You are not WalMart.com, Build a website that you can actually manage

One of the biggest problems we have with small merchants is getting them to understand the limits of their business and what hey can afford and manage when it comes to their website.

Th biggest problem is that people tend to see sites like Target.com or Walmart.com or Homedepot.com and they what to have the same features. But those companies have hundreds of people working on their websites and have spent countless millions of dollars building them.

So it is unreasonable to think that a one or two person business can do the same thing.

But in many cases, that is exactly what our customers expect us to provide. They expect to push a button and have the same features as Walmart or Target and that it should be simple for them to manage and take no time to do it.

In most cases, when people realize they can't have a million dollar website with one click they give up.

If that was possible then those companies would not need hundreds of employees and just one or two people could make the billions in revenue that they produce, which is just insane to believe.

So it is our job to try to make people understand what is reasonable and what is not, what they can manage and what is just too much for what it provides.

Perception is always a big hurdle, why can't I have product reviews? What can't I have videos on each item that demonstrate the item and so on. But you can have all of that on pageBuzz.com, you just have to add it and manage it.

Lets say you have 200 items in your shopping cart and want to have product reviews, so people can leave comments about the item.

Unfortunately, for every constructive comment you will get 10 spammers that come in and try to post urls to their websites, ads for Viagra or medical marijuana or something else as wonderful.

So as the website owner you have to manage that, and that means monitoring those 200 ads and the 2000 posts that the spammers have added for every 200 actual reviews. Spend time deleting the spam and approving the valid posts.

Of course, again, we are expected to solve that problem, so it is easy and our customer does not have to work as hard.

But the fact is, it is going to take work and if you want to manage something like that, you have to sacrifice the time and do the work.

There is absolutely no way you can filter out the bad people and let only the good people post reviews. You can used CATCHA authentication or even require logins, but some people are good and some people are bad. That is why we have prisons and police forces, to keep those people in check.

In the city of "thenameofyourbusiness.com" you are the police force, you are the one that has to manage all of the criminals. You also have to deal with the cost and time that it requires to keep those criminals in check.

At times it can be a big job and in most cases just too much for the average business owner to manage.

Of course, that is only one feature.

One of the biggest complaints we get from new customers is that it is going to take too long to add all of their items.

When they realize, the number of options, the shipping possibilities and all the program settings they need to make, they realize it is going to take hours and hours to do what they wanted.

Yes, that is true.

Companies like walmart have entire data entry departments to enter the data for their store. To set the shipping parameters for each item, add descriptions, upload the images of the product and the pricing options.

It will take a few minutes for each item even if you have the data right in front of you.

Now if you are making up the descriptions as you go, adding information off the top of your head, then it can take even longer. It might take 10 or 15 minutes for each item and with even just 200 items at 10 minutes each that adds up to over 30 hours of data entry. That is 30 hours of non stop work, it might take 40 hours at your computer with breaks to eat, use the bathroom or answer the phone.

So yes, big companies have full time staffs that do this all day every day.

If you want to build a shopping cart, it is going to take time. Or you could pay someone $500 to do it for you and even that is very cheap. The only problem is, what do they put in the fields?

If you are writing the descriptions off the top of your head, then you still have to create the data for the person to enter, so again, more time.

There is no easy way to do hard work.

Of course once you have the data in some type of digital format there are all types of programs to reformat it, import and export data so there is no data entry process.

We can build stores with 2000 items in minutes if the data is already available in digital format.

But with most of our customers, they don't have that and they don't have a data entry department to do it for them, so they have to bite the bullet and do the work themselves.

That means long hours at the computer and that is just to add the items, building the pages will require more time. To write a shipping and privacy policy, to create a page with contact information and a page about your company and products etc.

Forget the graphics, and all the hoopla you wanted, just get the basics done and then worry about getting the look you want.

If you want to run an ecommerce store like walmart, you will have to work very hard to get there.

If you can be a little more reasonable, keep it simple and not have all the extra features, then maybe you have the time to manage it.

The biggest trick is not thinking you can be a walmart. Understand they when they make a demonstration video they have a crew of 10 people including the actor, lighting tech, the camera person, a sound person and people to edit the video into something they can use.

Of course you can do it all yourself, but it takes work time and effort.

When we make the Mark's 2 cents videos it takes typically a full day to make one video by the time we create the script, shoot the video, edit the footage and get it posted on the website. If that can be done in less than 10 to 12 hours for a short 4 minute video we are doing very well.

So building a website with 200 videos is not done over night, it took years to create because we are a small company. We don't have crews of 10 people shooting a video and most of our customers don't either.

So it is important to try to comprehend what time limits and resource limits you have. What can be done in 1 day, what can be done in 1 week and understand what you actually need.

Do you need videos for every product?

Do you need product reviews?

Do you need 10 photos of each item?

I am going to say, probably not!

We have tools that make everything easy. But we can't change that even with easy tools, building giant websites with loads of products and features takes time.

It is unlikely that any mom and pop shop is going to build a website with the functionality of walmart.com, even if you think you can, there are not enough days in your lifetime to get all that work done. It will take a crew of people and not just some student webmaster you hired on craigslist.

So you have to be more reasonable, build what you can and what you can afford.

Build something that works, and work well for the size of your company.

Don't expect to do something just because you saw it on the homedepot.com website, because it was not likely a 15 minute job for one person.

If you can keep yourself in check you you will be very happy with what you build.

On the other hand, if you keep comparing yourself with walmart.com and trying to get to that level on a $20 budget, you will never be happy, never be satisfied and eventually quit.