From the beginning of my website development career, I have been watching small business owners struggle to get into a proper e-commerce channel. A thought to write an article popped up recently, so I decided to write a guide to start an e-commerce business to ensure a smooth ride of e-commerce business to anyone.
It took almost half a decade to learn from my client’s experiences, though I am not running any e-commerce shop than developing websites and marketing them. You could apply the information shared here to set up your e-commerce store with proper structure. It starts from legal registration to achieving the 1000th sale of your product. After that, the journey continues by yourself with your own experiences.
Is there a divine bliss than starting an e-commerce business from nothing and watching it grow? Your kingdom built by yourself and no one can take it from you! It will happen. To achieve that you would require a significant process synced with the journey of your life. But I am not going to explain or educate the way of life here. Just a utilization of technology enhancements for your e-commerce business.
Acknowledge the fact! Online retail is a booming business. E-commerce value estimated almost 5 Trillion Dollars during 2021.
Here is the checklist, which will guide to start an e-commerce business for beginners.
1. Start with a Business Name
Naming a business is like fixing the cornerstone of a building. Once it’s fixed, the entire building and structure are aligned perfectly. Guess a good name, not a great name.
Once you finalized a name in mind for your business, review these steps to make sure you’re not missing something. Check that your business name getting different perspectives, avoiding legal problems, and ways to anticipate how the name will resonate in public. It’s a good idea to avoid names that evoke a famous company or brand. You don’t want to be too local-sounding – so avoid having a neighborhood name in your title.
Finally, you would have guessed perfect pronunciation. Done. Just go through it. Avoid suggestions from your friends, neighbors, cousins and your pets. Many times, it will take you again from where you start.
Now let’s move to the next part.
2. Secure Your Domain Name
Many times, business owners do not put much effort into choosing the right domain name for their business which can be as devastating as choosing a wrong physical location for your business. A domain name is an address for your online store. I suggest you spend the maximum amount of time in planning and registering the right web address. Also note, your business name should shorter, clean, meaningful for your business where shoppers can find you easily.
A right domain name is more important for an online business. The domain name is an internet identity for your online business as already mentioned. It reflects who you are, what you do and what service/product you offer to the online shoppers.
The reason domain name is seen as an “internet identity” is because there is only one domain name. If you register first, no one can own it. For example, syntricon.com is our business identity, it can’t be duplicated. While choosing a web address that is unique to you is a chance for you to select the best possible domain name that describes your e-Commerce store.
3. Design your Brand Logo
Your logo is the face of your company. It is an identity both off and online. A logo is the first thing that customers will notice about your brand, so it’s essential that it makes a good first impression.
A logo is a visual representation of your brand, so why tell people what you do if you could just show them? Use simple icons to communicate who you are. You want to make sure people can read your logo from a distance, or when it’s really small – keeping it “clean” will achieve this.
Design your logo with professional’s. Because there is no point to change once finalized. So, keep it convey your business value perfectly, rely on professional designers like Creatink Solutions.
After creating the face of your company, the so-called Brand Logo. Now move again to the platform development phase.
4. Launch Your E-Commerce Store
You already owned a domain name. Now, choose a professional website development company like Syntricon to understand which type of website will suite your needs and build your perfect online store. Before reaching a professional, have some understanding between Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, and OpenCart. By doing this, you will have an idea of choosing the right platform.
After choosing a platform, you can start working on updating your knowledge with product images, SEO supported product naming, competitive pricing, convincing offers, customer order cycle fulfillment and tracking of your website. Also to your notice, connecting your site with apps like ZOHO CRM will make your business ease.
Ask more question from your online store developer, because it is your shop. You are going to spend at least 10 hours a day in that shop. You, customers, should spend a minimum of 30 minutes while each purchase because the customer should see most of your products based on cross-selling reference, and category references. It will improve an additional sale.
Make sure you have Chatbot enabled, Perfect login system, Cart tracking, Privacy Policies with the clean note, perfect product view page, SEO supportive code, and plugins, enable tracking systems for future analytics, and show a popup when customer exit without buying. The most important thing is the perfect landing page shows your most valuable products and offers.
After sculpting your online store now time to gran your first e-commerce business customer.
5. Acquire – First Sale and First Customer
Acquiring your first customer is more art than science. The first customer term refers to the person who purchases your product shouldn’t be your relative, friend or a well-wisher. Hope! You must understand why I am saying this.
If you can’t able to catch up, just go through these lines. Your relatives and neighbors must have known your store details at this point. You supposed to publicized it already. It’s good. But a real business starts when you are dealing with an unknown person. That where the count starts. If you can satisfy that customer, the more powerful tools Referral and Word of Mouth will bring more new customers to your e-commerce shop.
Keep that in mind ‘FIRST CUSTOMER IS EVERYTHING!’.
6. Digitally Market your Products
You acquired the real first customer, as I mentioned. Then what? That one challenge; every e-commerce shop owner will face is ‘how to increase online sales?’. Knowing where to start and how to stand out from the thousands of other e-commerce sites can be daunting.
Run a digital marketing campaign. Before that analyze your competitor’s online activities, online presence, sales campaign, and revenue stream. After analyzing, don’t copy your competitor’s campaign model. Because, the size of business, order fulfillment capacity, product price, and customer handling capacity always vary from vendor to vendor.
Reach out to a professional digital marketing agency like Syntricon. Discuss about your products, target customers, your order handling capacity, target location, and most important total target sales per day.
A professional digital marketer will devise a plan based on your inputs and start running a campaign. Do believe whatever platform they chose to market your products. It may be social media platforms, email marketing, SEM, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, missed call model, SMS marketing and a lot of other ways of digital marketing.
Once the digital marketer starts running the campaign your brand name will spread across. The digital marketing campaign will start pouring orders in your online store. You must be busy with fulfilling orders. But don’t stop right there.
7. Re-target your Clients
Re-targeting ads are designed for people who have already visited your website. You can also target customers who are in your database from a lead generation campaign.
Actually, the conversion rate is lesser than 4% of web traffic on the first visit. Experts devised re-targeting campaign methods to help brands reach 96% of users who don’t convert right away. Re-targeting is a cookie-based technology to anonymously ‘follow’ website visitors all over the Web. Technically, all you have to do is place a chunk of code on your website. This code creates a list of details who visit your site using “cookies” in their browsers. The list allows remarketing vendors to display remarketing ads to your potential customers as they visit other sites.
Re-targeting will be taken care of by your professional digital marketer. Just give him the details asked while you have campaign discussion.
8. Harvest – 1000th Sale
Re-targeting must have given you a 20% sales spike from the usual sales. Do fulfill your orders as good as you do. Your marketer does the job as good as he can. You will reach the 1000th sale target. Now have a small party. Invite the people helped in the journey, treat them well. It’s always good celebrating success, it pumps our spirit to do more. Next day target your next sales figure for a party, maybe 10000th sale.
