The latest forecast on the global number of digital buyers within the 2014-2019 period shows over 2 billion people worldwide will purchase goods and services online by 2020.
Online shopping has become a common practice among many people of different gender, social status, age, and nationality.
Being in demand, eCommerce businesses such as online stores continue achieving an exponential growth. However, only a few of the newly created eStores make a profit from the very start. The main reason why it happens is that very few merchants delve into crafting eCommerce strategy details; or they cut back on extra spending on over-and-above analysis. These 5 win-win strategies save your time and money.
1. Select the right platform and hosting
Picking your first eCommerce platform is a challenging task. Therefore, before choosing one, you need to consider:
- The size of your stock;
- Whether you are going to sell digital or physical goods;
- Payment methods you will use;
- Whether you are going to run a self-hosted store or a hosted one;
- The size of your budget.
The market is overloaded with numerous platforms. However, these three are the most popular:
Magento
The platform is suitable for eCommerce professionals, merchants who know how to customize the platform. As it’s an open source product, the settings can be easily changed using the access to the core code. However, the platform is an absolute winner for highly skilled programmers and those who can hire them and/or supply the eStore with additional Magento extensions. Therefore, before deciding on it, you should judge healthily of your financial and professional capacities.
Shopify
The platform is stated to be one of the most user-friendly eCommerce platforms. Thus even non-technical merchants can use the platform from the very start without engaging additional staff. The platform is supplied with numerous extensions that can be found on the official webstore, the cost is comparatively small and makes up from $9/mo to $29/mo regarding your demands.
WooCommerce
Is another open source platform, which is a plugin for WordPress. The solution suits smaller sized online shops. The platform is supplied with all the required features for selling online. So, being a WordPress website owner you may be interested in the variant, as it’ll be much easier to get over the new platform. The admin panel is assured to be one of the easiest if compared with other free solutions.
So, having considered all the points and decided on a suitable platform, you are ready to move on.
2. Get to know your targeted online audience
Getting acquainted with potential buyers is your primary need at this point.
a) Find out the targeted audience:
- average age;
- gender;
- social class;
- nationality, etc.
b) Delve into all the details about your customers’ needs.
c) Reveal all the customers’ problems and challenges that may lead them to your online webstore.
d) Learn what will bring their attention best, thus giving you more website traffic.
e) Get to know what social nets are most in-demand among your primary audience, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or all three together.
Probably, it’d be better to apply for expert’s support, as only based on the achieved information, you’ll manage to offer the goods to a wanting customer.
3. Step up your social media marketing
Social media platforms are good channels for your products advertising and the strategy should be invested in when launching a business.
a) Firstly, the company pages should be created on most popular social media platforms in the marketing area’s region.
b) Then you need to think of the content you will post on the platforms. If you are restricted in time and have to fill in the profiles quickly, you may partially use the content of your official website. Though the practice is not so good for SEO. Therefore, such tasks should be thought over in advance, before the official pages are publicly available.
c) Besides, make sure you don’t spend all the free space on promoting your products only, as the followers will soon get tired of the approach. Run the social platforms to cover the latest news, speak about challenges and solutions your company has found.
d) Don’t forget to mention customers’ reviews and timely respond to your followers.
e) The ‘mosaic thinking’ or ‘clip-consciousness’ of a 21st-century user predetermines the necessity to include videos, bright images, and catchy content.
All the steps will give you more traffic and help to win sales.
4. Adopt mobile strategies
Mobile devices have gained mass popularity. According to CellPhoneDeal by the year 2024 most ecommerce sales will take place on mobile devices, which has led to a necessity to think about a strong mobile platform for selling your products and remaining competitive. Besides, you need to run effective mobile emails marketing techniques.
All you need is to make your webstore mobile-friendly without losing its qualitative characteristics. The strategy will bring you additional traffic and help to boost sales, thus growing your business and convincing your visitors to become regular buyers.
5. Work at SEO and SEM strategies
Although the strategy is placed at the end of the list, it’s probably one of the essential parts of your future business advancement. Improvement of a webstore ranking in Google Search is a high-road to increase the number of visitors.
The core moment here is advertisements on Search Engines. One of the most convenient and efficient methods here is to run pay-per-click advertising for particular products of your store. However, the method is not always the winner for profit. Therefore, more often than not, organic results on search engines do better here, as more users are likely to trust the organic results rather than banner ads.
Moreover, there is every likelihood you’ll need professional assistance in terms of SEO improvement. So, maybe it does make sense to invest in the sphere from the very beginning. Through the strategy enhancement, you’ll manage to bring more customers at the last.
The bottom line
Starting from nothing is always challenging. You just need to take into account everything without exception: your financial capacities, targeted customers, platform, hosting, stock size and many more besides. The process can be stalled and the idea, which once seemed to be thrilling, can become sapless and uninteresting. But keep your head up, as the 5 clear strategies will help you make the first sure steps towards this goal.
