Need Advice.

Hi All & Thanks in advance. I currently sell on Amazon & growth has been phenomenal. I am looking to start my own website to be able to offer our customers lower prices without cutting our margins too much. The niche we are in is textbooks. I signed up for shopify and like their easy to use software, but their designs are lacking. Does anyone have any recommendations for listing tens of thousands of books with title, author, and ISBN? I don't want to spend countless hours listing products. I already have excel templates with ISBN, title, and author. I just need to find the quickest and simplest way of doing this. I don't have time to give product descriptions. I just want a bare-bones product listing with title, author, and ISBN. I would also probably need the ability for users to search by ISBN.

Thanks in advance,
-Luke

 

Hi! My advice.. hire someone to make the website for you. Not only will this save you a ton of time but also stress. Building a complete store on your own is not easy or quick. Website designers are able to speed up things and help fix errors, make your website SEO friendly and everything above for a great price. You don't seem to know a ton about HTML or coding and both take time to learn. Good luck!

 

Sounds like good advice. Where is the best place to find an able web designer that is able to design a website around my needs? To be honest, I'm not looking for anything super fancy. Basically, easy product importation and good cart software. Last question, what is a reasonable price to pay for this. Thanks Again!

 

I know this doesn't help much, but try a Google search you may be able to find soemthing there.

 

You can always test, after building your website and pay a little bit of adwords, on seeing how people react to your website. If you already know a certain keyword, that a competitor is ranking in, then ignore my advice. But, if your wondering if it maybe needed, then just test it out.

 

Hi, Its easy to create your store in minutes with ZS Cart . It is the best hosted shopping cart software for physical as well as digital download products.

 

split testing is key with any campaign and learn as much as you can. there are alot of great ebooks out there that will teach you alot. thats how i learned most of what i know. i also had a friend that mentored me as well.

 

Do you think you ca get the same amount of traffic with your own site? Maybe I am just being sceptical. Everyone knows Amazon, Half or Ebay. And a website of that quality and range of functions will cost you a fortune (I suppose).

 

I would advise you to hire a programmer/ website designer. It would save you an awful lot of time for a reasonable price.

 

qwikad.com
My goal is not to have the same traffic as Amazon. We sell textbooks that are custom edition made specifically for a certain school. Think Textbooks made for MIT, Harvard, Mizzou, University of FL. We are the only seller of these books besides the school-bookstore. We believe there is a huge opportunity in this field. We need to work on getting ISBNs indexed and books listed on our site. We need to target people specifically looking for these niche books. The only way I can think to do that is to rank the ISBN's & Titles in google.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of these books sold per year, that cannot be found online. We currently sell on Amazon and gross around 250k per year, with 100k profit. We are looking to lower our prices and keep our margins intact by opening a website. We can bring down our prices by about 30%, but only lower our profit by around 15% by eliminating the Amazon fees. I will look into hiring someone to make a site for us. I wanted to try and do some testing myself before I took a huge leap.

I welcome all suggestions or comments. Thanks everyone for the input, I appreciate it

 

Look at the requirements needed, to continue on your own website seperately.

1. Hiring a qualified designer
2. Hiring a qualified coder (usually the designer will have a jr coder or partner) but I recommend seperating the tasks.
3. Know the process of how a website is created, to minimize the costs.

 

You ca always go for online bidding options, from there you could get some of the best free lancers in website design who can give your website a compelling design and then you can list your products as you want them to. Hiring a professional designer would make your site error free, which is the top priority of a good running website.

 

What you need to do is go on a site like elance.com, post your job, then programmers around the world bid against each other for the job.

You will be amazed at the diversity of bids you'll receive. You'll be able to see each bidder's experience and feedback, then make an intelligent choice.

And I agree with a previous poster about splitting up the programmer and the designer. I would hire a good programmer to build the interface that allows you to upload the spreadsheet, search the titles, click through to a page and make a purchase. There are likely open source systems out there which already do most of that, and just need to be tweaked for your specific needs.

Then, once you have that working, find a designer to spruce it up, and work with them closely on that until you are thrilled with the way it looks. With any luck, again it will be an open source platform that can just be templated. That is why you should do the programming part first.

What you want to do is not that hard, just be very thoughtful in putting together the job descriptions, and be methodical in managing the process with your outsourced labor.

 

Jack, I really appreciate your suggestions. Definitely the best post so far. Thanks!

 

My pleasure. Good luck, and feel free to reach out to me if you get stuck long the way. I have done this kind of thing a lot over the years.

 

If you need a professional solution you can try Site Build It. In their own words they are an "all-in-one site-building-hosting-and-marketing system of software tools that delivers success." They will help you build your site and promote it. Their site contains success stories of people who have their sites in various niches. They are a bit expensive though at $299 per year although although they offer a monthly option for $29.99. You also need to put a lot of work into it but it is a lot less than if you're on your own.

Another option as described above is to outsource it. You can use Elance(given above), oDesk or Freelancer for such work. I would recommend Elance and oDesk for your work. Besides hiring professionals for various pieces of work you can also get good Project Managers who can put it all together. I suggest you browse these sites, use their search function to look at existing job posts and get an idea of what kind of ads to put out. You can also look at the rates by checking out the average bids and previous assignments of contractors..

I use both the sites extensively with a little more of oDesk for my ads. Before publishing an ad I look at similar ads and then write a detailed description of what I want. The more detailed your description the better it is. Many candidates do not read the entire ad and for such folks I put a dummy line in the middle of the ad and ask them to quote the dummy line in the first line of their response!

There is an option of offering a fixed price or a per hour rate. This can be tricky since if you offer a per hour rate someone may charge you for several hours without proper justification. Hence it is important to know how much work can be done in one hour. For example in the case of article writing you can find out how many articles can be written in one hour. Fixed price is best but if you're using a fixed price model your job description has to be as detailed as possible since you will get what you ask for.

Lastly you said that you were selling on Amazon and plan to start your own. The main challenge of having your own site is traffic. If you don't have visitors you will not be able to sell anything. Hence you will need to promote your site by using various techniques for getting traffic.

Hope this helps.

 

I couldn't agree with you more. It will save you so much time and there will just be a little room for error. Your web designer can make what exactly it is you wanted your Website to look like. The only advice on hiring I can give you is that you should find someone who understands who it is you're trying to attract because she will most likely come up with an awesome design if she's familiar with the market you are targeting.

However, if you're thinking of the expense of the Web Designer, you just really got to have a budget because mostly, you get what you pay for. Although, there are some web sites that can give you promising but affordable staff. oDesk and Elance might be a good start. Staff.com can also help you find your Web Designer faster since you can just search for the skill you're looking for on their database. I hope it helps.

 

A tones of advices here. But i didn't saw anyone who encouraged you to build up a fresh new website, to help you on sells. You can find a good designer here on forums anyway, not necesarly on freelance websites. As advice i think that referals are the best. Don't hire the very first person who pretends that is a rocket designer.

Good Luck!