E-Commerce --- Are we making any money at all ?

[The Apprentice]

Hello all Prestashop owners and developers

I have been lurking on this forum for a while and trying to grasp to understand the complexity of Prestashop.
I personally do not own a website of sorts but I am very intrigued by this growing phenomenon of e-commerce globally.
Having read countless articles on various websites and news feeds , I made a few observations:

Big business is throwing a lot of investors money around eg : Groupon
Google & Co are perhaps the biggest winner in this market.

Perhaps some media reports are inaccurate, that is possible.
Since having made some research into this topic, I have not yet encountered anyone that could release data that can claim that they can make a decent living from an online store.

Please share your opinion and let us be honest

[Fabien Alet]

Hello,

Nice topic and interesting topic. There are some example of clear success on the Internet. One of them as you asked for example is archiduchesse (http://www.archiduchesse.com/). This example shows you that you can succeed with one internet Website just by selling socks ! And I can tell you we've got plenty of stories like thta with PrestaShop (smallable, menlook, tartineetchocolat, ...)

However, the time for easy money with no ideas, poor products, dirty e-commerce site might be over in some countries.

My point is that you can succeed for sure, but you need a reasonnable good idea and a e-commerce culture to dispplay your products properly and convince your customer that they shouls spend their money with you.

Fabien

[The Apprentice]

Many thanks for the reply, Fabien
I had a look at the site mentioned (http://www.archiduchesse.com/) . I love the the layout, clean,simple and effective. :-)
You are dead right when you mentioned , that one needs decent products and a willing clientele that will purchase such.

My curiosity is more the effort,learning curve and long term outlay. I do not have a negative perception about online shopping.
My concern is more that everybody jumping the bandwagon of hoping to make a" quick buck" and the net will be flooded with all types of weird and wonderful websites that will eventually "curl up and die".

In the mean time more the greedy conglomerates with big dollars to blow close near all opportunities till the bubble explodes as it years ago.

[mr913]

Our first year in business we spent about $2500 on website stuff (in '99) and we didn't sell jack.

Next year, we started working smarter and cheaper and made about $1200.

Year after that a little more, and a little more.

Now we make about $30,000 a year working about 6-8 hours a week shipping product with less than 50 total SKUs (Items) (About 25K of that comes from the top 6 items...). It's side income, but keeps my [spam-filter] from having to work, so she can stay home with the kids.

Up until now, my sites have always been hard coded HTML using tables... Pretty 90s. Google has always loved it though. But I see my pages starting to slip in the SERPs and the people who are moving up have database driven websites (like prestashop). I used to be able to beat these sites hands down, but now it's getting tougher. Plus customers are starting to look for pretty... So, the last several months I've been working pretty hard on getting a prestashop site up and running to compete against my other sites (I have 3 right now - different products).

From an SEO standpoint, Prestashop right out of the box is pretty damn powerful. Everything that should be there is there from what I can tell. I'm hoping as I get more content on my site I can start to climb in the search results pages.. Just while I've been working on my site, with only 4-5 products online as I tweaked stuff, I had 2 orders... I'm getting about 20-30 visits a week from 1 key word. I think once I have more than paypal as a payment option more of those will start to convert to sales.

If all goes well with the new site, it will allow me to manage a lot more products (drop shipping!!!) much easier and hopefully my side income can become a full time gig.

Good luck to you if you decide to get into business!