5 Steps to Develop Your First E-commerce Store |
Posted: June 13, 2019 |
For a number of people, it can be exceedingly difficult to know exactly how to start an e-commerce business – a business that can actually do well enough to generate revenues. It all starts with developing a fully-functional online store, which acts as the base of running a profitable e-commerce business. So, if you’re thinking about building an e-commerce store and selling products online, use these 5 steps to do it right away. Step 1: Determine What You Want To Sell Online The first and the foremost thing you need to look at when you are starting your e-commerce business is deciding what do you want to sell. For a few people, finding the right product to sell is very easy, while for others it can take a lot of thinking. Think about your hobbies, interests or the things that you are good at. This can give you good ideas about what can you sell online. Also, you can use your knowledge and experience to create a product that customers would love to buy. However, if you are not keen on making your products, the second best option is to get them from other manufacturers or creators. But before you do that, you need to do complete market research to figure out what products are ideal to sell online and whether there is a demand for them or not. Step 2: Use Technology to build an e-commerce Website When you are done on deciding which products you want to sell online, the next important thing is to build an e-commerce website. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be too difficult, since there are several user-friendly platforms which make it all easy to set up an online store. Start With Business Name You need to take the right steps in a timely way to go about it well. First of all start with your business name. Choose a fantastic, memorable name that no else is using. Conduct a search to ensure no one else is using that. And once you decide with your business name, register it. Doing so will make sure that it becomes your intellectual property. Hosting and Domain Registration You will then need to register your domain name. Ideally, it should be the same as your business name. Though if it’s not available, try something similar to it. The top accredited domain registrar includes Bluehost, HostGator and GoDaddy. Choose one that seems like a good deal and offers you the most value. Select your e-commerce Platform In the next phase, you will need to decide which platform to use for powering your online store. There are two categories when it comes to that – hosted and self-hosted. Popular self-hosted platforms include Magento, WooCommerce, Opencart. While popular hosted platforms include Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Squarespace. The e-commerce platform is an integral part of your online store. Take your time to learn about them and choose the one that is right for your business. If you are starting out and don’t have much coding skills than a full-hosted platform can be the right choice for you. Also take a look at the features, add-ons and pricing of both types of e-commerce platforms which can help you make the right decision. Step 3: Choose From Different Payment Options For obvious reasons, payments are an important part of any e-commerce store. That is the reason you need to choose the right payment gateway which works well with your e-commerce platform. There are a number of payment gateways that you can choose for your online platform. The most popular of them include stripe, authorize.net, PayPal, Payline, WorldPay, 2Checkout. Depending on your preferences you can choose one that is right for you. However, there are obviously a few general factors to look at when deciding a suitable payment gateway option for your business. These include fees, payment types and e-commerce integration. Step 4: Market Your Business By now you have found what you want to sell, decided your e-commerce platform, set up for payment gateway, and finally build a fully-functional website. Now, it’s time to get the word and drive traffic to your online store. There are a number of ways you can do that. Let’s take a look at a few: SEO If you are looking for the best way to help you find your online store on the web, then SEO is just the right option for you. Investing in SEO strategies will enable you to site your rank in Google search results. There are different SEO strategies, all dealing in keywords to help your site appear on top of search engines like Google, and higher in rank than any of your competitors. Optimizing your website, adding your page links at relevant blogs and articles are a few SEO strategies. Meanwhile, Google Adwords, SEMRush and Moz Open Site Explorer are some of the most useful tools that can help you run an effective SEO strategy. Content Marketing Creating quality content relevant to your industry will allow you to engage with your audience and peers, also help you get a trustworthy authority in your business domain. Content marketing is an excellent way to answer different questions and burning pains of your target audience. Producing high-quality content related to your targeted keywords, accompanying the right links, also boosts your SEO rankings. Social Media No matter what type of business you are running, there is a good chance that you have a lot of potential customers active on social media. Facebook and Instagram are two of the most popular social media platforms used by millions of people online. So getting the word out to them can go a long way to help grow your business. Do a bit of research on your target customers’ social media habits that will help you to build a strategy to engage and connect with them in a much effective way and promote your brand. Step 5: Measure Business Performance Now that you are up and running with your e-commerce store successfully, it’s time to measure results and performance. In fact, you are required to continue doing that to make adjustments in your strategies and gain a better market share. Google Analytics is a good way of doing that. It can help you get insights on important metrics to better understand the position of your online business. Site traffic, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, average order value are all the important metrics you should consider trying to determine your business performance. Bottom Line There you go. Those were the five critical steps necessary to create an e-commerce store. It definitely takes time and effort to set up and run an e-commerce store. But following the right steps and strategy, it’s not that difficult as it may sound. I hope this quick guide can take you one step closer to opening your online store and bring you every success. Author Bio: Kirsten Pike is a UK based Writer who specializes in Business and Technology. She currently works in-house for a premium essay writing service UK house. When she isn’t not working, she likes to spend most of her time with her family, especially with her beautiful little twin daughters.
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