How to make your new shop a success? - from 0 to £3000 per month - my personal tips

[netman]

I was very excited when I launched my first shop - a few months ago. The excitment was soon replaced by disappointment. Where are the orders? Nothing, absolutely nothing for a couple of months. Then I sat down to work on the most important factor of ecommerce - marketing.

Three months on the shop generated over £3000 last month. How did I acheive this? Here are some of my tips:

1. The shop must look professional, clean and elegant,
2. The shop must be user friently and easy to use
3. Product images must be good
4. All information about your shop must be available. Creditability

Then comes to the most important bit - marketing

5. bring traffic to your site

There are many ways to to this.

5.1 Search engine optimisation - make sure your sites are optimised for your keywords. Optimising individual products are more important than general site optimisation. Most my visitors come from product search, and they go to the product page directly. Many of them have not seen my home page at all.

Put all meta data in. Check your competitors to see what they have done. Use Google keywords tool.

5.2 Use Google Products. This is free Google tool. Very useful. Upload alll your proudcts into Google products. Youi need to optimise Google products as well to achieve higher ranking in Google products search. The techniques are different from your site products optimisation.

After I started using Google products I have found Google bot visit my site a lot more frequently, from once a couple of days to once a couple of hours

5.3 Google adwards

Google adwards can help you generate instant traffic but it can be very costly. I think it has helped me to increate my generic search rankings. I spent £5 per day for a week. It did not bring in any sales. All my sales are from generic search.

5.4 Create as many inbount links as possible from related sites.

5.5 Upload your products to shopwiki. It is free and can generate a lot back links to your site. There are other free listing sites as well.

6. Optimise your hot sellers first

If you have many products, optimise your hot sellers first.

I have done a lot of research on my competitors to select correct key words for the products.

7. Set price right

I have a few tips on setting prices.

If you rely on generic Google searches, make your price competitive. Most Google searchers are bargain hunters. Put your price in the prodcut title to attract atention.

If you sell on ebay as well, you may set a different price, usually higher. Ebay charges 10% + Paypal fee.

Ok. That is it from me for now. Your tips, comments and questions are welcome. I hope this thread will help many new shop owners.

Please share your expericences here. We can all learn from each other.

[rocky]

Topic moved

[popres]

Well done!

Great tips thank you for sharing.

I noticed you don't have express checkout, you don't think will affect sales ?

[mrFox]

Excellent tips. Thanks for sharing your experience. :-)
+ Good luck with your ecommerce site. I hope it continues to grow! :-)

[curye]

Valuable tips, thx for sharing!!!

[ColorPig]

So far, I desperately wanted like this tip.

[SpyrosT]

Thank you for sharing this.

[noesac]

What I really like is how you've removed all the grey blocks.

http://i45.tinypic.com/37qco.png

When you have a white product on a grey block (which 99% of the time it is anyway) then it looks quite ugly. How did you do this? This is something I've been wanting to do for a long while now!

[rocky]

Just edit your global.css, search for the following sections and remove the border attribute from them:

#primary_block #image-block

#order div.cart_last_product a.cart_last_product_img img

td.cart_product a img

td.cart_product a:hover img

[noesac]

#order div.cart_last_product a.cart_last_product_img img

Thanks Rocky, where can I find that second one?

I tried searching every part of that string ("#order", "div.cart_last_product" etc) but couldn't find anything. Closest match was:



table.cart_last_product {
width:300px;
margin-left:130px;
}

table.cart_last_product_content {
margin:5px 0px 10px 130px;
}

[rocky]

It's in the /* shopping cart */ section on line 1508 of global.css (in PrestaShop v1.3.1):

#order div.cart_last_product a.cart_last_product_img img {
   margin:0 6px;
   border:1px solid #D0D1D5
}

[noesac]

Ah I see, I'm still on 1.25 I think. There's no record of this at all, do you think it's safe if I put it in?

Cheers

[noesac]

Hi Rocky, I made the following changes, do you mind having a quick glance to make sure I haven't done anything that looks wrong?

I changed:

This:

#center_column .products_block .block_content {
   background: #d0d3d8 none;
   padding:0pt;
}
#center_column .products_block ul li:hover { background-color: #bdc2c9; }
#center_column .products_block ul li {
   border-right: 1px solid white;
   border-bottom:1px solid white;
   float: left;
   clear: none;
   width:133px;
/*    height:375px;*/

   background-color: #d0d3d8;
   padding: 0;
   margin-top:0;
}

To this:

#center_column .products_block .block_content {
   background: #ffffff none;
   padding:0pt;
}
#center_column .products_block ul li:hover { background-color: #ffffff; }
#center_column .products_block ul li {
   border-right: 1px solid white;
   border-bottom:1px solid white;
   float: left;
   clear: none;
   width:133px;
/*    height:375px;*/

   background-color: #ffffff;
   padding: 0;
   margin-top:0;
}

[noesac]

Hi Rocky, I made the following changes, do you mind having a quick glance to make sure I haven't done anything that looks wrong (I basically changed three tags - "background-color", "background-colour" and "background"?

I changed:

This:

#center_column .products_block .block_content {
   background: #d0d3d8 none;
   padding:0pt;
}
#center_column .products_block ul li:hover { background-color: #bdc2c9; }
#center_column .products_block ul li {
   border-right: 1px solid white;
   border-bottom:1px solid white;
   float: left;
   clear: none;
   width:133px;
/*    height:375px;*/

   background-color: #d0d3d8;
   padding: 0;
   margin-top:0;
}

To this:

#center_column .products_block .block_content {
   background: #ffffff none;
   padding:0pt;
}
#center_column .products_block ul li:hover { background-color: #ffffff; }
#center_column .products_block ul li {
   border-right: 1px solid white;
   border-bottom:1px solid white;
   float: left;
   clear: none;
   width:133px;
/*    height:375px;*/

   background-color: #ffffff;
   padding: 0;
   margin-top:0;
}

[rocky]

I'm not sure what you are trying to do. That will change the background of the product listings to white, not remove the borders of the images.

[noesac]

Hi Rocky, this is what I'm trying to do (first image is the old one, second image is the new one the way I want it):

http://i48.tinypic.com/1z2nkg3.png

I've been testing it so far and it seems to be working fine, hopefully it holds up:)


Also do you know what I can do to make the borders grey when I hover over a specific product? Is that a hard one to do?