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Creating an eCommerce Website and Work From Home

by | Dec 4, 2014 | Articles, Web Design, Web Development | 0 comments

ecommerce - Work from home

Creating an eCommerce Website

The Internet has provided a wealth of money-making opportunities, and while most people focus on blogging, social media and inbound marketing, there is substantial money to be made in providing household services to people searching locally.

The way to make this business venture work is by creating a website that brings together clients looking for cleaning, gardening or handyman services with the professionals offering these services. Once you’ve set up the marketplace for these transactions, you simply collect a commission on each sale.

There is quite a bit of work that goes into setting up such a website, and it’s not quite as easy as setting up a WordPress blog for publishing articles. You will have to hire a Web developer to build a custom application as the site architecture will require special pages for both clients and freelancers.

To give you an idea of the scale of the project, you can take a look at Urban Outsource as an example. The site design for the landing page, About Us page, Pricing information and other general content is straightforward, and you can simply use pre-made templates for these pages. However, the transaction interface — the part of the website that clients and freelancers see when they log in to post or search for jobs — will have to be built from the ground up by a Web developer.

Monetary Potential of an ECommerce Site

The earnings are limited only by the amount of effort you put into promoting the site. You will have to invest somehow into the initial site construction and advertising, but these costs should pay for themselves relatively quickly.

The first step is to research the local market, and you can do this step online by searching the local classified ads. To compete with these existing resources, you will have to offer value to both clients and freelancers. It’s not enough to create the website; you have to entice people to post jobs on it. When there is work available in your marketplace, the freelancers will show up to claim assignments.

Therefore, your first order of business is to convince local homeowners to post their jobs on your website. There are various ways to bring in business, and one of them is to distinguish yourself as a provider of top-quality services. Offer reviews of the freelancers so that clients can shop around before deciding on a worker to hire. Classified ads don’t offer this feature, so you’ll be one step ahead of your existing competition.

Directing Traffic to Your Website

Another way to bring in business is with product launches and promotional offers. You can advertise these offers through a number of different channels, such as Google AdSense or private banner ads, but the most effective advertising channels use what is known as inbound marketing.

This strategy involves setting up a blog for your business and publishing keyword-targeted content that naturally attracts the type of clientele you want to serve. These readers will appreciate the free information you’ve given them, and they will remember your website and begin to trust you to follow through with your promises.

The Web design for your blog and informational pages doesn’t need to be expensive or elaborate. You can use a service like Unbounce or Instapage to create a simple landing page for your website, along with graphics to match the services you offer.

These lead-generation services integrate with WordPress, so you can put up a simple WordPress blog on which to publish targeted content. If you prefer a different content management system, use Joomla or Drupal. These examples are the most popular CMS packages, and they each have fairly extensive plugin support.

Building an ECommerce Website

This step actually comes before you begin promoting your website, but because it’s the most involved and expensive step, it deserves a detailed explanation. Ecommerce sites typically use an auction-style interface in which buyers bid on offers from sellers. On ecommerce sites that offer freelance services, this practice is usually done in reverse; instead of buyers bidding on offers from sellers, freelancers bid on jobs posted by clients. Clients have a chance to review freelancers’ ratings and job history before accepting an offer, and the invisible hand of the market sets the going rate on home services.

Look at websites like eBay, Elance, oDesk, Urban Outsource and other ecommerce sites. You will need to hire a Web developer to build a website that displays all the job categories available on the site, all the jobs currently available in a selected category and, when a user clicks on a job listing, a description of that job offer. The Web interface will need to allow freelancers to bid on jobs, and it will need to display a user dashboard to all users who log into the site. The dashboard must show all the relevant bids and activity to clients with active job listings, and it must show the offers and decisions made by clients to freelancers logged into the site.

Rather than a shopping cart page, your site will need a custom secure payment system to handle transactions between clients and freelancers. The way you implement this system is up to you and your development team, but you must request that all users sign a license agreement outlining the terms of service when they create their accounts. Then, at the time of payment, your website automatically takes its cut of the transaction.

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