• It will be easier to import your leads into your CRM. Your Joomla website is probably not the most suitable for managing your client information. Therefore, having the leads stored in your Joomla site database will save you time and improve accuracy when importing leads in your CRM system.
• Your server mail may stop working. Seriously, we had a recent issue where our virtual dedicated server provider ended up having some issues with their email relay and none of our server emails could be delivered. By having form submissions stored in the website, our Joomla support was able to retrieve our website leads and not have the info lost.
• Your website generated emails may accidentally end up in your spam folder. While this issue probably won't happen frequently if you have your spf record set up correctly, it still happens often enough and can cost you lost revenues and bad customer service.
• It is more secure. If your form submissions contain confidential information, you should not have form info transmitted via email to you. For increased Joomla security, access your Joomla site control panel via https:// and export form submissions to your computer in a secure manner using encrypted communication.

Do you have a Joomla website backup? Well, I should know better and ask you:

1. How frequent Joomla backups do you make?
2. What is your oldest backup?
3. What is your most recent backup?

Why do you need a recent backup of your Joomla website?
If you need your website recovered  from a file backup, all information that changed or additionally was added since then until the Joomla website incident is lost. Therefore, it's the best if the time between the incident and your latest backup is as short as possible.

Why do you need really old backups?
I've seen scenarios where websites have been compromised for months before the site owner realizing and acting on the security issue. In this case, you really need to be able to learn the point of time when the compromise took place and find the latest clean copy of your Joomla website. Cleaning up a compromised website is a real nightmare and enormous cost without a clean copy.

Therefore at minimum, you should have:

• backup file of your newly designed website.
• site backup every 3 months within the last year.
• weekly website backup within the last month
• daily database backup within the last week.

These are some examples based on real stories and clients that I have had in the past. So if you are running or considering creating a Virtuemart shop, then consider NOT making the following mistakes:

1. Sell everything under the sky on your shop. Sell unrelated products from helicopter toys to dishes that have nothing in common.
2. Sell products that can be purchased cheaper on Amazon.
3. Concentrate on one time product sales instead of repeat customers. The cost of new leads could easily be higher than the profit margin of your products.
4. Have products that people will buy just because they are green and eco-friendly.
5. Set up a huge infrastructure (warehouse, servers, etc) that you cannot support with 2-3 initial sales per day and you end up running out of initial money fast.
6. Sell products that people simply don't want or need.
7. Don't optimize your site for search engines.
8. Don't have solid arrangements in place with your suppliers and vendors.
9. Sell products that you can buy around the corner for the same price or slightly higher.

So you may ask what happens to these sites at the end? They end up selling their items on eBay or Amazon!

Ogy Nikolic
Joomla consultant

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1. Do you know who your best repeat customers are? What do they buy from your website?
2. How often do your repeat shoppers buy from you?
3. Could you predict what and when they will buy next?
4. Do you have customers that have stopped buying from you and what will it take to get them back?

• It’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find a new one.
• You have to earn the trust of new prospects but existing customers already trust you.
• If you value your existing customers, it will be easier for you to get new customers.

• These customers already know who you are and are familiar with your brand.
• They will be receptive to your message because they already trust you.
• You have their correct address, contact info and understand their personal preferences so you may even further personalize their shopping experience.