Adding Products and Setting up the Store

You now have your shopping cart lined up, you probably have most all of the backend setup so that you can add products to your store. You might even be looking at how many products you want to add. Now is the time to start evaluating that process.

Adding products should be a fairly simple process

If you picked the right shopping cart for your products, this should not be a difficult task. On the other hand, it can be quite time consuming depending on how many items you have. Evaluate your shopping cart and see what options you have for getting this process done. Try to eliminate or modify the shopping cart if you have to take repeating steps.

For example, let’s say the vast majority of your work requires that you select a category for the product to go in, but most of the products are going into the same category. Perhaps have it setup so that this category is already chosen when you go to add a product. This may not seem like a time saver, but if you have hundreds of products to add, this can be a significant amount of time wasted here.

Outsourcing the work

If you have too much work, you might consider outsourcing the work. I highly recommend that if you can avoid doing this, you should. There are a couple of reasons. First of all, adding products is primarily copy and pasting anyway. You typically copy and paste from the vendors’ description, you type in the price, copy and paste the name, and submit it. Therefore, if you are telling someone else, add “this name, this price, and this description” you are simply defeating the purpose.

Another problem is that this costs money. I highly recommend that you save money where possible so that this money can be invested into marketing your website. If you are on a budget, this is especially true. You do not want to run out of funds before you ever get started.

Feature your big items

Always keep in mind that your big items should be featured in some manner. It is not uncommon for your ecommerce store to be tailored to a specific product you have. For example, you may sell candles. If your website is devoted to this, have some of your best candles directly on the front page and easily accessible and highly visible. Products such as candle holders or candle lighters should take a back seat. This way the products you want to sell most of are the ones that are most likely to be purchased.

Always keep in mind your initial concept

If you have read all about sourcing your products and things, you probably had an initial concept for your shopping cart. It is understandable that you deviated from this a little bit, but try not to go too far. A lot of people, once they get right into it may see dollar signs on some products and totally revamp the direction that they originally had for their website. This is terrible because you have already done research and rationally thought out what could potentially work. Straying away for this only increases your chances of failure. While studying the marketplace on products, do not change the direction you are going simply because of profit margins. Stick to the original plan, and then maybe add on if you see these other products selling too.

This is not to say that you can not add additional products to your website. You just should keep in mind what products are the ones you have done research on and are most likely to sell well online.