Ecommerce is booming, and the statistics suggest that this industry will become a 4.5 trillion industry by the end of 2021. Among other reasons, COVID is the most significant one in the success of the e-commerce business. Those running just brick and mortar stores suffered huge losses during the last 1.5 years. People had to close their businesses due to bankruptcy.
While everything else is falling apart due to pandemic, the eCommerce business is thriving and gaining popularity more than ever. If you plan to open an online store, you know that there is a lot to digital technology than just getting a website.
To make a thrilling eCommerce website, you must follow the smart steps described in this article.
1. Research the Product or Service You Want to Sell
Spending time, money, and efforts on products that are not in demand is a waste. Maybe you think your product is brilliant and you have the skills to market it in the best way. But what will you do if there are only a few among the audience who search for this particular product?
Suppose you are enthusiastic about building a profitable eCommerce site, evaluating the demand through extensive keyword research. Also, research the competitiveness of your idea. See if the market is saturated with the product, and you will be able to beat the competitors in pricing or not. After finding answers to these questions, decide if you must proceed with the same product or find another one.
2. Get Your Website Ready
It sounds incredible that you can develop an eCommerce site by yourself, but can you keep up with all the updates and changes that need to be made with time as the trend changes. As the business owner, you have many other tasks to cater to. To build a successful business, you must hire a good web developer with a graphic designing background who can adjust the images and their size while developing the website.
After your website is ready, you may ideally choose a WordPress hosting platform for its launch. Developers are familiar with different platforms, so they can insert the plugins and payment processors to make your website perform better.
3. Secure Your Website
To build a secured and successful ecommerce site, you need an SSL certificate that keeps customers’ data secure flowing between the server and the browser. For ecommerce site, a wildcard SSL certificate is an essential certificate as it secures subdomains with a strong encryption. Cyber thieves will not recognize encrypted data as it looks gibberish language.
4. Make a Comprehensive SEO Strategy
SEO is essential to lift your website and bring in the ROI. A well-optimized site appears on the top of the search results, attracting a vast audience with the possibility of high conversion rates. One approach could be inducing high volume and low competition keywords in your content to appear in the searches.
5. Choose Your Payment Gateway
For a successful eCommerce website, it is essential to have a secure channel for online payment. Keeping just a few options is not enough because customers use credit and debit cards associated with the different payment partners for shopping.
For the online payment gateway, you must have a secure checkout process, a sound privacy policy and return policy, shipping methods, and an available customer service helpline.
6. Make User-friendly Website
One of the biggest challenges that online sellers face is that customers cannot touch or feel their products online. It is tough for them to judge the quality and hence make a purchase decision. As an online store operator, you can overcome this problem by intensive information about the product that is easily accessible on the website. Moreover, choose a simple but attractive layout and offer incentives on a purchase like discounts, free shipping, easy return exchange policies, etc.
7. Perform a Test Run
To make the buyer’s experience smooth and easy, you must test your website from every aspect before presenting it to the audience. While testing, put yourself in a customer’s place to observe from their perspective and focus on the entire buyer journey.
Several functionalities must be assessed, but those require plenty of skills. If you do not have the resources and required skills to test every detail, you must at least run a standard test that includes:
- Test if your search bar and filters are working fine
- Add and remove items from the shopping cart to see if it allows a customer to add, remove and proceed with one and more things.
- Check all the details related to sign in and log in.
- Ensure smooth and secure payment procedure.
8. Publish Your Website
Once your website’s home page, about us, and contact page are ready, you may launch it. Even if there is no product on the site, pre-launch pages are beneficial in SEO terms. Moreover, they will help attract vendors, and you can also reach out to bloggers for content. This pre-launch will have you make a strong base before appearing in front of the customers.
9. Legitimate Your Business
Although it is not a physical entity, you must do all the paperwork to legitimate your business. Get vendor’s license and cater to all the legal issues. It is advisable to hire a lawyer for this purpose. Even though it will increase your expense for once, it will save you many hassle and future problems.
10. Identify Marketing Opportunities
Start your marketing campaigns pre-launch to spread awareness. Get yourself listed on google shopping, run ads on social media platforms, build relationships with influencers, and much more. Getting a google shopping catalog and Facebook catalog helps to boost up SEO even before launch.
Content marketing is another very lucrative approach to build a successful business in this era. According to research, 61% of customers in the US make an online purchase based on the recommendation from blogs. All these tactics are cheap but effective ways to drag traffic to your website.
Final Words
Investing in the eCommerce website is a brilliant idea considering the market today. From this billion-dollar industry, every fish is getting a handsome share. You can be one of them but following the right strategies is compulsory to build a successful eCommerce business. Let us hope the guidelines mentioned in this article will help you in your way of success.
