Bringing customers back to your store is also huge as many companies make a large portion of their profits from return shoppers satisfied with their initial experience.

Arts
Tapestry

The hardest part for me would be the transition from a personal blog to an ecommerce site, you got to have the mindset of a business man to reach that goal. Thanks for a great post!

I think that the #1 Factor that will determine whether or not your site is successful (as in getting buyers the buy) is having enough traffic. You need to be able to get enough hits, as it can often take hundreds of visitors to see a sale. You can try to tweak the format of the site itself, but without large amounts of traffic it'll go bust and leave you disappointed.

That being said, you also need to realize that some niches simply don't convert well. I know a guy who has the #1 spot for the term "Horse Riding Saddles" which has THOUSANDS of searches each day. His site gets traffic, but they don't buy. After some research, it just seems like people don't like to buy saddles that cost upwards of $1000 online. They like to go to a local shop.

Contract that with a store like mine at http://www.AirsoftSniperRifleShop.com which sells (you guessed it) Airsoft Guns. My site produced 3 sales from it's first 500 hits online. That shows that search traffic looking for airsoft rifles actually buy instead of just looking around.

Even so, the conversion ratio was only 1/2 of one percent. If I only am getting 500 hits to my site a MONTH then there isn't going to be much money squeezed out of that little e-commerce site.

I think that the #1 Factor that will determine whether or not your site is successful (as in getting buyers the buy) is having enough traffic. You need to be able to get enough hits, as it can often take hundreds of visitors to see a sale. You can try to tweak the format of the site itself, but without large amounts of traffic it'll go bust and leave you disappointed.

That being said, you also need to realize that some niches simply don't convert well. I know a guy who has the #1 spot for the term "Horse Riding Saddles" which has THOUSANDS of searches each day. His site gets traffic, but they don't buy. After some research, it just seems like people don't like to buy saddles that cost upwards of $1000 online. They like to go to a local shop.

Contract that with a store like mine at http://www.AirsoftSniperRifleShop.com which sells (you guessed it) Airsoft Guns. My site produced 3 sales from it's first 500 hits online. That shows that search traffic looking for airsoft rifles actually buy instead of just looking around.

Even so, the conversion ratio was only 1/2 of one percent. If I only am getting 500 hits to my site a MONTH then there isn't going to be much money squeezed out of that little e-commerce site.