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5 ways to launch a new multiproduct eCommerce site - badly

Posted by admin on February 14, 2007 in SEO Theory

So you want to be the next Amazon. Yeah, that’s everyone’s dream. Well, I don’t want to overpromise the goods and services because, frankly, Amazon has invested years in building brand value. You won’t be able to achieve anything similar in one year or less.

But let’s pick on a few verticals where people keep trying to chisel away at the brand leaders: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, eBay, Yahoo!, CD Now. You could easily add a dozen more to the list. We can also talk about “Travel to Acapulco”, “Mexico Real Estate”, “California Real Estate”. Name it. There’s a vertical out there that has your dreams plastered all over it.

So how do you bring your brand-spanking new site online and compete with the giants? And let’s be modest. How do you get just a small percentage of the pie?

If you want to successfully build a brand, you have to consider the resources these well-establiedh big guys are bringing to the battle every day: they have brand recognition, they have marketing budgets, they have affiliate programs, they have loyal customer bases, and they have actual inventory. If you’re thinking a little search engine optimization will take you a long way, think again.

But before we get to the SEO, here are five mistakes I’ve seen many new sites make through the years. I don’t know if any of them are still around. I didn’t stay interested in them long enough to find out if they survived. Take that for what it’s worth.

The first mistake I see in most wannabe eCommerce sites is they try to build the site first and stock it later. Maybe someone has made that model work. Maybe you know someone who made it work. But I’ve never met anyone who made it work. We’re not talking “ringtones” here. We’re talking about bona fide, real products and services being offered to consumers who want to pay on the spot for those products and services.

If you don’t have the inventory, you don’t have anything to bring to the table: no brand, no value, no loyal customers. Without the inventory, you’re nothing. You can blow a fortune on PPC advertising but why? Even if you bring in millions of visitors you’re not building brand value. Brand only follows upon delivery of good products and services. No inventory = no brand. No inventory = no sales.

You only get one shot at bringing out a new Web site. You can take your time, make it robust, and offer plenty of content (inventory). Or you can rush it to market because Amazon is getting just that one more sale you could have gotten and try to get by on promising people you’ll have what they want if they just sign up for your newsletter.

Hm. Whom would you want to buy from? Tough choice, I know.

The second mistake I see people make is they offer just exactly what the market leaders offer. Okay, Amazon has millions of loyal customers. So what if ePinions may be able to get better prices (and more honest reviews)? ePinions is just a real fancy affiliate farm (note: I occasionally write reviews for ePinions — I like them). ePinions is still around after many years, but it lacks the brand recognition and power of the major players.

What I think keeps ePinions going is that reviewers can earn money (but I’ve never earned enough to get a check — I think my earnings have topped a dollar). Okay, maybe it’s just the community is established. But ePinions has at least staked a claim in the territory of community opinion. ePinions is one of the first true social marketing sites. It’s a pioneer, and a bit of a dinosaur. But if you want to take Amazon’s thunder away, you cannot be the next ePinions. You have to offer people some value they won’t find at Amazon and ePinions. What is that value?

And I don’t mean “value for their dollar”. I mean “value for their time”. What value does your new eCommerce site offer to people who bother to surf by?

The third mistake I see people make is they open their advertising campaigns with very broad, very forgettable campaigns. I recall one banner ad I used to see running around the Web. It was a completely black banner. I never clicked on the banner. I always wondered what it was supposed to be advertising, but since I never felt compelled to click on the ad, I never found out. For all I know it was an eBay banner. But somehow I don’t think so.

Pick a niche. I don’t care if you’re spending $200,000 a month on PPC. Pick a niche and build your foundation there. You can broaden your campaign gradually. You should do your early testing with a market that is most likely to be favorable to a new wannabe eCommerce site. And be honest with yourself: you are a wannabe. That’s all you are until you prove otherwise. So spend your advertising dollars on people who are interested in checking out the next new thing and tell them what you do and why they should check you out.

There is only one reward for stupid, short-sighted, pseudo-creativity in the marketplace: failure.

The fourth mistake I see people make is they try to fool their visitors. You’ve invested in a huge advertising budget, you’ve got all this great content, but when people actually check out your site they are slammed right and left by popup advertising. Be honest. You’re not selling products and services, you’re selling advertising. You just want warm click-throughs to throw banners in other people’s faces. That is why you fail.

If your revenue model is based on advertising, make the advertising unobtrusive. Make it inoffensive. You have not earned my loyalty, therefore you have not earned the right to shove floating, flashing, demanding ads in my face. I can go back to Amazon and eBay and be treated with far more respect. So what if America Online made that model work. You do know they had a 50% monthly subscriber turnover rate at the height of their growth period, right? Every month half of their subscribers abandoned the system — and many of them claimed it was the in-your-face advertising.

When you try to do too much too soon with a new eCommerce site, you shoot yourself in the foot. Give people a great experience and trust that more traditional advertising will pay the bills. But if you cannot provide that great experience to begin with, you’re doomed to failure. You cannot trap people on your site forever, you cannot force them to recommend your site to anyone else, and you cannot do anything about the bad reputation you’ll quickly get if you don’t offer real value.

The most successful Web banner advertising campaign in history was the infamous “Shoot the monkey” series. Those banners were innovative, creative, and annoying in the right way. Even I finally clicked on the stupid monkey because I finally became curious about what value lay behind the ads.

In my opinion, there was no value to be had. It was just a gateway to cheap, in-your-face marketing and worthless goods and services. I never cashed in on anything and getting off all those promotional mailing lists was a pain in the neck.

Don’t fool the visitors, fool. Be honest. Offer something of value.

The fifth mistake I see is these types of sites often turn to search engine optimization to solve the problems they created with the first four mistakes. That’s throwing bad money after bad.

Is search engine optimization necessary? Sure. It’s useful to a lot of people, but not really to a new eCommerce site. If I were starting up an Amazon wannabe, SEO would be the last part of my budget. It takes time, effort, and a lot of work to get a 100,000 product inventory to perform well in organic search results. If you have that much money just laying around that you can afford to wait on SEO to bail you out, you’ll get a better, more guaranteed ROI by investing those millions of dollars in U.S. Savings Bonds.

Do the right thing and acknowledge that you need a serious marketing budget first. Search engine optimization is a long-term play for a large content product inventory. The odds are pretty good you’re using a content management system and that is almost the kiss of death for most large inventory sites. It takes thought and imagination and maybe a little experience to get a 100,000-page CMS to genuinely look like 100,000 unique content pages.

Some merchants just invest their money in PPC advertising and leave it at that. Some merchants start out with a high-spend PPC budget and gradually transfer to SEO combined with a lower-spend PPC budget. Those are, of course, the brand builders. They plan on being around long enough for search engine optimization to offer a return on investment.

Search engine optimization — SEO, as we call it in the trade — works best for small to mid-size sites in the short term because it’s easier to evaluate and adjust a few to a few dozen pages. When you get up into the hundreds of pages of content you have to start juggling your priorities and schedule periodic updates for sections or areas of content. When you manage thousands, even tens of thousands of pages, you had better believe many of those pages will go without SEO love for a very long time.

You may actually have a staff of several dozen data entry operators who update your database every day. Good for you. That ain’t SEO. Search engine optimization requires thoughtful human evaluation of search results. That’s one of the chief reasons for why PPC works better with large content sites. The PPC services help you measure return on investment very quickly.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing — no software whatsoever — no tool, no gizmo, gadget, or SEO anything — that will help you automate the process of evaluating performance in organic search results. There are link checking tools, data center ranking tools, so-called “competitive analysis” tools, and statistic analysis tools — but ultimately someone has to look at organic search patterns and determine where the market is going and how to chase that market.

In serious, large-scale search engine optimization — where you’re chasing thousands of queries — you have to compromise on the quality of analysis. That is why spammers count on “3 clicks a day”. When they turn out 10,000 spam sites a month, they cannot take the time to evaluate all their verticals and hope they dominate the best search results. They’re chasing the so-called “long tail of search” and just hoping a domain pays for itself with 3 clicks a day.

An eCommerce site that depends on SEO for visibility won’t succeed. There are some people who feel they made it work, but when I’ve questioned them I’ve found they’ve done more than just rely on search engine optimization. It’s not like their 50,000-page sites weren’t interlinked and didn’t run intrasite promotions. It’s not like they didn’t capture customer data and push out new promotions to people who bought something.

Real search engine optimization assumes that every page has to perform on its own. It doesn’t matter if they are all on one domain or on a thousand domains. Each page is its own entity. You capitalize on your SEO success through interlinkage and cross-promotional content. You build your loyal customer base by upselling buyers with promotional information.

You could kickstart an eCommerce site with SEO, but it would be a long slow process and you had better be ready to imprint brand, value, and service into every visitor regardless of whether they buy something because you may never see those people again.

The bottom line here is that search engine optimization is just one of several marketing tools and strategies. A good SEO theoretician knows from the start that the SEO campaigns will have to augment and work hand-in-glove with other marketing campaigns. If you don’t believe it, that will be why you fail.