An E-Commerce Survival Guide 10 ways to help your e-Business Through "Interesting Times".

How do you avoid going belly-up?

You may have noticed that things are tough in the E-Commerce world at the moment. Many of the larger Internet companies are struggling – and those are the lucky ones that are still here. It’s anyone’s guess how many of the small businesses that set up on-line in the glory days of last year are still sticking it out.

Still, most industry analysts agree that better times lie ahead. The problem is keeping your head above water until business picks up. Here is a list of ten things you can do to increase the survivability of your on-line business.

1: Reduce costs

With revenues down, costs have to be reduced to keep a business viable. For a small on-line business this could involve moving to a lower priced hosting service. Moving to a free service is also an option. Sure, you may have to run the hosting service’s banner ads, but how much of a problem would this be in the short term? Reducing the amount you spend on on-line advertising is also a possibility – and what about closing that expensive merchant account and moving to PayPal?

2: Increase stickiness

You may have less visitors to your site these days, so it’s imoportant to keep them there and if possible get them to come back. There are various well-proven techniques for increasing the "stickiness" of your site. Find out about them in "The Flypaper Principle".

3: Use alternative advertising.

For small businesses, banner ads just aren’t a good investment at the present time. To get a decent response you have to pay out a lot of money – which is exactly what you don’t want to do. Highly targeted newsletter ads are a much better bet.

4: Offer incentive schemes

Incentive schemes such as Beenz or Cybergold can be effective at drawing more traffic to site if used imaginatively. Accepting some of the new payment cards might also be a good move as these services tend to promote participating companies heavily (i.e. free advertising).

5: Consider alternative sources of revenue

Even though your main business may not be doing well, it’s possible to squeeze enough additional income out of a site to keep things ticking over. Affiliate programs is the obvious way of doing this, but there are others. Classified ads, auctions or even sub-letting space on your Web-store are all possibilities.

6: Move off-Line

It may seem crazy for an on-line company to consider off-line alternatives but every little helps. A stall at a trade show or some well-placed advertising or clever leaflet distribution can generate more sales than a banner ad campaign at a fraction of the cost.

7: Specialize

Competing with the big on-line stores can be a waste of time. If you sell books, why would anyone buy from you instead of Amazon.com? Well if they were looking for 19th Century Australian literature, and you happened to be a specialist 19th century Australian literature Web site then they might. To succeed in E-Commerce you need to excel and it is a lot easier to excel if you limit your area of specialization.

8: Go find your customers

If customers aren’t coming to you, you have to go to your customers. This means targeted advertising. You need to find out where in cyberspace your potential customers hang out and make sure that you have a presence there. This can mean advertising or perhaps just participating in the communities.

9: Find Partners

Seeking out partnerships can be one of the best ways of protecting your business. This can be as simple as crosslinking with complementary (not competing) sites or more formal arrangements to promote and sell products on other company’s sites.

10: Optimize

Search engines can provide substantial traffic, but it isn’t easy to get good results. Submitting your site to search engines is a waste of time unless your pages are optimised – make sure that your site is search-engine friendly.

These 10 tips may help but I won’t pretend that running a successful on-line business at the present time is easy. It’s going to be hard for everyone over the coming months, but there will be winners – and it’s important to prepare now to take advantage of the upturn in the market when it comes. – as it surely will.

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