I’ve been reading comments from my first post, and it gave me an idea for my second. I see a lot of people using the word “ecommerce” or talking about being scared to “go ecommerce”.

Ecommerce is, by definition, the buying and selling of goods and services on the internet. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, because ecommerce is totally possible in other industries, but I think you’re dreaming if you expect that in the promotional products industry. You might find this easy with company stores, or in certain niche markets, but the average distributor is dealing with more than that — I know I am. I target several niche markets, and have many low-competition niche products that I focus on, but even those don’t produce a great number of online purchases. There are just too many variables when it comes to buying promotional products and end users aren’t that comfortable just yet. In short, don’t go throwing those sales skills out the window. You’re going to need them.

I consider myself an “online marketer” NOT an “online seller”. If I write 150 orders next month, 145 of them are going to be literally “written” — pen and paper, phone in hand. Now keep in mind, I shoot for good margins. If I wanted to work for lower margins, i’m sure I could get more to buy online, but how many more? The very nature of this industry, and the items we sell makes that very difficult – so why play around and sacrifice profits?

I use my 10 years of online marketing experience to make the phone ring. From there I rely on my sales experience to help me end the call with a credit card number (more on that later). That is real good news for most of you…. you already possess the skills needed to be successful, you just want to know how to apply those skills in the “dotcom” environment and it really isn’t that hard. You simply take your existing knowledge of marketing, and apply it to your online marketing. Be sure to to keep those sales skills tuned too. You can be a great online marketer, but if you have no sales skills it doesn’t mean a thing.

As the site grows, keep an eye on the categories off to the right because they too will grow to help us keep things organized. This will not be in anyway structured, because an ADD mind like mine has no such ability, but I hope it will be informative. ;)