Business owners who sell many products or services can become confused as to whether building one large website or several smaller websites is the way to proceed. The debate has been going on for years. Here are points to consider about each of these scenarios.
One Large Store
Shows You Mean Business: The beauty of having one large online store is that customers can see you mean business by all the products that are available. Internet giants such as Amazon.com have certainly taken advantage of this idea. On the other hand, building and growing a large e-commerce website takes an enormous amount of time. Imagine having to get photos, specifications, and other important information for a very large website. It certainly requires a lot of resources (financial, time, etc).
Easy Cross-selling and Upselling: One of the main benefits of a single large store is that someone may find the site and plan to purchase one product but ends up leaving with several related products. For example, an electronics-type store that focuses on cell phones may do well on its own but if it sold extra batteries, the customer may purchase those as well. On the other hand, a store that only sells batteries may attract a unique clientele such that customers expect to purchase their cell phone batteries from that specialty store alone (especially if the website is persuasive).
Makes Financial Sense: Having a large store is more cost effective financially because the fees for development and marketing remain focused on one site. It is also less time consuming to get off the ground because you do not have to worry about the fine details of design for each site, for example.
You Look Too General: If you sell a broad array of products, it can make your site look to all-encompassing and trying to serve everyone is not a good idea for most businesses.
Several Niche Stores
People Like Specialty Shops: Be-all stores are effective but niche markets are a smart approach as well. If a customer believes that your company offers a product as a specialty, they may be more inclined to buy from you. I think that the more fancy, expensive, luxurious, or unique the product, the more people like to buy from a niche store.
Branding: If you have several websites, you can custom brand each of them so they can better compete in their niche markets. Several niche stores that are marketed completely independent of one another is probably better than having several stores for different products with the same brand name. For example, developing one store for shampoo and another for soap but both with the same brand name is sure to cause confusion and annoy the visitor as they go from store to store.
SEO: It takes a lot more financial and time-related resources to build a series of niche stores. Building a search engine friendly website is a must but it’s going to cost you. Real search engine optimization isn’t cheap and you’ll have to have an SEO approach for each site. For example, link building will have to be multiplied by the number of sites you plan to develop. Also, if you recently purchased the new domain names, each store will lack a “history” which is a point against them. On the other hand, if your main keywords are highly competitive a niche store may help you in many ways from an SEO perspective.
Social Media Marketing: Multiple niche stores means having multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages, and so on. As fads come and go, you’ll be expected to set up and maintain a social media profile page on new services that arise.
Content & Design: Sites with more limited niche content may be more easy to develop as an aesthetically pleasing marketing tool. Always remember that it’s not just about getting visitors to the site. The key is to inspire confidence in the target market end user which will get them to buy what you are selling. This includes having an attractive Internet presence, making the site easy to navigate, providing detailed descriptions, designing clear “buy now” buttons and many other methods to call attention to various offerings.
Depends on the Theme: Whether the niche websites are related or unrelated may make a difference. If you want to become an online sports equipment retailer, should you sell all of your equipment in one large store or have hockey equipment website, football equipment website, and so on? What if you sell unrelated products?
No Easy Answers
As you can see, businesses selling many products and services online have a big decision to make. There are no easy answers but I suggest starting with at least one search engine friendly shopping cart and seeing where it goes. You can always build more stores later. Besides, more stores means more effort but also potentially more market share.
Comments
Thank you for the post.
This is one of my main concerns too.
One or many? I’m going for many up to now because i need one less step in the website navigation hierarchy to reach my long tail keywords.
For example
Electronics->Photo Cameras->Specific
Becomes:
Photo Cameras->Specific
with a niche site and that’s a good thing.
But on the other hand, we can’t pull all eggs in one basket can we? 😉
At least if i ever decide, i can 301 from the old ones and lead the visitors to the new bigger store.
Ah well food for thought food for thought 🙂
Angel
Did you just say, “Start with a search engine-friendly shopping cart” and “build more stores later”?
What’s a shopping cart? 🙂
Actually I don’t use any shopping cart software, I live off an affiliate commission…I’m sure having a store/product of my own will be life-changing, but so long as there’s people with an actual brick and mortar, I’ll be happy to sell for them.
I just figure why do the heavy lifting, if you don’t have to?
Anyhow – maybe I completely missed what you meant.
Re: the one vs. many problem – it’s funny how this ancient issue keeps coming up for philosophers as well as marketers: there’s no easy answer, just depends on your goal.
I prefer a few sites – somewhere in the vicinity of 15-20. That may sound like too much, but right now 3 are really putting food on the table, I figure multiplying to 15-20 = an incredible amount of money that I wouldn’t really know what to do with.
BUT
Having one project at a time is the real key to making a solid passive income, I found. Too many directions at once – sure way to spin your wheels in the mud.
I personally think that only the trust worthy sites are now popular for an eCommerce. Specialty niche sites are an exact search sites for the customers. The multiple product and one site is great idea at first instance but it takes a lot of hard work to make your sale and sites statistics rise.
I have both, one big generic dog products store, then several niche sites developed on the strength of what sells well in the big store. The big store is affiliate sales and the niche sites are my own products wholesale, needless to say which makes more profit. I don’t like my eggs all in one basket.
I have 4 small online bookstores, each dealing in one specific subject. I like the idea of offering a specialty store, and when a Customer arrives, they only see the subject they came for. I think most would like this also.
It is also easier in a sense, as you can push your SEO towards one keyword/phrase, and not worry about diluting them against each other. Upon saying that, some of the biggest online retailers are an ‘all in one’ store, so both obviously work well. But if one of my sites goes down, i still have 3 to depend on until it’s back on track.