So how do get those extra sales without costing an arm and a leg? Well firstly you need to look at your business model and determine if selling online is an option for your business. If you can integrate an online shop into your business then I would definately investigate if this is a worthwhile exercise for you. Sure you’ll need to have someone develop an online ecommerce system but it’s really not too difficult and providing there is some demand for you products then you should easily make your money back plus more in a reasonable amount of time. Talk to you web development team about how to add ecommerce functionality to you existing web site if you have one.

The best part of an online business is limited overheads because you don’t have to have that prime real estate position and the online space works pretty well particularly if you already have really good branding of your business and people are looking for your business name online. Prime real estate online is a combination of improving your pay per click campaign and natural search rankings and you get a global market to boot.
So do people really buy stuff online? Yes, Yes, and Yes, however it depends on what your business sells but I think in a majority of cases you can sell your products that you have and use the leverage of Pay Per Click with Google to sell these products online as well. All you need to do is to setup some tracking so you have some visibility of what’s happening on your site, track conversions, and monitor and adjust.

Of course you will need some knowledge of Google’s Adwords Pay Per Click program, need to be a little tech savvy to edit the shopping cart information and have some determination to perservere when starting off. I’ve been involved with promoting one particular shop selling online and have seen sales over this past year for their online shop tipping in just over $250K in gross sales for under 10K in online advertising. Not bad for not a lot of extra effort.

One client that I manage their Adwords campaign has made this month $8000 of gross sales for just $50 in online advertising. I’d like to disclose more details however due to client confidentiality I can’t but I can say that they sell tangible products that require shipping, they also have some retail outlet stores and have had a online shop selling their products as well and they are currently only targeting the Australian market.

Of course getting these results does take a bit of time to get right and I still think that this client could make even further improvements with split testing of their site pages and implemented natural search optimisation to further reduce costs.

I’ve been involved in a small retail business of my own and understand the overheads and cashflow issues of running a small business in today’s economic climate. If I knew then what I know now, I’d definately be adding an online element to my marketing efforts and generate further sales at a much lower cost.

What’s it costing your business to drive a customer into your store each day or even more to the point a new customer? The great thing about the web is that you can capture the buyer with impulse buying online right when they want the product from anywhere, then all you need to do is deliver. Get that right and your on a path for success.