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Planning for Success

Having a successful Web store involves much more than just an "If you build it, they will come" mentality. ShopSite makes it easy to build your store, but you aren’t ready to get started until you’ve done a significant amount of planning.

Decide What to Sell

The products that you offer for sale are — of course — a critical factor in ensuring the success of your store. Here are some questions that you should consider when evaluating your product offerings:

Uniqueness
Are you offering unique items for sale, meaning that they are either one-of-a-kind or are not offered for sale anywhere else? Or are the products in your store easy to find in other Web stores?
Competition
If your products are also available from other Web stores, have you spent time browsing in those stores? Have you compared their prices with what you plan to charge? What is it about your store that will draw customers away from competitors’ stores?
Profit Margin
For products that you buy at wholesale, is your markup enough to provide you with some profit? For products that you make, will you earn a fair return on the time that you invested? Most merchants aren’t trying to run their Web stores as non-profit organizations!

Organize Your Products

The ease with which customers can find the products that they’re looking for is a critical factor in sales. If you are planning on selling more than one type of product, you need to have planned out the organization of your store prior to building it. For example, a small toy store might organize products this way:

Obviously, a store with thousands of products will require a more advanced organization.

The product search feature in ShopSite Pro and ShopSite Manager can help your customers find products in your store, but nothing can replace good organization.

A Picture is Worth...

Your store will be more useful and appealing to customers if you include pictures of each product. You should also consider having an appealing logo on the first page of your store, and perhaps a smaller version of the logo on all other pages.

Pictures must be in jpg or gif format. If you have ability to scan and edit images yourself, you can simply create the images and store them for later. Otherwise, hire a graphic designer to take photographs, or use photographs that you supply, and use them to produce images in gif format. When you receive the images from the graphic artist, store them on your computer. You’ll be able to upload them to ShopSite when you’re building your store.

Gather Product Information

Knowing what you’re going to sell and having pictures of those items is a large part of the preparation for building your store, but you should also gather other information about your products. Having product information on hand will make building your store much faster and less frustrating. Specifically, you should have:

Planning Payment, Tax, and Shipping Policies

Once you’ve planned your products, you need to plan for transaction processing and fulfillment. Specifically:

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February 13, 2004
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