Powered by a future ready ecommerce platform you can set up your online store within hours these days. But, to write your entrepreneurial success story you need lots of strategic planning and insight into ecommerce business.
Online retail is no longer only about supplying the best products at the most affordable pricing. It’s more about creating customer engagement to make your customers feel as if they are shopping in a real brick and mortar shop.
With the average cart abandonment rate at 68%, online buyers are known to be impatient. They tend to avoid complicated sites and move away from sites that do not provide seamless shopping experience. Hence, it is imperative that you take care of the do’s when you create online stores.
To make your customers happy ,and to keep them coming back let us check the list of Do’s for your site:
Table of Contents
1. Research the Marketability of your Product
Many entrepreneurs rush into launching an online business without spending time on research. Research enables you to get the right picture about the demand and profitability of your product.
Before you launch a business idea conduct surveys, ask your friends, relatives, friends of friends and try to find out how they respond to your product. Send out some free samples if needed. This exercise would cost some money but it is better to invest a little before you start an online store and spend larger amounts just to discover later that your product is not sale worthy.
2. Make Shopping Simple
One of the biggest reasons for the popularity of ecommerce is the ease and convenience it provides over offline shopping. So, to make your website attractive and popular among your buyers you should provide a simple and seamless shopping experience for your customers.
Improve the navigation, search functionality, distribute products into multi-tier categories and create an easy checkout offering multiple payment options to your customers.
If your customers can navigate and order on your online web store in few clicks they would keep coming back to make your business a success.
3. Create Meaningful Product Descriptions
Do you have the most awesome products at the best prices on your online retail shop but still don’t get enough sales? Chances are high that your product description is poor or simply not there.
A good product description engages the customers and entices them to buy. Instead of shouting “BUY ME” your product description should subtly hint at the way the product can bring about a positive change in the life, personality or general well being of your customers. Every product description should offer some gains.
Instead of directly describing a product you can also play around the emotions associated with the product. Like for a holiday package of a hotel, instead of offering discounts, play around the feeling of the given season, the beauty of the place or the festival season for which the package is advertised on the travel online store website.
4. Set a Budget for Paid Marketing
In the initial stages of business, you have tried FREE marketing and gained some traction with it as well. But this is not a scalable model and in the long run it fails to pay dividends.
However small your business is, creating paid buzz around it is helpful. Allot a budget and play around with different marketing channels and strategies to bring targeted traffic to your new online store.
Word of caution, if you are bootstrapped plan your marketing strategy carefully. Do not invest too heavily on any one channel until you are sure of the ROI it brings. Keep testing and retesting various combinations for best results.
5. Listen What Your Customers are Talking
Customers are the best judge of your product. Even with best efforts you will come across a customer who has mountain of grievances and vents it out to your customer service team or worst at various online forums.
Listen to what your customer are saying and you can get the best insights into consumer behavior and buying habits. This can help you enrich your product catalogue, improve your operations and logistics and also find new business opportunities for your online webstore.
You need not go by everything being suggested by your customers but you can form deeper ties with your customers by offering them what they had been looking for. This would create brand loyalty and keep them coming back to you as well as help spread word of mouth about your online business.
Conclusion
Try the above suggestions to create an online retail store that your customers fall in love with and keep visiting frequently.
Keep watching this space as we would bring for you 5 common e-commerce mistakes take can ruin your online web store’s business.
If you have any suggestions or would like detailed input on any ecommerce business topic, feel free to leave a comment below.
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