1.
Launching aproduct or service nobody really cares about.
Often we get excited over a product or service idea before welearn whether others will care about it.
Do your research and save yourselfthousands of dollars and months of wasted effort.
Start by discovering ifothers have already implemented your idea online.
If so, what kind of web sitetraffic do they receive? (see Alexa.
com for the answer to that question) Dothey appear successful? How busy does their site seem? Next, talk to friends.
Tell them to be completely honest with you,otherwise they will just tell you what they think you want to hear.
Think ofall the ways you can gauge interest in your idea and test as many as you can.
You could go so far as to paying for some advertising and driving users to asite with nothing more than a logo and a "coming soon" message andpossibly a "leave a message" form for users to leave you comments.
Count the number of people who click to get to your site and ask them anyburning questions you have to determine what they think about your "comingsoon" website.
2.
Overbuildingyour first version site.
If version #1 is successful, upgrade it to a biggerand better version #2.
Start with a less expensive first version of your site and includejust the basics your users will need to use the site.
Find out if you can gettraffic and build up clients or interest.
If it starts to take off, budget yourversion #2 and get busy adding to the site until it meets all your users'needs.
Often web entrepreneurs will invest everything they have in afully tricked-out site before they know if people will have interest in thesite.
Don't make that mistake.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket until youare sure users care about your site.
3, Hiringprogrammers who lack experience in ecommerce business sites.
Web designers and programmers come in all shapes, sizes and levelsof experience.
Spend the time talking to any programmers or developers who youare enlisting to build your site and make sure they have developed sites ofsimilar caliber before.
Make sure they have a handful of nice looking sitesunder their belts already.
Trust me on this one: the last thing you want to dois hire an under-qualified programmer or designer.
4.
Building asite that you can't maintain inexpensively.
There are always 10 ways to build a web site.
Make sure your siteis built so that you don't need to pay a programmer to make all the dailychanges, edits and additions that will be required.
Managing products, changingprices, editing pages and text copy are all things you should be able to dowith little more than general website and computer knowledge if your site isbuilt well.
5.
Programmingthe site from scratch unless absolutely necessary.
These days there are a lot of ecommerce web site hosting andbuilding companies like Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, or Storefront.
net.
Thesecompanies have very full featured ecommerce store builders and they will helpyou complete your store if needed.
Building a solution from scratch, that issimilar to the ones they already have, could cost you 10-20 times what you'llpay these companies.
The limitation is that these stores might not provide absolutelyeverything you want - and if you have a custom product or service, they mightnot be suitable for your needs.
Strongly consider a "ready to use"solution if this is your first store and you are selling typical goods orservices.
6.
Blowing yourentire marketing budget by overspending on Google advertising.
After your store is built and ready for the world, you'll go toGoogle or Overture and invest in some advertising.
If you are not careful, youcould blow your entire months' budget in a couple days by overbidding forclicks.
Spend the time to learn what you should be spending and what yourreturn on investment will be if you make only 1 or 2 sales per hundred or soclicks.
Good luck Hopefully these tips will save you time and money as you embark onyour website journey.
Remember, it will ALWAYS take you twice the time andenergy you originally planned for and it will end up costing more too.
Withthat in mind, good luck with your project.
You can do it!