How to try out an e-commerce idea quickly and easily

You can easily spent tens of thousands of pounds (and a number of months) on an e-commerce project, nailing down every detail of the design and then building a fancy website. But with the web  it's so much better to get started on something quick and simple, see how it goes, and then build upon the stuff that works. It's far less risky this way; you get to a better solution faster; and it's more fun as you focus your efforts on doing rather than talking about what you're going to do.

Here's how to do this for an e-commerce website:

1. Decide on a very small number of product lines to sell online. About three works well.
2. Get a very simple (but professionally designed) homepage together with clear calls to action including a link to further product details - one page per product - and to BUY NOW.
3. Create a simple one page order form to allow customers to select the quantity of each product that they would like and provide shipping details etc. No need to create a 'shopping basket' system yet.
4. Use a cheap e-payment provider like Protx (£20 set-up; £20/month) to provide the secure server for credit card payments.
5. Have a web programmer set up the site to email you the customer's order upon approval of the credit card. This is a straightforward job for any web programmer.
6. Make sure you have a stats package set up on the web hosting account so you can find out how people are using the site. Check out Google Analytics for this.

And voila, you have an e-eommerce website, ready for customers to to start buying your products.

Next you  need some visitors to the site. Easy! Head over to Google Adwords and within minutes you can start paying Google for visitors to your website who are searching for keywords relating to your products. An Adwords professional will be able to help you to get the most potential customers possible for your budget, but you can worry about that later. What we're after right now is proof of the concept.

Now sit back and watch the stats as people start using the site. Hopefully some of those visitors will buy your products, but regardless of whether or not they do buy, you can use the stats reporting to see which products people were interested in and which search keywords they had used when they found your site.

You can also sit friends, family, and random people off the street in front of your website and find out what they think.

Feed back everything you learn into a round of enhancements for the site. Maybe add a couple more products, or drop any products that people aren't interested in. Improve the layout of the homepage. And then go live and see how things have improved.

Then rinse and repeat.