E-commerce is today what Industrial revolution was in the early 1900s. If there is a right time to enter the ecommerce segment it is now. Global industry experts estimate the ecommerce market to touch around $434 billion and that within the precincts of US alone. Imagine the kind of growth the ecommerce industry will have on a global basis.
When you are gearing up to launch an ecommerce store of your own, there are plenty of things to check off to do it in style. In addition to find a reliable ecommerce online builder you might also need to do all, it not at least some of the below mentioned points.
Find a Niche Market
Your ecommerce shop builder can build an eCommerce store like Amazon, Flipkart and Ebay, but to move mountains in sales and to survive in the overheated ecommerce market your store must have a niche segment of products and customers who will want to buy it. Go crazy with creative ideas to assemble inventory of unique and aspirational value. Make sure your products of choice are goods that will fly off the shelves all year round.
Creating a USP
With more than 100,000 ecommerce stores vying for the same target market attention, staying unique and exclusive is mandatory. Your store needs to have ‘something’ - a unique selling proposition (USP) if it needs to rake up sales volumes and brand image in the long run. Get back to the drawing board with your ecommerce product builder to create a USP for your store in terms of shopping experience.
Pick the Right Platform
Rewind a decade back it was almost impossible to have a robust and complete hands-on system that can be used to launch an ecommerce store from scratch. But today, there are plenty of ready to market ecommerce platforms and solutions. Just execute the source code and personalize the product pages and you are ready to mint money. However, the key to success lies in selecting the right platform from a cross-section of ecommerce platforms including Magento, WooCommerce, Presta Shop, Zen Cart, etc.
Magento is the most preferred choice for building any sort of ecommerce store since it is:
- Highly customizable,
- Scalable
- User friendly
- Can be speed optimized for swift page loading
I recommend you to conduct a comparison of the pros and cons of every ecommerce platform available before making your final choice. Also find a magento ecommerce website builder who can not only put the store in shape but can also optimize for quick loading.
Make a First Impression
Statistics suggest that a customer makes a purchase decision under 50 milliseconds!
You have hardly a second to persist your customer to buy products from your ecommerce. That’s why a catchy first impression is essential. You need to be as creative as possible to bring on screen a landing page and subsequent product pages that will entice customers to make a buying decision then and there.
Remember: A first impression can last for years.
Create a User-Friendly Site Navigation (Customer Features)
The last thing you will need your customers to feel while shopping online is stress or frustration. An ecommerce platform builder should focus on building the store with a neatly designed sitemap for quick navigation. Using the right product categories and subcategories is a thing of beauty. Not to mention that a well laid sitemap will improve your search engine ranking too as search engines can crawl pages easily.
Flex Your Responsive Designing Skills
70% of the ecommerce related mobile searches result in an action under an hour. Ecommerce stores should embed responsive designing in their tech strategy to ensure that mobile and users with all types of screen sizes are able to access the website and shop hassle free.
Develop a Memorable Shopping Experience
Window shopping or actual shopping, your customers need to enjoy the time spent on your ecommerce store. The store must have a quick checkout process for customers who make it till the end. Features like product comparison, best sellers, user reviews & rating super deals, one step checkout, etc. are great add-ons.
Diversify Your Sales Channels ( Mcommerce & Social Commerce)
Selling online itself has got diversified in the past few years. Take for instance the surging rise of mobile commerce and social commerce. Mobile commerce with the help of ecommerce apps are an instant hit amidst both sellers and buyers. Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr have ventured into integrating online shopping medium for ecommerce store owners. This helps tap into billions of global market population from a single remote location. Diversify your sales channels using mobile and social commerce for garnering maximum market share.
Shipping It on Time, Every Time
‘Free shipping’ is great. Customers love it. But, as an ecommerce store builder, it is a must to analyze the per order shipping cost and price the products accordingly to that they yield profits. Free shipping usually works great with uniform and average sized products like clothes, cosmetics, accessories, etc. The rest might need some brain racking to zero in on free shipping or otherwise.
Reports & Analytics
How much have you sold? Sales high and low points? Best sellers and slow moving SKUs. These are some of the many questions that reports and analytics of your store must answer. As an ecommerce website builder, pay attention to creating key reports that will provide decisive metrics like average order size, conversion rate, cart abandonment, time spent on site, etc.
Stay in Touch
In this age of forgetting-everything-so-easily you need to stay in your customer's memory loop with constant newsletters, social media campaigns and email marketing. Use these tools as a medium of engaging with customers and communicating with them the latest offers and deals that can help improve sales volumes.
More Power to Blogging
Ecommerce stores that use blogging and content based marketing rake in more than 50% of sales than those which do not. Need we say more? Start blogging fellas! Get in touch with one of the best ecommerce website builder for small business who can integrate your store with your blog site for boosting online presence.
Affiliate Marketing, Coupons & Branding
If implemented properly, affiliate marketing, coupon based selling & branding activities can bring in more than 90% of a store’s revenues. Setting up an affiliate marketing strategy is easy and simple provided you set the threshold limits easy and clear. Ecommerce website builder companies are relying on commission revenue from affiliate marketing to cushion lean period sales volumes.
Ask for Feedback
Do your customers like your products? Is your shopping experience great? How will you come to know of key facts like these without seeking feedback from customers. While choosing an ecommerce website builder with shopping cart chalk out a plan to set up an online feedback system with which user experience and rating can be obtained and measured real time.
End Note
Building an eCommerce website is no rocket science, but neither it is a cake walk. It is more of a tight rope trick that requires fine technical and creative balance. Hit the sweet spot and you will be able to bring in sales volumes in millions or even more.
