Overcoming Fear of Failure in Ecommerce

“What if I build the site and it gets no traffic?”

What if the site gets too much traffic and I can’t keep up with the demand?”

What if you squash those fears and put your plan into action regardless?

Overcoming fear of failure in ecommerce is something every online entrepreneur has to grapple with at some point. Your best chance, whether you’re launching ebooks online stores, a new software platform or the next eBay is to stop tripping and get at it.

Here’s how others have done so.

Conduct Research

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Further, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What’s more, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean things aren’t liable to fail. To mitigate these factors, conduct some research around your idea to find the best strategy for executing it. You’ll feel more comfortable proceeding when you’ve found the key data upon which you can base your decisions. Just be careful to avoid falling into paralysis by analysis, in which you spend so much time researching your idea you never get it off the ground.

Create a Business Plan

While a business plan is usually thought of in terms of getting others to invest in your venture, it’s also good for getting you to invest in your venture. Writing a plan for developing your ebooks online stores, or any other venture for that matter, will help you uncover the obstacles you’ll need to overcome. Having worked them through on paper will make navigating them easier when they emerge. Furthermore, breaking the project into its constituent parts and setting goals around them will provide you with a yardstick by which you can observe your successes as you proceed.

Keeping “Failures” in Perspective

During the course of developing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell found many ways it wouldn’t work. He is quoted as having said; “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

In other words, failures are nothing more than ways ideas won’t work. And yes, there will always be many of them. Learn from them, but don’t dwell upon them. All you really need to find is one way the idea will work and you’ll be good to go.

Keep looking.

What Happens if You Don’t Try?

Many people try to disguise their fear by hiding behind the amount of time it could take to get something off the ground. Let’s say you get an idea for an ecommerce bookstore at the age of 25. Researching it, you determine it will take five years to get it up running and on the path to success. That means you’d be 30 by the time the idea is paying off.

Here’s the billion-dollar question; how old would you be in five years if you didn’t pursue the idea? Yes, you’d be 30 regardless. The difference is you’ll either be 30 with your idea up and running, or you’ll be 30 without it working for you. Time won’t stop just because you don’t try.

Overcoming fear of failure in ecommerce is much easier when you consider these four tips. Of course, the best way to get over being afraid of something is to live through it. If you don’t try, you’ll never know if you could have been successful or not. Giving it your best shot, while keeping these ideas in mind, will give you a better go of it.

And, for the record, everybody is afraid the first time.