Frightening fees for e-commerce businesses, what can be done?

Trading online is a great way to make a living or some extra money. However sometimes it can be so costly that you only just break even after SEO and SEM costs. People are increasingly looking at alternatives to hosting their own site online and are now registering with sites that can do it all for them.

When trading online, there is less emphasis put on the location of your business therefore rental costs are much lower. You will also require less staff with an online operation than you would with a traditional retail store.However the costs associated with running your own e-commerce site can add up unexpectedly.

After setting up and paying for a domain name, paid a developer to create the website you then have to look at online marketing strategies. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing ) can be extremely costly and not always effective. When we look at google Pay Per Click for example, people are spending from 25 cents up to more than $2.50 to have someone simply visit their website. The statistics are that only 1 in 50 of these visitors will become a registered user.This makes the average cost of acquiring a register user on your website anywhere between $12.50 and $50. We haven’t even started on the cost of traditional forms of marketing such as print advertising and other media campaigns.

In the early stages of e-commerce marketing, savvy business owners could handle the google ad-word program(PPC) by themselves just by following the guidelines provided by google. Now as more people purchase and search online, online buyer behavior and usage of search terms has become a very complicated topic. Only professionals and extreme online business proprietors can handle Google ad-word themselves. Most of the new comers to the online business will complain that their PPC program just doesn’t work. Smart business owners generally hand over their PPC programme to a SEO company because they realise that hiring a full time in house team will not be able to compete with professional SEO companies. Not only will it cost more to have a team in house, but it will most likely not be as effective as outsourcing to a SEO Company.

But the real war zone is google organic key word rankings. When it comes to hot key words and getting on google’s first page in one of the top 5 positions, many SEO techies work day and night using methods they think will work,to try and push their client’s website to one of the top 5 positions. I have to say, in some highly competitive industries, to achieve coming up on google’s first page, is nothing short of sheer brilliance. It seems these days businesses will spare no expense to come up on google’s first page top five ranking. When online business owners realise this, they know the cost of running an online business isn’t necessarily cheaper than running a traditional store.

The Internet should make doing business easier. It can if you have the right systems in place. As the price of running an e-commerce businesses increases, it’s time we realised that we need to create new models for doing business online.

What can you do to loosen the load of fees for trading online?At OfferMe.com.au we aim to make the cost of selling on the Internet minimal. Through us there is no barrier between buyers and sellers.There are no listing fees and no time wasting-searching for customers. We have a ‘no sale, no charge’ policy. So you don’t pay anything unless you make a sale. Gone are the days of eBay anxiety.

OfferMe is the first step towards eradicating high online marketing fees for businesses. An important step towards the ecommerce of the future.

Author: Albert Yang