Every industry has its own myths attached to it, and so does the e-commerce industry. Since the start of the internet, there have been many e-commerce sites that have been successful. A few of the most famous ones are Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, and Flipkart. The large nature of these e-commerce sites crate myths about e-commerce site development. In this article, let us discuss the top five myths about e-commerce site development.
Developing an E-Commerce Site Costs a Lot
Most people think that starting an e-commerce site costs a lot, and yes creating an e-commerce site could cost a lot, but it does not have to; let me explain. Website hosting is affordable these days, and you can use any open-source e-commerce platform. These online store platforms can be used for free, all you need to do is download Joomla or OpenCart, and start building your e-commerce site on your own.
Granted, you may not be able to make a lot of changes to the interface but you can start an online store today. Moreover, if you decide to make changes to the interface to give the online store a more unique look, all you have to do is hire a Joomla developer for the Joomla e-commerce platform or an OpenCart developer for the OpenCart e-commerce platform to a unique online store for yourself.
You Need a Huge Team to Develop and Run an E-Commerce Website
If you are running Amazon or a similar large-scale e-commerce site, you would require a large team. There would be a lot of logistics involved and you would need help with almost all parts of the business. But we are talking about starting an e-commerce website, as you don’t need to have 100,000 products on your site to start selling, you don’t need a large team to start the e-commerce site. Remember, Jeff Bezos started Amazon from his basement. He did not have a big team, he had a big idea, and that’s what you need to start.
If you use platforms such as Joomla or OpenCart managing the online store is pretty simple. You won’t need a software developer to manage the website for you; these platforms have user-friendly admin panels that you can manage the store from. Once you start to grow you can always hire virtual assistants to help you with your activities.
You Have To Produce Products to Sell On an E-Commerce Site
These days you don’t have to even produce your own products to sell on e-commerce sites. Companies like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, and Flipkart do not produce their own products; they provide a platform for other vendors to sell their products.
Then there are numerous drop-shipping websites as well, anybody can develop an e-commerce site and signup with these drop-shipping companies. How they work is simple; when a customer shops on your online store, the order goes directly to the drop-shipping site. The drop-shipping site then sends the customer the product on your behalf. So, you don’t need to worry about producing a product, or finding a vendor, or manage the logistics on the e-commerce site. Alibaba is one of the biggest names when it comes to drop-shipping companies.
Starting a New E-Commerce Site Is Not Worth It, As You Can’t Compete With Amazon/Alibaba
Let me start by saying this is not a myth, it is true. If you are starting a small e-commerce site you may not be able to compete with Amazon, Alibaba or any of these large-scale e-commerce sites. Don’t start by thinking of competing with them, take baby steps. What you need to do is find niche products, for niche audiences. You don’t want to target everybody (Unless you have millions to invest), you want to target a group of people, and develop an e-commerce site for them.
Maybe you can sell mobile phone accessories, a person who wants to buy mobile accessories would rather visit a site that is dedicated to mobile accessories then a site that sells everything. There are many examples of niche e-commerce sites with great success.
You Need To Run Ads to Make Your E-Commerce Site A Success
Running paid ads is a good way to boost those sales, but you can develop and grow an e-commerce website without running a single paid ad. Yes, it would require a lot of hard work, and excellent search engine optimization skills but it can be done. You need to start thinking about SEO right from the start, get a domain name that relates to your industry/products. Fall SEO protocols while developing the e-commerce site. Rank your website in search engines by on-page and off-page SEO.
The beauty of getting your e-commerce site to rank by doing SEO is that it does not cost you anything to do. If you know who to use SEO you can do it yourself, or hire an SEO expert to do it for you.
Conclusion
With these myths busted, you can stop worrying and start developing your e-commerce site today. If you need any help with the development, you can always take the help of professional IT outsourcing companies. An excellent place to hire developers to build your e-commerce site is Optimal Virtual Employee. They have talent developers skilled in various technologies like; Joomla, OpenCart, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc.
