makes it easy to pepper your site with more features and add-ons than a dozen average websites. Sadly though, these features are nothing more than the garnishes to make your overall product and strategy look and feel even better than it is. As such, without a winning strategy and product in the first place, all the bells and whistles in the world are completely and utterly pointless. You therefore need to focus on your strategy – what you will do, how, why, with whom and so on – long before you get busy with the technical extras.Networking From Day One is CrucialWhy wait until you site is built and ready before beginning to collect names and general contacts? This is counterproductive to say the least as during the development and even the planning stages for your site, you could be at the same time building an essential email list. Once your Magento site is ready to go, you’ll already have yourself a powerful marketing tool.Misinterpreting AnalyticsIf your business seems to be going up and down from one day to the next and faces an even more turbulent ride at different times of the year, it’s natural to interpret this as something being very wrong. Usually however it really isn’t – the seasonal nature of Ecommerce makes it impossible to gain a conclusive view of what’s going on without comparing results and performance year-on-year. So while watching daily performance matters, don’t go OTT and jump to conclusions without factoring in the whole of the year.Poor PromotionsFrom the moment your Magento store opens its doors, you need to have promotions in place and have known for some time what they would be. Poor planning for promotions means taking the risk of going OTT with too many or introducing few with any real appeal to your shoppers.Overdoing Product CataloguesAnd finally, it can be tempting to spoil your shoppers with choice right off the bat, but an epic arsenal of merchandise can be the downfall of any new Ecommerce business. And it’s not only about the cost of buying the stuff either – to start off with a small range of products means to expand and grow in conjunction with buyer behaviour, trends, patterns and requests. Or in other words, every new product you from then on begin listing has already been vetted and approved by your buyers, rather than just being bought on the back of your own assumptions.