If you own a company that usually sells goods in a typical brick and mortar shop rather than online, you’re missing out on a massive revenue generating opportunity.
Online retail sales are constantly growing, so it only makes sense to make the most of this and sell your goods both ways. For small businesses, launching an online store can be challenging, as time is of the essence with little budget and staff.
However, you don’t need to go it alone, and there are loads of companies out there who can help you to design and keep up an online store in a simple yet affordable fashion.
Beginning the Build of Your Online Store
If you can’t afford to hire somebody who will build a customised ecommerce store for you, there are plenty of vendors out there who will help you to create one quickly – so don’t worry. This can take all of the hassle out of the hard parts like coding, hosting, and doing maintenance on a server of your own. Platforms like Bigcommerce and Shopify let you design the general look and feel of your online store, where you can also upload your product catalogue, setup shopping carts, and securely accept payments.
Services like this will require some basic work from you to start with. Let’s use Shopify as an example; you choose a storefront layout from a set of templates and customise your fonts, colour scheme, and product image sizes. You’ll also be able to upload custom brand logos and backgrounds.
Customising the Look of Your Ecommerce Store
In most cases, if your company already has a website, you could replicate your existing online look, including any logos and colour schemes you have. If you don’t currently have a website, choose a background and accent colours for your ecommerce site that complement your logo.
Many design templates will come with preset themes that don’t require you to have any HTML or CSS knowledge to customise, so that’s a bonus. It should be fairly easy to upload your logo, product images, and any banners you like.
Payment Systems
PayPal is a great choice when you first set up your ecommerce store. There aren’t any monthly charges for the basic service, but PayPal sellers do pay a 2.9% transaction fee on top of the total sale amount, as well as a 20 p fee per transaction.
Customer Service
You’re going to need to respond to your customers concerns in a quick and effective manner. Your ecommerce vendor should give you access to a reliable customer relationship management tool, which will help you with this.
Profiles on social media sites can also be great ways to respond to questions and complaints in a quick and effective way. There’s no start or end time for customer service, you should always be available to help, so make sure you have a great CRM system.
Working Out Shipping Costs
It’s usually easier and more accurate to leave your shipping costs to the carrier you use. The big carriers will work out your shipping costs for you for free, while the majority of ecommerce vendors will let you integrate the costs into your store’s checkout section. Rapid Parcel offer a great service for a great price, so consider them at this stage.
Creating the Best Product Images and Descriptions
People who are shopping online can’t see, touch, feel, or smell your product. However, they usually respond well to a clear product image. You don’t have to hire a professional to get images like this, but you shouldn’t cut corners at the same time. Using a 16 megapixel DSLR camera, decent lighting and a light box will give you the best images you can imagine.
Customer Reviews and Social Sharing
By giving your customers the ability to comment on your products and leave ratings, you’re building their confidence in you. Positive reviews and social media shares could potentially lead to more sales. Obviously there’s the risk of negative comments, but you also have the chance to quickly respond to and rectify these. You can also make it easy for customers to like your products on Facebook, pin images to Pinterest pages and email images of products directly from listings.
Attracting Shoppers
Once your store is ready to go, you need to spread the word both on and offline. Place links to your store’s web address on your main website, as well as in any email newsletter campaigns. This will be a good start and you should begin to attract shoppers quite quickly. Social media sites will also help you to generate interested and keep people interested in you, providing you update them a few times a day. You can easily drive traffic to your ecommerce store and promote any deals this way.
Handling Returns
All stores have to deal with returned items. You must check that you ecommerce vendor provides you with built in tools that let you quickly and easily replace merchandise or refund purchase prices. This software should also restock your inventory and send emails to the customer regarding their return.
Tracking Your Success
As with anything in life, it’s essential that you track your success so you can see what needs to be changed, improved upon, and removed completely. An ecommerce vendor that offers free self service analytics is your best bet, as well as other reporting tools. You’ll be able to tell how many people are visiting your store and how often, where they live, and how they found you. You’ll even be able to see which sites drive the most traffic to your store and which products are looked at most/least often.
With this advice, you should be able to create a fully functional, profitable, attractive, ecommerce online store. The information here can be researched in more detail, so don’t hesitate to look online if you want to know more. Providing you have the drive, you can easily start a fantastic ecommerce store. Good luck!
