5 Step Guide To Building An Online Store For Big Enterprise Brands

Running a successful enterprise brand? Happy with how your business scaled and how you have solidified your position in the market? So what’s next?

Wanna grow bigger, right!

Thinking of hopping on the ecommerce bandwagon?? Looking for ways to connect with your clients across multiple touchpoints? Raving to be the brand like none other but not sure how to build your phygital presence?

Don’t worry, we have got you covered. We will help you uncover the trends and ideas whilst preparing you well to carve your position in the ecommerce market. 

Going Online: Your First Steps Towards Unlocking Success

Ecommerce is a trillion-dollar industry, expected only to soar in the coming years. It is estimated that world retail ecommerce sales will exceed $7.3 trillion by 2025. And your enterprise brand cannot miss the opportunity to claim its share in this stupendous growth. 

To begin your successful journey, you also need to take your brand online.  

Afterall, building your online presence has a number of benefits. When you build an online store for your brand you;

• Solidify your brand image across digital channels

• Reach a wider audience as your brand goes beyond geographical boundaries 

• Have the potential to easily reach out to global buyers Reduce operational costs 

• Introduce efficiencies through automation

• Be available for shopping 24*7 for your customers

But is this all hunky-dory? Well, like everything great, taking a successful enterprise brand to the next-level comes with its own set of challenges. In such a cut-throat market, launching your ecommerce website is not a piece of cake, but with the right solution provider, half the battle is won!

But before you go looking for the holy grail of an ecommerce website builder, you need to understand your target audience and market better. And how exactly do you do it?

How About Starting To Think Like A Customer?

Yes, that’s how you can align your brand for unparalleled success. With your brand already being loved by your customers, you have your basics right. Now, to be miles ahead of your competition, you have to win the customer experience battleground. 

• 47% of the customers decided to switch to a different brand due to bad customer service within the last year.

• 60% of the customers report that they will become repeat buyers after a personalised purchasing experience.

• 85.65% abandonment rate for mobile shopping carts due to inconveniences like long checkout processes or slow load time.

• 58% of the shoppers refrain from making a purchase due to higher shipping costs, difficult return processes, and privacy concerns.

• 58% of online buyers are more likely to buy when they can make purchases quickly.

Source: BigCommerce

It's time to WOW your customers by providing exactly what they are looking for. A happy customer is a key to the sustained growth of any business.  

Here is what your customers are looking for in your brand:

• a seamless shopping experience on every channel that they interact with you 

• fast loading sites, to make buying fun

• quick and secure payment options for frictionless checkouts

• personalised feed, offers, and discounts designed to make them feel special

• multi-channel support that answers their queries and resolves their issues in no time

• streamlined shipping (preferably free) with transparent tracking and multiple  delivery options   

Living in the age of customer-driven markets, it is crucial to cater to the needs and expectations of your buyers. 

Taking your enterprise brand online and reaching out to new customer segments in new markets,needs careful considerations and data-driven insights to build the kind of touchpoints where your customers would like to flock, engage, interact and convert. 

Here we bring for you a simple step-wise approach to get you started on a successful online journey.

5 Step Guide To Building An Online Store For Big Enterprise Brand

It takes a lot to build an online store, and if you are new to the game, knowing where to start can be a bit of a challenge. Let us boil down the entire process into 5 easy steps:

1. Choosing The Right Ecommerce Platform

As you decide to build an online store, comes the daunting task of choosing the right ecommerce platform for your business. This one decision is going to take your brand to places and give you the freedom to experiment with new trends.

Enterprise brands need to look for ways to remain agile, customer-centric, and future-proof. For this they need to rely on next generation technologies and solutions that give them better creative control. Choosing a platform that offers 360-degree solutions to build and run the business along with cutting-edge technology to keep the business attuned with dynamic market trends is the need of the hour. 

So  your business needs an online store builder that comes with the power, agility and flexibility of MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud native, Headless) architecture. With microservices based architecture and decoupled headless platforms your developers and marketers get the freedom and flexibility to implement innovative changes aligned with market dynamics. 

Cloud based solutions come with elastic scalability and help you grow to any numbers horizontally and vertically. The API component of MACH helps in easily integrating with chosen best-of-breed software and services. In nutshell, MACH architecture based online store builders make it easy for enterprise brands to build innovative, hybrid solutions to unlock growth opportunities.  Along with offering the best-tech solution, the best online store builder for enterprises should also offer end to end solutions for order and inventory management, marketing tools to grow the brand along with shipping and payment solutions for streamlined order fulfilment.

StoreHippo, the best ecommerce platform built on the powerful MACH architecture to build out-of-box solutions to scale your business in no time. The fully hosted and managed solutions from StoreHippo help business owners in their growth and expansion, setting them free from IT worries. The gamut of features and tools along with 300+ features, 120+ integrations, 30+ pre-integrated logistics solutions and 60+ trusted payment gateways offer 360-degree solutions to enterprise brands to go online and create a niche for their business.

2. Omnichannel And Extensive Personalization

Now that you are done building an ecommerce website, it is time to notch your game up with omnichannel and extreme personalization. To win big in the enterprise ecommerce industry, merge online and offline shopping experiences and woo your customers. 

One thing that customers love about a brand is its personalised themes, offers, time-to-time messages, and discounts. A personalised experience makes your customer remember your brand. And for this your brand should be present everywhere your customers are, from having your brand’s ecommerce website to having your mobile apps and social media presence, you should be literally everywhere. And yes, your customers should not get siloed experiences on all these channels, rather there should be unified, seamless experiences across all channels.

With StoreHippo’s ready-to-use solutions for all your omnichannel strategies, prepare your brand to grow manifold. With StoreHippo’s decoupled headless commerce solutions you can add new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. This way you can set up multiple sales channels for your enterprise brand. You can also pivot to new business models and scale up to new locations, new vendors or roll out a network of brand stores in no time. Isn’t that the foundation stone of growing your business, quickly and efficiently? We bet it is!

3. Win The Game With The Mobile Commerce

To win your space in the ecommerce industry, undivided attention to mobile commerce is a must. Statistics show that 67% of the customers make a purchase through a mobile window. To speed up your conversions, having a mobile-friendly store or app is fundamental.

With your enterprise brand on mobile, you

• Rank better

• Give your customer the comfort of shopping from anywhere anytime

• Create an alternative sales channel

• Capture customer insights 

• Bring high conversion rates

• Edge over competition 

• Increase customer engagement

Here are some numbers that speak of the importance of mobile commerce:

• 62.5% of all ecommerce is mobile commerce

• 79% of the smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device

• $3.5 trillion Expected market value for mobile wallet in 2023

• 77% of the online window shopper who does so for fun, end up making impulsive purchases

• 76% of the consumers shop online on mobile devices as it saves time

It’s clear from the data that your enterprise brand needs a solid mobile presence to rule the online markets. With your mobile website and mobile apps on your customers phones, you literally have a copy of your shop on their devices. What better way to keep your customers engaged and interested in your brand. With smart, data-driven marketing for mobile channels, you can ensure your enterprise brand becomes the go-to-shop for your buyers.

Using StoreHippo’s ecommerce platform with inbuilt mobile commerce solutions, you can create Android and iOS apps directly from the dashboard without the need for any coding. Apps and stores powered by StoreHippo are Progressive Web Apps (PWA), meaning these ecommerce websites work seamlessly on mobile devices and reach distant places even with low or no internet connectivity. 

4. Build Your Brand’s Chain Of Stores

Wondering how a chain of stores helps scale your business? Well, there are some incredible benefits of launching a multi-store portal; the benefit of higher customer engagement and better store management remains atop the list. We all know how extremely important it is to personalise the user experience especially when it comes to offers and discounts. With the multi-store feature, you can attract customers with offers/discounts on the products they are interested in.

When you build an online store and dedicate it to a given audience segment or a product line or maybe to a geo-location, you not only get the freedom to customise the store for the specific target audience but you also get the undivided attention of your customers. Your business can also acquire new customers and increase the market penetration with highly personalised targeted marketing in a specific location, as and when required. 

And now comes the best part, you can easily replicate these stores and tweak them for a new location or product. Building a multi store set up for your enterprise brand gives you the freedom to experiment with different formats of store design, marketing strategies, product lines, differential pricing, shipping , payments etc. You can easily compare the ROI from different stores and can then replicate the most profitable one to grow your business.

With more and more enterprise brands going online, hybrid business models that combine multi store with online marketplace, hyperlocal marketplace, D2C or B2B set up or even B2B2C set up have become a norm.  So, when you are considering the business model for your online transition, chalk out a strategy to identify which business model will give you maximum scope to expand and grow. Also, be ready to pivot your business model quickly to make the best of the market conditions.

To be able to do this you need an advance ecommerce website builder like StoreHippo that comes with support for many business models like B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C along with comprehensive plug and play solutions for multi store, multi vendor marketplace, hyperlocal commerce, multilingual stores and much more.

With StoreHippo’s ecommerce platform,

• You can launch and manage multiple sub-stores for your enterprise brand based on unique locations, vendors, and categories from a single platform

• You can leverage the global ecommerce by communicating with customers in 100+ translatable languages in just a few click 

• You can cater to the unique needs of your target audience based on their geolocation with the hyperlocal ecommerce feature

• You can build your own hybrid D2C marketplace where your customers can buy directly from your ecommerce website or through mobile commerce channels 

Clubbed together, you will find a basket full of features to scale your brand with StoreHippo. StoreHippo gives you the right tools and solutions to craft your own innovative hybrid business model that has the potential to disrupt the market.

5. Make Ordering Simple

To win customers, it is important to simplify their shopping journey. 77% of the buyers say that their latest shopping journey was complex or difficult. It is here that brands lose their potential buyers.

During the purchase journey, a customer goes through multiple steps and these steps need to be simple and streamlined. To make your ordering simple you need to ensure that:

• Logging in and adding products to cart is simple

• Products carry detailed descriptions and images

• Customers can easily navigate through your site

• They get advanced filter options to find exact matches

• You offer multiple payment options

• Your deals and discounts are easily accessible to your buyers

• They get multiple shipping options

• They can hop in and out of their favourite shopping channels like ecommerce website, mobile apps etc and still get a streamlined buying experience on all the channels

Along with all these features, you need engaging, conversion oriented store design to keep your customers interested in your enterprise brand. 

Here are few tips you might want to consider to keep your customer count increasing:

• Justify your product quality through customer testimonials 

• Offer in-depth product details with images

• Make your mobile navigation easy 

• Offer multiple payment gateways with 100% security 

• Keep your customers updated about their deliveries and orders

Capitalise on changing customer behaviours with StoreHippo, and seamlessly implement a host of features for your enterprise brand.

StoreHippo is a full-featured enterprise ecommerce solutions provider that comes with a host of features to make it easy for your customers to order. Its features like social login, guest checkout etc. make it easier for customers to get registered with your brand or order as a guest. Also, advanced filters, 360-degree product view, reviews for each product, advanced search options, multiple payment and shipping options make it easy for brands to engage customers and get faster conversions. Storehippo also comes with an inbuilt discount engine and other marketing tools to make marketing easier for different customer segments of your enterprise brand.

Conclusion

Building an ecommerce website for your enterprise brand comes with its own challenges but when done right it has the potential to catapult your business to new heights of success. 

With the right ecommerce platform at your disposal and a strategy to reach new markets, you can consolidate your position in the online market.

So, without any further delay, start your 14-day free trial to explore the widest range of features, tools, and marketing solutions for your business.