Before you start building an ecommerce website for your business there are some questions you need to answer. First, who manages your website right now? Without a plan to manage an ecommerce website you are doomed from the start.

Who will manage the site?

An ecommerce website requires a lot of work. The question of who is going to take care of the labor is important to address from the start.

A good question to ask is, “Does your website get managed?!?!” Unfortunately, many stores neglect their website completely. If you’re one of those stores, then your first step should be to figure out a process to manage your website.

If you’re further along in the process, you may already have an employee running your website. How much time does it take them and what are they doing? Just because an employee can handle updates to a WordPress site doesn’t mean they can adapt to an ecommerce site on Magento. This is something to think about if you move to ecommerce. What type of training will your staff need? Will you need additional support to manage a more complex site?

An ecommerce website requires the most time and labor investment to be successful.

What it takes to manage an ecommerce website

Do you have the resources to dedicate a part time employee to your website? Here are some of the ongoing tasks you can expect to do with an ecommerce website:

• Fulfill orders
• Issue refunds, credits, cancellations
• Marketing functions – Google Ads, Facebook Ads
• Adding product images, descriptions
• Updating prices
• Changing content like images, text and blogs
• Manage apps
• Provide customer service for ecommerce customers

If you’re not prepared to dedicate at least one knowledgeable part-time employee to your ecommerce site, you may be better off not building one. As the revenue from the ecommerce site grows so will the required maintenance.

If you’re at square one right now. I recommend you start by improving the way you manage your informational site first. Learn what it takes to grow traffic to the site, improve the SEO and update it regularly. Once you’ve mastered your webmaster skills you can embark on an ecommerce voyage.