E-commerce platform sellers. Who regulates them?

suki1001

InsideInsurance wrote: »

The failure rate is higher because people dont plan because of the low cost of entry..... back in my web development days I had hundreds of people that approached wanting an ecommerce site set up but they had no products identified, no branding, no supply chain, no keywords, no target market, no USPs.... they simply heard the internet was an easy way to make money so wanted their ecommerce site. Looking both on here but more so on the likes of Digital Spy you still get daily posts of people doing the same.

You are fortunate to be able to set up a shop for £20,000. The majority are not so fortunate; local to us your looking at circa £60k pa lease of a small unit on the high street so with 2 months deposit plus one months rent your talking £18,000 just to get the keys.

Obviously when people are going to be spending even your £20,000 on setting up a store and then £X,000 a month on rent, water, electric, rates etc they are much more likely to do some planning before hand. I've not heard of many people renting a shop and getting the shop fitting done and only then considering what they are going to actually sell, where they'll buy it from etc. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

If you take the average running cost of a physical store, deduct off the running cost of an ecommerce store and spent the net difference on a combination of long tail and short tail keywords and have a functional site with acceptable pricing I cannot believe the ecommerce store would have no customers, no orders, nothing.

Absolutely agree that if you spend £50 on webhosting, use oscommerce with a free theme and simply submit the site to the search engines for indexing that you will have nothing but that is because at least some of what you save on running cost must be reinvested in advertising because there is no natural footfall unless you happen to be very good at SEO and/ or your in a niche where all of your competitors are even worse at SEO than you.

I agree, - I'm also not sure where the 20k figure comes in. The price for a shop in our local town centre would be at least 30k, that's without other costs. Small west yorkshire town.

The only way to minimalise your risk is to pay when the work has been done. i.e. only pay for it when your happy with it. If you are happy with the general layout of your existing site, it may be easy for a developer to set one up for you at a lower cost. We have companies that come to us all the time who want a new site, but have an existing layout and only want to change a few things. It's also possible through maybe a local chamber of commerce that they may be able to give you some contacts. There isn't just Business link. Many towns and cities have small business enterprise organisations that can point you to someone reliable that won't cost loads. You may even be able to get funding for a site too, it's well worth looking into.

I also agree sometimes people tend to think i have a site, therefore people will buy things. You can have an all singing all dancing website, but that won't mean your customers will ever be able to find you. How much do you need a site? Many people can do things through ebay or amazon. That's sometimes a good way to test the water of your product.

What type of business are you trying to promote op?