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Online retailing has never been easier, with e-commerce platforms such as Wix and Ecwid and their user-friendliness making it simple even for beginners to get started. However, to build a successful online retail store, you need a plan that involves everything from selecting the right platform to marketing and testing.
Are you expanding your brick-and-mortar store online, or taking the leap into e-commerce and want to know exactly how to start an online store? You’re in luck. Once you’ve established your business plan and sourced your products, these seven steps will help elevate your online retail store to success.
Selecting the right e-commerce platform is critical to your online retail business’s success. Since every business and its combination of budget, business plan, product offering, and branding are different, it’s crucial to start off on the right foot with the right e-commerce platform.
Here are a few things to keep in mind during your search:
To start receiving payments from customers, you’ll need to select a payment processor. Similar to choosing an e-commerce platform, avoid picking the lowest bidder and focus on the needs of both you and your customers.
Here are a few factors to consider when evaluating payment processors:
It’s not enough to set up an online store and simply hope that customers come flocking. Knowing how to market your products online and investing properly in the right marketing channels is imperative for success.
Here are a few areas where you need to invest to make sure your online retail store gets in front of the right eyes and attracts sales:
Making sure you take time to do proper keyword research for your store is a great start, but there are multiple other ways you can enhance your store’s chances of reaching your target audience.
Far too often, businesses overlook the importance of content and copy because they don’t recognize its value and power, and it often takes a while for content marketing to deliver a return on investment.
Content marketing is not just about writing sparse blog posts and hoping your store will rank highly on Google. When it’s done thoughtfully, content marketing drives customers to the purchasing stage. Let’s take a look at some low-effort, high-reward content marketing tips:
Pro tip: If writing isn’t your strong suit, hire a professional copywriter, content marketer, or digital strategist. They’ll have valuable knowledge about conducting user research, ideating content strategies, implementing content promotion, and importantly, diving into analytics to help constantly evaluate your efforts.
Product photography is a huge part of marketing your products online. According to research by Weebly, 22% of products are returned because items didn’t look like they did in the website photos. Since customers can’t physically see or touch your products, it’s up to you to upload photographs that properly represent them.
Not only will a professional photographer know how to capture high-quality pictures of your products in the best light, but they’ll have ideas for how to represent them. For example, some products look better against a white background, while others look better represented in context.
Other products might need a bit more explanation. For example, if you’re selling a backpack, it’s a good idea to visually demonstrate how many items the backpack can hold.
If photography’s not your forte, leave it to a professional, and focus on constructing the rest of your e-commerce platform.
Customers want to know about the people behind the store. I love to read about how and why small businesses started out and what their business philosophy is. This helps to put a face to a name, but it also helps customers connect with you on a more personal level.
You don’t need to be the best writer in the world, but be honest about how you got to be here. Don’t let customers assume you’re another faceless corporation!
While we’re on the subject, don’t make it impossible for customers to contact you. When customers need to ask you a question about shipping, bundling, or anything else, they’ll be put off making a purchase when they can’t find an email address or social media account where they can get in touch with you directly.
When you’re just about to launch your online retail business, you need to entice customers into making a purchase.
Incentives are a great method of generating excitement and anticipation of your online store’s launch. There are several ways of offering retailer promotions that can tempt your target audience and begin to create customer loyalty, including:
One of the benefits of selling online is that you can make sure everything is in working order before your customers arrive. Here’s a quick pre-launch checklist to tick off before the big day:
While there are advantages and disadvantages to online shopping and managing an online store, the future of retail definitely includes an exponential growth in e-commerce stores. There are many online retailing advantages, such as low business overheads and costs, and a much larger potential sales reach.
To succeed in online retail, you need to start strong with the basics. Although back-end tasks, such as building out your website and setting up a payment processor, aren’t as exciting as making your first few sales, if you put the work in at the beginning, your website will have a much better chance of standing out from the crowd.
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