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If you're selling stuff online, you are into e-commerce. And despite the breadth and reach of the Internet, if you are an e-merchant, you still have to find your customers, keep them, and hopefully get them to tell others about you and your products, so you get more business coming to you.

This is where a good e-commerce strategy comes in—and where the basics of marketing still come into play. Yes, there are a lot of technological considerations when you run an e-commerce site, but as EcommercePartners.net, a consulting company founded in 1998 by Gil Levy and Asi Erenberg and based in New York, says: “Build a business, not a website.”

To map out a good strategy, EcommercePartners.net, whose motto is “building successful businesses online,” says one must remember five P’s—Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

On the Internet, a small or start-up business can go head-to-head with larger, older enterprises—and even beat them. To do that, you need one thing: a good strategy.

Kliza explains the first two points in detail, as follows:

 
1) Define your market and position your product. Even offline brick-and-mortar businesses do this, and you must too, through diligent research. Ultimately, Kliza says, you will want to define your target customers (who is going to buy your product) and your product positioning (why will they buy your product). Even if you think websites are all about technology, “don’t abandon what you may or may not know about marketing,” he adds. “The Web is about reach, but the secret is to connect with customers.”

Although it’s often difficult to define your customer, “find the type of Internet shopper who will buy your product,” says Kliza. You can segment them by age, gender, income level, occupation, education, lifestyle, behavior, and other criteria. “Figure out who the first hundred people are that going to be your customers,” he says. “It’s all about innovative segmentation.”

Another important area to consider is your pricing, says Kliza. “Price is king. You can spend all the time and money getting everything else right about your e-commerce venture and then get killed on price. Do your due diligence and know what your competition is offering.”

This statement should define the benefits the customer will obtain from—rather than just defining features of—your product, he adds. “You want to find something in your differentiators that speaks the most to your target customers.”

Finally, Kliza says you need to confirm that your product is still a good fit for e-commerce and has a “sweet spot” for selling on the Internet. For instance, your product should be in a good price range for credit card purchases (the consultant says it’s between $50 to $500 US); should be “easily shipped or downloadable” (the latter in the case of software products); and isn’t “try before buy or tailored/fitted.”

“Make sure your target customers are in a demographic that isn’t afraid to make on-line purchases. Make sure your value statement can be communicated over the web in words and pictures,” he adds.

While the Internet “will let you reach every corner of the globe,” Kliza says you must not be tempted to try to do it all at once. “Spend the time to clearly define your market by understanding your target customers, crafting your product’s value proposition to those customers, and making sure the e-commerce business plan is viable.”

 
2) Choose your platform. When choosing your e-commerce platform, Hybrid Forge’s Kliza says three considerations come to mind: inventory management, SEO (search engine optimization) friendliness, and cost. You can choose from hosted platforms (like Amazon.com and eBay), free open sourced programs (OSCommerce and Magento) and licensed programs (AspDotNetStoreFront and Interprise Suite eCommerce).

Meanwhile, SEO “is no longer a competitive advantage on the Internet, it is a necessity,” says Kliza, so you should be very careful in choosing a platform that “formats HTML and URLs (Web addresses) in an SEO-friendly manner.” He adds that most current e-commerce platforms will do this, “but some are better than others.”

As for cost, “the key strategic decision in choosing a platform is if you can get it to do what you need within your allotted budget,” the Hybrid Forge owner says. You will be spending on software licenses, Web hosting, site configuration and product setup, graphics design and layout, custom feature development and payment gateway integration, Kliza adds, so “the trick is to pick the software that will minimize your costs in these areas while providing the maximum alignment with your product marketing strategy.”