A new book by Chris Barling, “The Insider’s Guide to Ecommerce”, builds upon the authors previous work by adding over a hundred more tips and insights into working in the world of eCommerce.

We looked at the previous book “Over 300 Top Tips For Running an Ecommerce Website” in 2011 where we found “the book has plenty of useful tips to make it a worthy read and if you are in the e-commerce world you are bound to gain some useful insights”.

The new book runs to 194 pages (around 50 more than the previous book) and increases the tips to 440 across a range of areas including website marketing, day-to-day operations, and customer relations, whilst new sections build on social media and online market places.

The Insider’s Guide To eCommerce

The book opens with simple and practical advice for those considering setting up an online store including doing your research, selecting a payment solution, and keeping on top of costs. Tips then move into the process of marketing your new eCommerce website with more than one hundred tips dedicated to this section alone. These tips include choosing an effective web address, website analytics, email marketing, and generating PR interest. Generating PR interest is likely to be of particular interest for most people selling online as standing out from the crowd can make the difference between a successful product launch and a monumental failure.

Two new sections are “embrace social media”, which primarily focuses on Facebook and Twitter, and “market places”, which deals with eBay, Amazon, and Facebook.

The perceived benefits of social media can often divide people so it’s good to see some practical tips including  clearly understanding what you want to get from social media, effective call to actions, and getting people to visit your eCommerce website as a result of your social media interactions.

The market places section provides much useful insights particularly into the area of eBay – an interest fact quoted from Forbes magazine says “There are around 200 million products listed at any one time…” on eBay alone whilst the book also quotes as eBay as saying they expect a “tenth of businesses to eventually achieve sales of over £3m.”

In Summary: The Insider’s Guide To eCommerce

The book is crammed full of tips and with this new version looks to be establishing itself as the de facto insight guide for selling online. As highlighted in the previous review there is still no glossary of terms or real world scenarios but if you are looking to quickly dip into some tips about the world of eCommerce then this book is for you.

The Insider’s Guide To eCommerce is currently available for around £12.99 (A5 Paperback) and around £6.68 for the Kindle Edition | Buy from Amazon.