If your retail business doesn’t already have a strong online presence with an e-commerce website to increase your sales channels by offering an online purchasing option, you might be falling behind the times. You should strongly consider starting an e-commerce store, particularly given the rate at which e-commerce sales and their market shares are increasing. Here are some pro tips to get you started.
Spend Time Understanding Good Web Design
The very first thing you’ll do when you create an online store is to actually build your e-commerce website, and that means you need to know what exactly goes into creating a well thought out, easy to use, customer focused and engaging website. Your online store is your showroom and according to studies, your potential customers aren’t going to give you more than a few seconds of their time to grab their attention.
Spending time understanding what will make a success when you do create online store fronts is going to take some research and looking at the competition to get an idea of what you should be aiming for. If you want some of the design heavy lifting done for you, then you should get started herewith the Wix Ecommerce website builder that offers many great templates and hosting at affordable rates. Using a builder will make this part of your e-commerce journey much easier and let you focus on other things.
Offer Free or Cheap Shipping
Shipping is a major decision point for many consumers who purchase online. Being able to get free or cost-effectiveshipping means they’re more likely to make the purchase. You also need to consider your biggest competitors like Amazon with their Prime program which offers free shipping. If you can’t at least come close to matching this, potential sales might be lost to another e-commerce store that does offer free shipping. If free shipping is prohibitive because of your margins, consider offering free shipping if customers make purchases over a certain value, as this will incentivize higher total spends.
Give Your Customers Many Ways to Pay
Don’t just offer a standard payment method like a credit card at checkout. Add as many ways for your customers to pay as possible. Offering checkout options like PayPal is essential if you don’t want customers to change their mind last minute at your checkout page. Consumers like PayPal because it offers them protection against online purchases and offering a few checkout options means that everyone visiting your store will find a convenient way to pay for their purchase.
Embrace Social Media
Whatever your personal feelings about social media are, it’sundeniably a very powerful way to advertise and market your products, whether by traditional adverts or getting involved in the world of influencer marketing. Many consumers, particularly younger customers, who often have more disposable income, report having made purchases online purely thanks to a trusted influencer that they follow and admire showcasing a product.
Use Promotions and Discounts
Everyone loves a good deal and if your online store isn’t taking advantage of this, then you’re missing out. Display specials and promotions prominently and offer incentives to purchase or increase the total spend. Displaying prominently what your customer could save or benefit from, and how they do so, like a 2 for 1 sale, will drive incentive to spend money on your e-commerce website. You could create a loyalty program that rewards returning and frequent shoppers too, which will serve to increase customer loyalty. Both options are effective in different ways and using a combination of these is your best strategy to make promotions and discounts work for you.
Add a Blog to Increase SEO Effectiveness
Search engine optimization is a complex system of rankings that the big search engines use to determine in what order websites appear in the search results when a user performs a search for something. Many different factors contribute to this algorithm-based display order, with one of the most effective and biggest determining factors being relevance to the search term. You can increase your search relevance by adding a blogto your website where you can add short articles relating to your products. Offer your customers advice and solutions andmake these blog posts informative and useful. Not only will this increase your SEO effectiveness, but it will mean users will spend more time on your website to read your blogs, which in turn can be a conversion to sales.
Offering online sales means offering your products or solutions to a new market you might not have had direct access to before, and that can only mean an increase in profits if you do it correctly. Understanding the e-commercelandscape and what is offered by the competition can help you decide how to create your online strategy, as can following some of the tips presented here. No matter how you do go about it, don’t hesitate any longer in getting your online store up and running!
