Hi PB,

Firstly i'm afraid i can not help on the first of your questions, i have a vast amount of experience in ecommerce sites from a previous employment and life and what i can stress enough is your Search Engine Optimisation ( ranking in Search Engines) a lot of peole in the past that i have worked for have always placed a lot of effort in to their website and forgot about getting good rankings within Google, after all there is no point of having an ecommerce site if nobody can find it.

I don't know if this is something you have considered or may even already have got sorted, but my advice would be to think of the domain name you would like to use if you go in to business even if it is not immediatley, buy the name some cheap hosting and get some good related keywords on a page just to let google get used to the domain name and what it is about and so hopefully when you do start your business and develop a ecommerce site you might have a little head start.

I would also recommend anybody thinking of starting an ecomeerce site to learn some SEO basics, you don't need to become a professional, but from my experience there are some sharks out there that will try and tell you things that aren't relelvant to get more money out of you, as getting a good search engine ranking can be expensive.

All the best with your ideas.

Hi,

Hopefully we will be able to help you with your question. We as a agency built the website www.bluepink.co, this company specialises in the sales of baby clothing. With this project we supplied the business plan right through to the completion of the website.

We worked very closely with the suppliers with regards to the clothing and the drop shipping. As you can see from the site it is an e commerce site. We launched the site 2 months ago to our client initially with 70 products, now the site has nearly 500 products and products are still being added.

As you can see it is a new site, so at present it is going through stage 2 which is the marketing side of it. Then stage 3 will be making Bluepink as a known brand within baby clothing.

From our experience it is not going to be easy as there are a lot of competitors in the UK, so it will take a lot of your time and effort to get the business where you want it.

Please feel free to get in contact with us for any further advice.

Many Thanks

Greg
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WebFlicker Design Agency
www.webflicker.co.uk
Bespoke websites at your request

Hi

In a past life I worked for a big e-commerce retailer they had a baby category and provided fulfilment to a baby clothing brand.

While I can't suggest market research groups I would suggest getting in touch with your local play group or nurseries and ask if you can set up a coffee morning to get some feedback from some mums on your business idea the product range you wish to sell and the price points. Ask them what they like and dislike about shopping online etc create a questionnaire. It might take a couple of these events to get some decent feedback but you'd only be investing time and money to cover tea and biscuits.

Drop shipping is good if you have the product range, margin and a good basis to test what does and doesn't work online before you invest cash on stock.

Suppliers - where do I start...

Make sure you know the following before you place an order...

Do they have a minimum order?
What is the cost of shipping?
Do they work on a proforma, 30 day payment structure or pay upfront?
Do they supply anyone else online?
If they do check what the competition sell the products for and check your margins?
Can you get any exclusives in the future?
How are the clothes delivered?
Are the items bagged and labelled - if not be prepared to complete a sorting exercise when you receive stock
Do they do sale or return and what are the terms?
Do they have a link on there website to preferred distributors?
How do you get your business onto there website?

With reference to starting ecommerce sites we have lots of customers in this position. The successful ones have sales and marketing plans in place which they review at the end of every month to see what works and what doesn't. They have Facebook fan pages, twitter feeds, they run competitions provide press releases, collect customer data to run email promotions and grab any opportunity to share there products and brand which could include the local village fair or network groups.

I could give you a full run down of what you should and shouldn't do with eCommerce in terms of SEO, product listing, content etc but I think before you even begin to go down that road you need to plan how you will market your site and the product range. Then plan the site around your unique selling points based on the research you complete and find someone who will sit down and talk you through updating it adding products creating graphics and promoting it online and use this opportunity to ask all of the questions you have. You want to be able to update product, content and images as little or as often as you need to.

I hope this helps and good luck!
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Elaine Fleck
http://ww.SiteBuilderDIY.co.uk
Create an exciting website for your business using our Free 30 day trial. No experience required just passion and determination to succeed in business.

Hello PB and any other forum member,
Its been a year since you have posted your advise request.
I am from Israel, considering to have a website, offering uniqe handmade gifts for babies, made localy and shipped intarnationaly.
I would appreciate if you can tell me a bit of your experience from this year and what us your impression of the ecommerce potential.
I would also be happy to read any other advise and enlightnings.

Thank you,

Miri