Choose products that are suitable for a large variety of people. Selling niche products that have low demand are not at all suitable for e-business. The web business thrives mainly on the volumes generated.

E-business is totally based on technology and one has to adapt to changes rapidly. The security systems that are put in place today for securing transfer of electronic money is far advanced and robust than ever. Customers will be sceptical in using transaction systems that do not have a proven record of securing private data. Implementing such technology involves tremendous investments and constant upgradation to retain customer faith and confidence.

While the ease of getting a business may get you hooked, make sure that you have put in place systems that deliver what you promise. A web portal that enables buying consumer products on the internet at discounted prices is indeed great, provided there is a way to make sure the customer gets the product in time, without the seller losing money in the process. The initial busts in such businesses happened since the customer did not have access to high-end technology that enabled such transactions.

The two generally accepted services business to customer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) are implemented in different ways. While the former concentrates more on discounts, volumes generated and retail the latter is based on quality products delivered on time.

Patience and persistence is the key to success on the web. Unlike regular models, e-business does not involve direct contact between the potential customer and the seller. Hence it will take time for the customer to notice the quality of your product.

Training of personnel on a regular basis is a must. The technological advancements have to be implemented as soon as they are available. An example can be that of a company implementing a system for maintaining a co-ordination between the material store, the product assembly line and the vendor. This system ensures automatic and timely notification of depleted or over stocked inventory. But the failure by the staff at any of the points in understanding the processes may result in failure of the very objectives for which the system was put in place. Set targets that are realistic and can be implemented, and evaluate your success rates after regular intervals.

Another tricky but effective way to a successful business is to get your customer to upgrade his systems. This can be quite difficult, since implementing any new system means additional costs are incurred. However, convince the client about the need and the benefits of moving over to the new technology.

Building long term customer relationship and making them want more from you is important. E-business enables provision of personalized services which is not possible for regular businesses. An example can that be of providing e-bills of mobile phone calls in the language that is understood by the client.

The freedom that the client has to refuse service and the variety of options available on the Internet has made e-business more customer centric like no other models.

Peter Brittain
Perth Web Design

• Article submission: Article submission is very useful for the purpose of SEO as well creating an image of an expert for your. There are tools like SubmityourArticle.com which allow you to automate the article submission process. You can submit articles to various article directories, ezine publishers etc. Article submission proves to be among the most effective marketing medium as you can get good backlinks which is useful when search engines index and rank you.

• Audio recording and Podcasting : You can add audio messages or videos to your website. By adding videos of testimonials from your customer you can most certainly increase your credibility. It can be very useful to provide demos of your products. There are products like audioacrobat.com that can be used to make streaming of such audio and video files faster. It is necessary that you use it optimally, as it can be time consuming for your website to load on slower network connections.

• Backup: It is necessary that you invest some amount and use tools like carbonite.com that provide services to backup the files that you want it to. Even if you accidentally overwrite any of your files you may use this service to find the original version.

Peter Brittain
Perth Digital Agency

• Email management and auto-responders: Email marketing is a very important part of your marketing campaign. There are tools that allow you to schedule your email marketing campaign. You can regularly send out newsletters and personal emails to new and existing customer informing them about new products and offers. Tools like aWeber.com are useful for the purpose and can even provide you the opportunity to create reports about how many readers checked your newsletters and how many have come back to buy your product.

• Hosting: It is of utmost importance to have a good hosting plan. You would have to find sites that offer hosting services. It is necessary to create an account if you want to manage a number of websites. Moreover, the bandwidth of the host is important when hosting your site, as it may be a cause of concern if your site takes time to load.

Other things like having a merchant account to accept online payments, a shopping cart for order processing, spyware protection, password management tools and many more tools are also helpful to you to keep track of your online marketing efforts. You can try out various tools available online and use those that you feel are suited to your needs.

Peter Brittain
Perth Digital Agency

The initial yardstick to measure the success of a website depended on the number of people visiting the site. Over the time this has proved to be insufficient because all that a site had to do was to provide some eye-catching graphic with no content to back it up. Now more emphasis is given on the amount of time spent by the user on a specific web page. An analysis of popularity of the site as a whole is also taken into consideration. This shift in policy is important since a site like the YouTube, which may add content on a daily basis may be rated similar to that of a gaming site popular among adolescents, that is updated, maybe once in six months. The new system has its own pitfalls since a slow network or a particularly unscrupulous developer deliberately slowing the page load speeds could result in higher ratings.

Get viewers and independent analytics to rate your content – the text, pictures, graphics and tables, and their placing. The ease of using the navigation system and the frequency of updates must also be taken into account. The number of people who click on the Bookmark option on the page will give an idea of your popularity. Also, the number of hits you have through recommendations from other sites who provide links that lead to yours will give an idea of the reliability and depth of your content.

Measuring the ratio of product sales compared to the number of visits will give a good measure of how successful you are. This will also give a direct valuation of each product you sell on the web. Analyzing the average time a successful buyer spends on your site will give an idea of how easy it is for clients to get quality information from your site.

Google Analytics interface is a very helpful tool in analyzing web usage data. The tool allows measuring in detail how many users availed of an option provided on the page. It also enables to measure the unpopularity of a page by providing a count of the number of people who left a site without browsing around. Keep track of the variations taking place in number of users registering onto your site. Do a research the web to know what other sites and blogs have to say about the quality of your service.

The functionality of site is measured by analysing how useful and easy the tools are for all end users. User friendliness may include factors such as the time taken to resolve user queries, data downloaded and messages sent and received are acknowledged.

Although methods of valuations have changed and will change in the future be assured that finally the right judge – the user, has been appointed. So long as you play by his rules you are bound to stay in reckoning.

Peter Brittain
Perth Web Design