One question that every entrepreneur gets a lot, when working on a new product in a crowded space is this: “How is your product different/better than other products?”

Of course this is interesting to know. If you’re going to enter a crowded space, like E-commerce software is you must have a clear vision on how to separate yourself from competition.

I’ve seen quite a few businesses that are selling stuff online. In order to run their business, they need E-commerce software to host their website and act as a platform for their business.

Around this platform, come all the online marketing products, such as Google AdWords, newsletters, affiliate marketing, Twitter, Facebook and such.

Every shop owner wants to use those marketing products in their business, but they have huge difficulties in doing so the right way. Take Google AdWords. You are given endless possibilities, if you do things right. You have to know how to set up targeting correctly, if you should use conversion optimizer or not, daily budget must be right etc.

I’m sorry, but people running a business just doesn’t know about those little, but very important details. Neither do they know how to get correct insight of their costs vs. revenue to act in a timely manner.

Another thing they usually forget is the importance of landing pages for each and every campaign they run. And what about optimizing landing pages for conversions, by using e.g. Google Website Optimizer?

Another thing is the web design provided by a lot of E-commerce software products. Templates, they call ‘em. What’s good about using a stock template design for your business? Where’s your identity? It’s like Twitter using stock photo for their logo.

So how are we going to be different?

To address the design and identity issues, we don’t have templates at all. I know we’ll lose some potential customers on this, but we’ll also catch those operating on a higher level of quality. And quality is exactly what you get from a unique design and identity for your business. This will include a web design, newsletter design, landing page “master” design, e-mail communication design (for order confirmations and such).

In terms of marketing, we’ve made “limitations” for the client. So, if you want to use Google AdWords settings are applied for you automatically. Milkshake will help you find negative keywords, based on referrers from broad match keywords that never convert into sales.

Milkshake strongly entices you to create a landing page for your campaigns, by telling you via our alerting features. So we’ve made a landing page builder that uses the “master” design for landing pages. We’ve made it very easy to include Google Website Optimizer experiments. You just have to paste in, the installation URL provided by Google Website Optimizer and all scripts will be included for you.

We download cost data from Google AdWords and displays that for you, compared to your revenue. Our dashboard will show green and red arrows if you either make, or lose money on Google AdWords.

So, instead of just providing E-commerce software where you can sell your stuff online, we want to set up boundaries for inside what is considered best practices to help our customers run a better online business.

Getting to know more about our features

In the next couple of months, I’m going to take every major feature of Milkshake and blog about the problem that feature solves. How your business will benefit from solving that problem, and show you how it is implemented inside Milkshake by taking some screenshots, or maybe even make a small video.

As we’re getting closer to a feature complete product, you can learn more about Milkshake here, sign up for our RSS feed or get on the early bird sneak peak mailing list, that we have.