Sell without Shame

One of the worst mental barriers online merchants need to overcome is a belief, possibly subconscious, that it is somehow uncool to make strong, direct sales pitches on the World Wide Web. This probably dates back to 1994, when the Internet first allowed commercial activity and most people online had some sort of academic or government affiliation, and hardly anyone expected to make money from running a Web site. Many of the first unabashedly commercial sites drew open hostility from the "original" Internet denizens, while commercial sites that offered (or at least purportedly offered) some sort of educational or entertainment value in addition to pitching products or services got fewer negative emails than ones that obviously existed only to make money. Times have changed. The vast majority of Web users today came online after 1995 and are accustomed to seeing Web sites that are metaphorical "storefronts" that have "shopping cart" features in "online malls," and obviously exist for no purpose other than to get customers either for existing offline businesses or to sell directly over the Internet.

Once you accept the fact that your ecommerce Web site's mission is to sell, and that the most effective way to sell is to focus on selling, the idea of providing news or entertainment on your sales site in order to lure visitors to it starts to look silly. Once you get focused this way, you can stop worrying about the gross number of visitors your site attracts, too. Raw popularity is not important for an ecommerce site. Sales volume is its one and only measure of success. A site that attracts one million visitors every day is going to run up big server and bandwidth bills, and if only a few hundred of those visitors spend $100 each, that site is a money-losing failure, while a site that gets only 1000 visitors per day, and gets three of those visitors to part with $100, can turn a modest profit if the goods or services it sells are priced correctly and the site itself is built and maintained on a tight budget.