So, you have taken the leap and started your own online retail business? Congratulations! You have a lot of learning, challenges and exhilarating successes ahead of you. Now is certainly the right time to head into the eCommerce sector, with the development of technology and digital capabilities, as well as the impact of COVID-19.
If you are just getting started, we thought you would need a helpful guide into the first few steps you need to take to start making your business a success. Although online can be more effective than a brick-and-mortar store, you do have to know what you are doing.
So, let's start right away with the basic guidelines of starting an eCommerce store, and what you need to know before launching.
Create a Map of Your Customer
The first thing you need to know is who your customer is. Where do they live? What are their age groups? Are they mostly male or female? Mapping out their demographics helps you to start blueprinting your brand, your messaging and your product marketing. Don't be alarmed though, this will be an ongoing process and will mean that you will be permanently tracking who is visiting your site.
You will also want to, when your site is up and running, keep track of where your traffic is coming from. With the right tools, such as IP address location lookup tool, you can monitor where your traffic is coming from so that you can effectively target that demographic with your marketing campaigns. This will also help your site convert currencies automatically if you have visitors from beyond your own borders, which is a great opportunity to grow internationally.
It is also worthwhile to understand what your target audience's general behaviors and interests are. So, if you are an organic food retailer, for example, will your audience also be interested in fitness? Will they be sports fanatics? Add this to your customer map for your marketing strategies.
Create a Business Strategy
The next step will be to write an actual business plan for your business. This document will prove to be incredibly vital to your company's growth. Not only can you use this document to map out the key aspects of your business, but you can also set mid- to long-term goals in this strategy. Because this document is so important, it is worth hiring a professional business plan writer to get it right from the start.
Use this document to list your competitors, your products and your unique selling point (USP). Map out the strategy for the next three months to a year and beyond. Not only can you keep referring back to this document to monitor your progress, but you can also send it to potential investors and stakeholders when the time is right.
Make sure that the business plan is adaptable. You will want to add and remove aspects as your business grows, so make sure you can change vital aspects of it. Keep it up-to-date and fresh as you never know when you will need to send it to a potential investor.
Spend Time on the Layout of Your Site
Millions of brands go through a UX design phase before they even begin their website. In this, they work out what the flow of the website will be and what the customer journey will be like from entry all the way through to checkout. If you cannot complete a UX design, pay attention to the customer journey and what your landing pages look like.
The content on your site will need to be simple, yet descriptive to provide your customer with all of the information they need. Images need to be high-quality, yet web-optimized and be able to tell a story to the customer. Keep your CTAs above the fold to heighten your conversion rates. The moment they have to scroll further down past the fold, you have already lost a large percentage of potential customers.
Lastly, pay attention to what appears on the product page. Give your customers other reviews to read, provide them with several images of the product and give them vital payment and cost information to make an informed decision.
Focus on Your Content
Your content is vital to sell your products to your customer, granted, but it is also key in SEO. Relevant keywords need to appear on your site for Google to know where to categorize you and where to rank you.
You want your product pages to pop up in search, so having the right keywords on the product pages is key to ensure that they are found. The reviews, descriptions and even images will help you rank your pages.
Look at creating a blog too. Create and input educational and informative information about your products and services. Not only will your customers find this useful and keep coming to you for vital information, increasing conversions, but you can increase your search results with the right keywords.
Last Thoughts
Starting an online retail business is about implementing something, measuring its success, testing with something else and then trying something new. You will be able to monitor your traffic, engagement, open rates and conversion rates to track what is working and what is not. Keep your eyes on this, and keep trying new things until you get it right.
