‘It’s time to enter the eCommerce world!’ Online shopping has been proving its superiority and setting a new way for consumers to get what they want.
Store owners are eager to transform their vision of eCommerce to reality, starting from setting up an irresistible online store.
The growth of eCommerce is increasing rapidly, with an estimation of 1.92 billion digital buyers in 2019 out of 7.5 billion people worldwide. This is a gigantic number of consumers who entrust in online shopping.
For those who are still wondering about the benefit of eCommerce, let us point out the huge advantages of online shopping.
Amazing Advantages of eCommerce
It’s an Easy Way to Increase your Revenue
It’s better to have more than one stream of revenue. If you have the resources to set up an eCommerce store, why not make it right away? Whether or not you own a brick-and-mortar store, taking advantage of the Internet is crucial in this modern world.
Online shopping allows customers to have a shorter route to purchase what they want.
The diversity of product categories on the Internet creates favorable conditions for consumers to buy immediately without going to the physical location. eCommerce site helps your business scale easily since it follows closely with the demands of the market and consumers.
It also allows you to save lots of money to invest in other fields when you don’t have to worry about expenses such as rental and maintenance fees, or budget for traditional marketing methods.
It helps you Expand your Influence
Making you available on the Internet will bring potential customers closer to you. The popularity and advancement of technology are helping people in their fundamental daily tasks.
With the help of search engines, buyers can find the desired products and shops quickly and easily.
The O2O (Online-to-Offline) model where store owners combine the advantages of an eCommerce site with a physical location is becoming more and more popular, so you can access potential customers through both the online and offline worlds.
Recommended: Store Pickup Magento 2 Extension
Another amazing advantage that eCommerce gives merchants is its flexibility in place and time. Stop worrying about the status of your store, let’s relax on your vacation since you can manage every order within a few clicks.
Each consumer has a unique shopping behavior, and online stores can always ready to serve them 24/7/365!
It helps your Customer Service
Online stores provide you a new method to take care of your customers throughout their buying journey. The availability of the Internet makes it easier for sellers to know more about the trends and buyers’ demands so they can quickly update their store to suit the new changes.
The flexibility also shows its advance in your customer service. You’re always ready to handle the problems with build-in apps that help you communicate with your buyers easier.
Customers can have your support and consultants whenever they want since both parties are not limited in time and location.
Your sales campaign, new arrivals or discount program are more capturing since they appear on your site through many CTAs (Call-to-Actions).
The ways you thank your precious buyers are also varied: Reward points, voucher, coupon, etc; name as many as you want, an eCommerce site can help you spread your gratitude toward the right users.
With these prosperous opportunities, retailers are changing to online selling. But the big question is ‘how to set up an eCommerce store?’ Well, stop asking yourself ‘cause we got your answer right here!
Research and Prepare
The most important part when it comes to jumping into a new area is understanding you and your choices. There are several factors that businesses must consider carefully.
The Demands of the Market
You must know what the consumers want and need in your types of products. 81% of peoplespan style=”font-weight: 400;”> research online before actually deciding on buying anything.
Understanding the requirements of consumers helps you in choosing the right products to sell as well as creating an impressive marketing campaign.
Competitors
It’s inevitable that you’re not the only one selling a particular category; it’s estimated that there are millions of eCommerce stores globally.
So getting to know your competitors and have a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis of their status will allow you to build an effective plan and building your own unique points.
Customers definitely fall in love with your store when they can see the difference and the improvements in your brand compared to others.
Business Strategy
After having a thorough evaluation of the competition, it’s time to know yourself. Building a business plan helps you develop your vision and avoid getting lost in the middle of the road.
Don’t confuse yourself with what factors to prioritize or how to engage with customers. A clear business plan will help you achieve success faster and simpler.
So there are some elements that you should pay attention to:
Name
The most important thing to remember: Don’t get your name mixing up with other brands. The way people remember your brand will determine the flow of customers.
Your name should be short and memorable. This also affects your domain name. You can also run a test to check if your name is appropriate.
Logo
Images speak better than words. Humans are easily drawn to visual impacts from an attractive logo. Like the name, your logo should also be easily recognized.
Famous trillion-dollar brands always use an unforgettable logo such as popular fast-fashion retailers H&M and Zara use their name as the logo in an aesthetic way.
Starbucks with the green mermaid is familiar to millions of consumers.
Policies
To run an eCommerce store smoothly, it’s vital not to forget about policies and legal conditions.
There will be problems relating to shipping, refund, due date, exchange policies, etc. Store owners should be ready to answer all these questions legitimately.
Dangerous risks of fraud and cyber-attacks are still hiding behind many forms of digital activities, so protecting your business as well as the benefit of customers will guarantee a steady growth of your store.
Inventory and Shipping Management
Even though you’re online, it’s important to manage your inventory so you’re always ready with the orders of customers.
Having a smart physical location system also aids the development of your eCommerce site, for example, you can organize a flash sale without worrying about out-of-stock products.
Recommended: Out Of Stock Magento 2 Extension
Another thing you need to keep in mind is managing your shipping system, whether you require a third-party to do the job or go on your own; how products are transported; what is the budget for shipping service.
With eCommerce stores, shipping can cause lots of frustration for customers, so don’t give them the chance to have bad comments.
SEO
Since you’re online, it’s crucial to the existence of your store when you know how to maximize the potential of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Building a system of keywords that facilitate the journey of consumers is an efficient way to gain more traffic to your store.
Besides, creating a site structure that is easy to scale with the development of the business is a must-do task, since it serves the long-term benefits of your store.
Choose technology solutions
The fact that you can choose the perfect eCommerce website builder means you have already won half of the competition.
Choosing the right platform basically has helped you answer the most tricky part of how to set up an eCommerce store.
There are many providers in the market, such as Magento, Shopify or BigCommerce. Based on your resources you can pick a suitable platform to build your store. We suggest you try Magento for its easy configuration and scalability.
Additionally, deciding the correct sales channel is one of the best ways to reach new customers. You can choose multiple channels to increase your spheres of influence, like eBay and Amazon.
Choose your style
In terms of creating your uniqueness, defining your style plays the most important role.
Your design should strike directly to the intention to purchase of potential customers and make them stay on the page for your creativity. CTAs can help you to deliver the desired emotion to the shoppers.
When entering an eCommerce site, buyers expect to find things easily such as product details, previous customers’ comments, hot deals, or your contacts and address.
Providing them with valuable data in time will increase the opportunity for a successful transaction.
With brands that are based on social media like Facebook or Instagram, don’t forget to link your accounts to the page. These connections can create a satisfying buying session for customers since they can go back and forth between SNS and the website.
For Magento-based pages, we introduce an extremely helpful extension to integrate Instagram feed into your site, which is Magento 2 Instagram Shop by Magenest. We promise this extension will not let you down!
Set up a payment method
When you have finished all the above steps, one final touch before go-live is setting a payment method.
Unlike direct selling, online payment requires more secure protocols to protect both store owners and customers. Choosing reliable gateways and combining different methods is a way to create favorable conditions for buyers to purchase.
You can consider Paypal or Stripe payment gateway thanks to its security as well as simple usage.
After adding the products to the site, now you’re ready to enter the eCommerce world!
Voila! You have answered the question of how to set up an eCommerce store. It’s time to launch your marketing campaign and sell your products!
Throughout the process, you need to check up regularly to ensure that your site is running smoothly and you can find threats as soon as possible.
Final Words
It’s a pain point for numerous retailers to solve the riddle of how to set up an eCommerce store. With this article, we hope you can understand how the machine works and build up your own online store. The key is in your hand now, let’s open the new door of digital transformation!
