“If you build it they will come.” – It was a phrase in the movie Field of Dreams.   It seems to be a quote that would define the goals of a lot of would-be web entrepreneurs as well.  If you build it they will come, but will they really???  Can you simply build a website and then have droves of surfing consumers come to your site and fulfill your dreams of web success?   The lure of that 1% of sales to the entire population that uses the Internet is tempting.  But the ‘Net is like all marketplaces – it is a buyer beware (or be taken to the cleaners) zone!   If you build it they may not come, making your millions of dollars through ecommerce is not as simple as building a web site to sell your wares.   

Things to consider before starting your own field of dreams:

1. Is your idea unique?  Are there currently others doing what you want to do already out there on the Internet.  Remember just because you are using the Internet as your medium doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have to do the same market research as you would if you were opening a physical business location.  If the market (the Internet) is already saturated with other online stores just like yours and you have no unique features to set yourself out from the masses already in existence on the web, who is going to buy your products?  Why?
2. Are you prepared to wait awhile for the site to make you money?  If you build it they may come… but it may take several months of marketing before they do.  Can you afford to wait – three months, six months, a year?
3. Are you prepared to invest in marketing to promote your site and thereby attract more pontential customers to it?  There are a variety of marketing techniques used on the web, but the bulk of them fall into the category of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).   If you build it and do not spend the time / money to make sure your site is search engine friendly, no one may ever find your site but you.  Are you willing to spend money to advertise your site?
4. Build your site in stages.  Especially in the area of ecommerce, start slow.   Are there marketplace websites already in existence on the web that you can use to sell your wares?(ie Etsy.com or eBay.com)  Start a store on one of those first.   Then as interest in your wares grows and you start making regular sales, build your own site to sell your wares.   Use a service like PayPal or Google Checkout as your method of ecommerce payments until your sales grow large enough and regular enough to sustain regular payments to a merchant ecommerce service.

If your idea has survived consideration No 1, you are able to wait as No 2 suggests, you are willing to spend as No 3 recommends, then take it slow and plan your site.  Rome was not built in a day, neither will your Internet success.  Do your site in stages; using sites like eBay and Etsy can significantly increase your exposure on the Internet and at an affordable cost.  Don’t get caught up on the hype of the all-in-one ecommerce solutions that some sites offer – why spend $300/month when as little as $16/month is all you initially require. 

Visibility on the Internet is a challenge.   Make sure your site is search engine friendly.  Google ‘tag cloud’, submit your site pages to one of the tag cloud generators in your Googled results.  Verify that the keywords that show up in that tag cloud are the ones you want to identify your site, if they aren’t you will want go back and edit your site text to focus your content for better search results.   Once you have your site ready, the next step is increasing your site exposure on the Internet.   Find directories and indexes on the web that list sites like yours for free or for a fee.  Get your site listed on these, focus on the ones that do not require reciprocal links first.  Search engines such as Google count the number of links going to your site without reciprocal links back and use that number to help determine your overall site rank.  

Last but not least use a SEO analyser like Google Analytics to monitor your site.  The amount of information you can get about your site and your site visitors is awesome (and it is free!!!).   You can find out what pages interested your visitors most, how long they spent on your site, what search words brought them to your site.