E-Commerce Websites, Does All-in-one Work?
Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 14 of February , 2008 at 10:05 am
There is some debate as to whether or not it makes sense to create all-in-one e-commerce websites. By all-in-one e-commerce websites, I am of course referring to websites that bundle everything into one package. Some e-commerce websites come with a forum, a blog and product pages integrated together to form a single package. Some webmasters will tell you this is great for the brand, others will tell you it can hurt your sales. Who is right? Depending on the situation, they both might be.
Everything on e-commerce websites should be about driving sales or promoting your brand. Where some people go wrong on all-in-one e-commerce websites is that they lose focus of this fact. Blogs can be great marketing tools for e-commerce websites, but a blog can quite often take on a life of its own. If you are selling information services, you can quite easily bamboozle your readers. The last thing that you want to do is to make them feel like they are getting in over their heads. At the same time, toning down your blog work might be selling yourself short to other customers. In these cases, you would do better to keep your blog elsewhere and display some of your best work on your site. All-in-one content management systems are great for e-commerce websites, and it is worth remembering that they are easy to configure and that components can be readily removed or transferred to a different location.
I am not a fan of forums in e-commerce websites. They are prone to spamming and require a great deal of maintenance. There are circumstances in which they can work, but you need to be prepared for a great deal of work. Forums require constant attention.
If you are going to include optional components in your e-commerce websites, just be sure that they are helping and not hurting your efforts. The idea behind all of these extra components is to drive traffic your way, if they are not driving traffic to your e-commerce websites then they are not fulfilling their purpose. Giving blogs and forums a “home of their own,” can be good for e-commerce websites in such situations.
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Category: eCommerce Websites
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