In 2021, more than 2.14 billion people – or one quarter of the human population – shopped online. This surge was caused in part by the closing of physical stores during worldwide lockdowns, but it also followed a larger trend of shoppers choosing online retail experiences over physical shopping. And Ecommerce website development plays a big role in how successful your online retail store can be.
If you haven’t already set up your Ecommerce store, there’s no time like the present. While getting started may be daunting, falling behind in a constantly evolving market is even more so.
With a well-honed eCommerce site in your pocket, you can watch your brand go global overnight and reach new markets.
There’s a lot of work that goes into selling online, from cataloging products to designing your landing page to updating product pages and marketing your brand. However, with a range of cutting-edge tools such as ecommerce personalisation and AR at your disposal, you can soon gain a competitive edge.
While an online store may seem worlds apart from your bricks-and-mortar shop, the principles are the same – you want to create a positive shopping experience for your customers, ensuring they can find what they need and check out easily, inspiring them to come back and buy again.
Read on to discover the latest tips on building and launching your own eCommerce website, from starting off on the right foot through to technical and aesthetic decisions.
Know Your Business
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Before you so much as start up your computer, there are a few things to get straight in your mind. Firstly, what sort of eCommerce website is right for your business? The decisions you make and the tools you use will differ based on whether you’re a wholesaler, a retailer, or a B2B or B2C business.
If you sell to end-user consumers, your website and associated marketing will need to be customer-centric, creating a simple and streamlined user experience that adds value across the board.
B2B eCommerce can be a little more specific, with several selling and marketing tools, such as Amazon Business and LinkedIn, helping to target your products to the right industries and gain quality leads.
Secondly, consider your budget. While a completely custom-designed eCommerce experience will turn heads, a simple and streamlined site can be built on a very small budget using tools such as Wix and Squarespace.
Come to your project with a sense of where you most want your budget to be allocated. Don’t invest so much in your site that you lack funds for marketing, but likewise, don’t cut corners on the nuts and bolts of your customer experience.
This is also an ideal time to conduct some market research to understand what your customers are looking for in an online experience and what your competitors are doing right. Explore current trends in web design, SEO, and customer communications, and figure out which ones will work for your business needs.
Tools such as SEMrush and Google AdWords utilize AI tools to help you make well-informed business decisions. With thorough reports under your belt, you will be able to set up your sales platform confidently.
Pick Your Platforms
You will need to decide three key things straight up: your eCommerce building platform, your eCommerce hosting platform, and an online payment solution. Each of these will need to work well with the others, coming together to meet your business needs.
When considering eCommerce creation tools, the main question is one of expertise: do you have a web developer and designer on your team who can make a more complex site shine? If so, you will be able to take advantage of more professional platforms like Magneto or Prestashop, which allow for greater levels of personalisation in ecommerce.
On the other hand, you may be learning the art of eCommerce as you go along. If so, you’ll prefer a drag-and-drop style site builder, which guides you through the process from start to finish. Platforms such as Shopify will suit your style.
Once you’ve built your site, you’ll need to publish it to make it viewable. This means selecting an appropriate host for your eCommerce domain. Some of the best known are GoDaddy, Bluehost, and iPage.
Select one which integrates well with your site-building platform and boasts high performance and fast load speed. You’d be surprised how quickly shoppers give up on a site when faced with technical difficulties.
You will also want to consider scalability and whether the hosting site can move along with your planned business trajectory. Storage becomes crucial at this point, as you may have hundreds of products in a large-scale eCommerce shop.
Finally, select an online payment solution that integrates with your site. Tools such as Spotify and WordPress will offer their own payment platforms, both of which have a solid reputation for secure payments.
If you do end up choosing a third-party payment platform, make sure you select one without hidden charges – this is one of the most common reasons for online shopping carts to be abandoned.
Go Content-first
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Now comes the fun part – building the content of your site. This includes written information, photos, videos, and even the colors and fonts you use. All of these work together to inform and guide the user experience.
Ensure that each page offers value, minimizing the number of clicks between a shopper landing on your site and finding what they need. Optimize the customer journey to checkout with a clear flow, helpful messaging, and pleasing visuals.
You wouldn’t decorate a physical shop with garish colors and hard-to-read signs, and visual merchandising online is no different. Stick to the same layout, with minimalist fonts, images, and logos to keep customers calm and engaged.
Focus on your product pages, offering high-quality photos and bullet-pointed descriptions which succinctly answer users’ questions. Building up social proof goes a long way when it comes to decision making, so include reviews or testimonials on each relevant product page.
Help your shoppers quickly select the right product with well-organized categories, filters, sorting options, and search bars. Include a visible FAQ section in the menu, where potential customers can learn about shipping and returns.
Test and Optimize
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So your site’s looking pretty good, and your finger’s hovering over the launch button – but you’re not there yet. Before you can share your store with the world, you’ll need to test and test again.
Invest in AI solutions for automated testing, which will instantly run countless potential scenarios through your site and report on any technical issues, such as dead links or submission errors. You will want to run these tests across device types to be certain your store is optimized for mobile and tablet as well as desktop.
The human touch will provide the next level of feedback: Invite end-user testers to explore your site ahead of launch, and ask them where the buyer journey could be improved. This data may lead to better website personalization and happier customers.
Ensure that your ecommerce order management process flow is ready for launch, with return and exchange processes ready to roll.
Once you’ve reacted to your feedback and optimized your systems, you’re ready to go live. Remember, your eCommerce store is a dynamic entity, which can – and should – be changed as it goes along. That being said, it’s wise to prepare a rollback strategy in case of any significant issues in the first days of deployment.
Website Promotion: Make Some Noise!
Now your website’s live on air, you need a regular audience – invest in digital marketing to announce your launch and turn browsers into buyers.
You may want to announce your eCommerce launch to the media with a press release. This can be particularly useful if you’re a B2B company, but ensure that you’re targeting relevant industry publications.
For B2C, nothing beats social media marketing. Set up accounts on the platforms where your audience is most active. Make sure your branding is carried across all these profiles, with identical logos, color schemes, and visual content.
Tools such as Facebook Business and LinkedIn ads offer targeted advertising to ensure your message is reaching the right audience. You can narrow results by age, location, gender, and interests to gain quality traffic. Facebook also offers an in-depth analysis of activity on your posts, so you can see what type of messaging works best.
Email marketing is the next step. Encourage shoppers to sign up for your mailing list in return for exclusive content or special offers. This will give you a base of interested buyers who may be prompted into a quick purchase upon opening an email with a discount code, product launch, or sale announcement.
Once you’ve piqued some interest across your marketing channels, it’s time to pull out all the stops. Grab shoppers’ attention with contests, giveaways, limited-time discount codes, or free gifts. This sort of content makes shopping fun and boosts new traffic as well as customer retention.
Conclusion
The truth is, setting up your eCommerce site is just the beginning. Selling online is a rollercoaster journey of trend-spotting, customer service, targeted marketing, and innovative content.
No online choice is truly permanent, and there will be many opportunities to experiment with different looks and techniques along the way. That being said, a poor reputation is hard to shift – so your priority needs to be breaking into the world of eCommerce confidently and with a firm ethos behind you.
And if you’re in need of some expert developers to round out your skill set, you can always look into hiring developers.
With well-informed decisions and a bevy of developing tools, you’re well set to build a successful online brand around your eCommerce store.
