Are you an innovative maverick dreaming of becoming a soon-to-be entrepreneur?
Have you decided to launch your e-commerce website? But what’s next?
Are you solely depending upon branding agency to kindle your dreams and build next eBay, Amazon, or Flipkart to fulfill your aspirations?
Or are there specific factors you must ponder upon before you embark on building your e-commerce website?
But first, let’s find out how an online platform can be beneficial to escalate your business!
Benefits of selling products on e-commerce platform
In a tech-savvy world that aptly functions through smart apps and digitalization, online e-commerce websites have gained immense popularity. Moreover, selling products through storefronts limits your reach, while the internet has a vast scope.
- On average, customers are inclined towards online shopping than purchasing from a store. This is because it reduces the hassle of trial and offers a plethora of options with targeted segments.
- An e-commerce website exponentially curbs costs such as rental pay, staff salary, store maintenance cost, and eradicating the hassle of licensing and permits, which most store owners have to undergo.
- With online shopping, customers can conveniently shop at home or on-the-go with ease of payment and return features.
- Business branding online creates an online presence for your product on the Google search list, thus bolstering the brand image.
- With the advent of smartphones and smart apps, your business will see booming growth with a 45% hike in the number of customers by 2024.
But before you venture into your e-commerce website, there are certain foundational elements that your website will require.
To start a live e-commerce website, the first thing you need is a domain name and web hosting platform, a logo designer, and a professional website design agency to make your site trendy with a customer-centric approach.
6 imperative aspects to ponder upon before building an e-commerce website
- Know your business goals
The first aspect of setting up a business is to have a clear understanding of your business goals. This includes an in-depth analysis of the target market and customers. Leveraging various strategies, you can track your target segment’s personalized shopping patterns to know about the likes and dislikes of the customer. You can develop your site features based on these data and organize promotional campaigns to create brand awareness.
- Prepare strategies to stand out amidst the competitors
You are not alone; there are thousands of e-commerce websites offering a gamut of services. To know who your real competitors are, utilize Google and Yahoo to do your targeted market’s due diligence.
After identifying your peers, analyze their features and promotional strategies to entice buyers towards their products. It is also imperative to understand whether they are regularly optimizing their platform or using an e-commerce hosting platform.
All these data will help you strategize superlative solutions to promote the USP of your brand.
- A profound plan for project requirements
This is a crucial step, as project planning determines the functionalities performed during the development phase. It includes third-party integration, the internal project team’s role, additional features, functionalities, and customizations that will help your website attain large-scale accomplishments.
A profound comprehensive plan with a realistic timeline and budget will enable you to create an exceptional e-commerce website within the set timeframe. Also, make your website SEO optimized to enable a higher Google performance. During SEO transition remember to check-
a) Appropriate tagging
b) High ranking Keywords
c) 301 redirects
d) Navigational hierarchy
e) Internal linking
f) URL optimization
- Deciding on Data Migration requirements
Data migration applies to businesses having an online presence and is willing to migrate to other marketing platforms. A successful migration strategy is required to overcome the hurdles that lay in the process of migration. Your migration process may include catalog data migration, order history, product review, customer information, and promotions/coupons.
- Focusing on the technical aspect of the website
To gain momentum in your e-commerce business, it is necessary to have a keen eye for the technical details and eliminates the glitches that come in the way.
a) To escalate business development, you must select an apt e-commerce platform that is best suited for your requirements. You can begin with a free platform or voyage for the reputed ones if your business requires huge traffic. A keen eye on template design is a must as a simple, trendy, and easy user-interface entices the audience.
b) Showcasing your products with segment divisions enables your buyers to have seamless shopping experience on your platform. So creating effective product pages is a must.
c) Enable various plug-ins that will allow you to incorporate any new feature based on the market trend to enhance customer engagement.
d) Studies reveal that 30% of online users opt for search options to narrow down their search lists. So adding a search feature to your website will be a boon.
e) Your e-commerce website must have a customer account creation feature before they place an order. This will help you notify customers of their registered contact details about new launches and exciting promotional offers. However, you must also have a feature for the one-time users who refrain from account creation. Also, enable various payment choices and pay utmost care to maintain user information secrecy.
f) As an integral part of a successful business, install analytics to track your e-commerce key metrics and marketing trends.
g) You must also have a back-up plan in case of a sudden hike in customer visitors or a site crash. Lack of contingency plans can have adverse effects on your business.
- Optimizing the website at a frequent interval
Once your e-commerce site goes live, you need to add a robust feedback mechanism for your website to understand user experience while visiting your platform. This is an ongoing process of collecting data from analytics, social media campaigns, SEO, email marketing, and PPC advertisements. The collected data is your foundation for improvement to ensure a high conversion rate while adding new customers and retaining older ones.
Final Thoughts
E-commerce is one of the buzzing sectors, and launching an online store with a unique product is a marvelous business plan, but everything here doesn’t work on a magic wand! It requires data-driven marketing strategies, impeccable user interface, and profound market knowledge to enhance customer engagement and seamlessly reach out to the target audience.
