looking to make my site an empire in 11 months

[OnTheWayUp]

You definitely need a re-design, and focus on usability, as well as key SEO tactics. If you need more info, PM me. I run over a dozen websites.

[Gaulkin]

Layout is terrible, work on that first.

[jake_russell]

Make sure you understand your competition. Some of the websites you will be competing with are very nice, dacardworld.com, pghsportswholesale.com, footballcardshop.com, cardboardinvestor.com. Take a look at these sites and see what you can do better. Will you focus on mom's looking to buy their kids some cards or investors looking for real expensive stuff? You can do this it will just take a lot of work. Try and find someone who knows alot about website development and SEO because a small business site can make it to the top of google results. "Google" sports cards and check out the first page, they are not some super big company.

keep at it and take any harsh advice from other people as advice none-the-less,

jake

[dalex]

Hello,

First off, id like to congratulate you for setting a goal for starting a business at such an early start in life, Secondly you have done a good job so far however as with any business it takes further steps to accomplish more. Below are some tips, please note they are intended for help, not to discourage you.

Having a website that looks like an actual company store is one of many keys to success when it comes to selling online. Having a more personal type website for an online store is ussually the last thing you would want to do.

Some more important aspects that a customer determines before buying:

1) Credibility and Reliability
2) Shipping Time Frames
3) Customer Service
4) Ease of use of the website "plays into the first mentioned aspect".
5) contact information on the site is easy to find, you dont need to look for it.

More tips:
1) SSL's help sell the product, it shows your website is secured to take payments.
2) use more than 1 source of accepted payments, recommend: 2Checkout "accepts PayPal and major credit cards" and Google Checkout.
3) Blogs, this can increase customer relationship with your company and provide up to date news and products to the customers.
4) Newsletter / Magazine, this can be tricky customers have to actually apply, read "can-spam", also newsletters is starting to get tired out and I recommend saying magazine or catalog "with free" instead".
5) more professional images, "brighter images and a more white background, refer to giants like Amazon.com, Target.com etc"

Design Related:
1) Overhaul website designed more as an ecommerce website.
2) Logo re-design, having a background image with blurred text overlayed is not a good strategy as the logo is to complex to remember.


*also*
you do not need to be the cheapest out there when it comes to a niche market like hobbies, reason for this is because there are limited places you can buy this or that from vs big box electronics like best buy or target. Also, providing an easy to use website, great customer service can actually allow you to charge more and allow the customer to not mind.

Example:
Sports Card Deck: Retail - $9.99
Your Price: $4
Online: $6

you can actually charge $7.99 or even retail! Remember there is always someone cheaper and it starts with someone being cheaper than the other guys "it is a vicious cycle",

so:

if you were to make $20

you would need to sell:
$4 - 5 packs
$8 - a little more than 2

it becomes a lot of work to ship twice as much product when you can ship half as much and make the same, there are fine points with every price and it takes measuring sales to know what works best.

There are a lot of steps however hopefully the above can get you going.

If you have any questions or would like assistance with any design, product, or photos please feel free to let me know.

Thanks for your time.

[MissBossLJ]

hello there just see your message about sites, so are you designing sites then as i would be interested in having one created for one of my companies that is currently an offline bricks and mortar company. regards

[spenserb14]

thanks everyone for your responses, i sent out a couple pms to you guys, i'm looking to have a professionally made site once i have the money to do so. i'm basically out of stock right now because i had three people spend upwards of $600. I'm changing my focus of the site to sports autographs/game used memorabilia, cards are a little harder with competition because of huge companies already existing, it is also easier to get wholesale balls/jerseys/hockey sticks/etc than to get cards.