Creating an Online Store in Three Steps
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When you consider moving some, or all, of your business online, you need to be absolutely sure that this decision will be profitable. The biggest difference between your average site and an online store is that you HAVE to make money from it and you should focus on making the site lucrative.
In this simple guide we’ll talk about the three most important steps you need to follow to create your online shop. Here are the tasks in a nutshell:
Find a Market
Creating e-commerce Website
Business Setup
Finding a Market
As a businessman you should never start an online shop without researching if there is a market for the products or services you want to sell. Thankfully market research can be very easy online.
One of the simplest methods to do this is to create a blog for people who would want your services or products. For instance, let’s imagine that we want to create an online shop that sells soap. In this case, you should create a blog that talks about soap and hands out tips about how to use this product. Have a writer create some original content and add a few advertisements that link to soap products that are already being sold online.
By judging how many people clicked your advertisements, and actually bought soap from that other shop, you will know whether there is a large enough market out there for you.
If that blog does amazing, then start your business immediately and change those advertisements to link to YOUR shop. This way you are already a step ahead, by having a marketing blog in place when your business starts.
Of course, this means that we now have to:
Create the eCommerce Website
Creating online shops is harder than just making a blog or a simple informational site. This is the case, because online shops have to:
- Track sales and purchases
- Track customers
- Calculate your profits and losses
- Keep a log of returns
This is why you need to invest in some good eCommerce software such as Magento, which can do all this (and more) for you.
The next job in line is the design of your online store. It is always best to keep the theme and look of your shop as crisp as possible. Make sure that the site doesn’t look too cluttered and that your products are visually displayed.
You should choose the style of your website to match the products or services you want to sell. For instance, if you want to sell those soaps we were talking about, you should choose a style that reflects cleanliness and beautiful scents.
Finally, there is the content of your site. You absolutely need to get a professional to write you some decent copy for your online shop. Copy, are those catchy and bold sales texts you often find in online stores. They are written to outline the problems your products solve and why your customers should prefer you above your competitors.
With that shiny new shop in place, we get down to business by:
Setting up the Business
This is the simplest part, thankfully. Now that everything is in place, you need to make sure that people come to your site and actually purchase products and services from you.
There are plenty of ways to increase the traffic of your site. Here are some very good tips on how to do that:
- Pay for some advertisements:Online advertising will certainly pull some attention to your site. You should certainly consider buying some advertisements, at least until your shop is famous enough to advertise itself.
- Give out free Information:If you followed our suggested steps, you already have a nice blog that gives out free information and links to your shop. If not, you can create one! You should also give away free content linking to your site to other high ranking sites out there for some reciprocal goodness.
- Get in touch with your customers:Email marketing is very personal and has a high rate of success if done correctly. Make sure that people who buy from you hear from you again and turn into repeat customers!
And there you have it: One brand new business site, with all it needs to become a huge success.