Opening multiple ecommerce websites is a bad move for a retailer

Time and again I see small and medium sized retailers opening a second or third ecommerce website in an attempt to revive their poor success in Ecommerce. I can never understand the logic. If you've invested in one website which isn't working, then why spend money setting up multiple ecommerce websites instead of investing in your main site

Marketing ecommerce websites, getting a good Google ranking and getting a useful volume of traffic is extremely difficult. Most ecommerce sites fail simply because they do not attract the traffic levels required to make enough sales to make the website worth the time and effort. Getting a new Ecommerce site off the ground and generating useful sales requires a lot of time and pain - you never get results overnight, unless you are selling something utterly unique.

One of the favourite techniques of some retailers is to open up a second website selling exactly the same goods, but under a completely separate brand name and for much reduced prices and slimmed down customer service. A lot of established retailers have a well known name in their vertical market, and are much respected by consumers. However, consumers respect price above pretty much anything else. So retailers of established market names open up a second website as a "stack them high, sell the cheap" website just to increase turnover.

The advantage of this lies in the prices on the main branded website. Retailers can't afford to have lower prices on their website than in their shop. Customers to the shop tend to get very upset if they find the website has lower prices than the shop. One way to avoid this is to have a website under a completely different website competing on cost along, which the shop customers "don't know about".

This not a good approach. The sales you gain on price are partly made up of the sales you loose from the main website. You are essentially trying to promote two identical websites in the same niche - you are in competition against yourself. You are bidding against yourself in advertising programs such as Google Adwords.

It is true that the cost-driven website will attract new sales from price comparison websites. However it is extremely difficult to justify this small increase in sales against the loss of customers to the main website, plus the massively increased costs of running two websites instead of one.

It is hard enough to get EPOS software which is properly integrated with your ecommerce website, but finding EPOS software which is can mange multiple websites with different prices and descriptions is very difficult. You can't really put the same descriptions of products on both websites because you'll seriously upset Google. Google does not like duplicate content and it will significantly reduce the rankings of both sites in the search engine results.

Other retailers try to open up secondary ecommerce websites by branching out into a new vertical market. This is also usually a mistake which is driven by disappointment at the performance of their existing Ecommerce website. Smaller retailers are usually experts in their particular vertical - what makes them think they can suddenly start competing in a completely different vertical is a mystery to me.

No, your best chance at retail ecommerce success comes from putting all your effort into your prime website and not dividing your effort. Except in a small number of peculiar cases, failure of your main website is caused by not doing the correct things, not working hard enough and expecting a quick win. None of these things are going to go away by opening up more retail ecommerce websites.