The dream of making money while you sleep does exist! Having a shopping cart can greatly increase the selling of your product. But the part bout sleeping … well your suppose to be sleeping but are up allll night doing all sorts of extra things in order for you to maintain your money making shopping cart.
Your inventory
Are you buying and reselling or are you making your own items to sell? Either way the best case scenario is also your worst case scenario, your making stuff all the time or doing that balancing act of ordering just enough inventory for the demand of your product.
Delivering your product
Fantastic, someone (or a lot of people) purchased! Unfortunately their are still no plugins that neatly packages your product, fills out your shipping slip flawlessly and gets it to the post office less then 24hrs from online purchase. But their are Fullfillment Houses, trick with these warehouses is how to maintain their minimums of orders, 1 online sale a week won’t cut it.
Built it and they will come
Nope, don’t work that way. That’s why their is a whole field devoted to it called online marketing. Marketing is the fabulous part of a business, the public relations popping bottles part. But if you are too buys celebrating you have a business but have nothing to sell OR too busy managing the sale of the product to even DO any marketing, it can all disappear as quick as smoke.
My ecommerce site is smarter then me
Nooot yet. Your site will do exactly what you tell it to do. So if you tell it something wrong, it will try to follow your command but if the command is wrong, it won’t tell you its wrong. Like uploading the wrong image size, inserting the wrong inventory amount, scheduling something to Go Live on the wrong date. A human is still needed to plan and organize and double check all the facets of your business from branding to inventory from marketing to sale transaction.
My site is forevvvver
Nothing is forever, specially not the online virtual world. If your sole money making machine is a website of any kind online, you need to keep up with the forever changing and new online fad creations that come in the form of browser window updates, new “hot” social media sites, new technology to see your site. Its never ending and to stay competitive, you need to keep UPGRADING not only your website but how you communicate online.
Like the goose that laid the golden egg, don’t kill your goose by overlooking any of the above pitfalls. Online shopping carts can be very successful but you need to take care of it, like your pet goose.