Does the Word eCommerce Scare You or Are You Just Misunderstanding It? - BobWP Monetizer Podcast

eCommerce. For some it’s a scary word or simply misunderstood. Let’s talk about how you may already be part of the eCommerce world.

Watch…

Listen…

Read…

Over the last one or two years here on the blog, we’ve been talking about eCommerce and selling stuff on your WordPress site. This is nothing new here as we have been sharing this kind of content for sometime. At one point, we just decided to focus on it more.

But don’t freak out. It may be that you only think of those big online stores when you hear the word eCommerce. Or you think it’s about selling products only.

What the $(#@^? is eCommerce?

The short definition:

Commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet.

Or as Wikipedia defines it:

eCommerce: Electronic commerce, commonly written as e-commerce or eCommerce, is the trading or facilitation of trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet or online social networks. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction’s life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail.

Whew!

So if we take the middle ground on this, eCommerce is basically selling something online. That’s it. In fact, I touched on this in our first eCommerce podcast episode and I talked about it when I presented at WooConf last year. I have talked about my desire to get into eCommerce early. Pre-WordPress, I even started a stock photo site. I struggled to wrap my brain around it because I was thinking only products. Little did I know that when I started using WooCommerce in late 2011, and ever since then, no matter what I sold online, I used some version of it.

It’s All About Selling

You may have an online store that sells products or you may sell a single eBook on your site. You might sell some kinds of packages of the services on your site—or perhaps some online courses or memberships. You might offer booking services. Or maybe you sell tickets to workshops or other events. You may even have some affiliate links scattered around, or a few ads. Well, that too, my friends, is eCommerce. So if you are selling your products or services on your WordPress site, face it, you are part of the eCommerce world.

But It Goes Further than That

Think of every aspect I mentioned and all of the content, plugins and themes that are part of eCommerce, even if they are not directly related. You may use a certain theme to sell something online. It wasn’t marketed as an eCommerce theme, but it works. You need those plugins to help people subscribe to your site, share content via social media, and build forms so they can contact you. The list goes on and on.

Take for example, my podcast titled Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization and Your Online Store with Rebecca Gill. I can guarantee you that if you listened to it, or read the transcript, you learned something about SEO, whether you were selling hundreds of products, an hour of your coaching, or nothing.

Don’t Let eCommerce Scare You Away

We have massive amounts of content here on BobWP. A lot of that content focuses heavily on eCommerce or touches slightly on it. There will be some that appears on the surface to be just good old WordPress content,