Starting a website for the first time can be terrifying and make you feel clueless. If you have no idea where or how to start, this article could help you out with the basics of creating your eCommerce website.
Where To Start with your very first eCommerce site
The best way to start building your online shop is having a solid strategy. A strategy will help guide you and work out how to resolve problems that may arise in the future, by anticipating your biggest potential challenges you will be more prepared to tackle them. Once you have a strategy in place, it’s time to consider your brand and domain name. Your domain name is the digital address for your website. It is best in the long run if you own your domain name, whilst this costs, getting one for free gives the website builder ownership rather than you. It’s worth spending a little extra and owning your own domain name. You can see if the name you are wanting is available to use by checking on a domain name provider, such as GoDaddy or Google Domains.
Planning the Layout of your Online Store
Once you have a strategy and a domain name, it’s time to start designing your store. You will need to choose a website building software, unless you want to code your website from scratch. However, to make it easier for yourself, there are many softwares out there to choose from, such as WordPress or Shopify, I recommend using one you find easy to use and works for you. Planning out the layout of your website before you begin will make the process ten times easier.
Simplicity and easy navigation through your website is important to plan out, If your user cannot work out how to use your website, they’ll use someone else’s. From browsing to buying it needs to be easy to work through. Another important aspect for your website is it needs to be mobile friendly. These days more and more people use their phones, rather than laptops or computers, to purchase online, if your website doesn’t fit and adapt to a phone screen, you could harm the credibility of your business and lose out on a large amount of potential buyers.
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Designing Your Web Shop
When designing the look of your website, it’s important to consider your brand, who you are appealing to and how you want to come across. Do you want to seem fun or professional? Bold or casual? It depends how you want to be perceived, who your target audience includes and what products you’re selling. Have a theme that represents your brand and best showcases your products, this will help with branding.
Your website needs to include product photos, descriptions, prices and delivery and contact information. It’s also a good idea to include user reviews and frequently asked questions on your website. Each product you sell needs multiple high resolution photos, this is important as the customer won’t get to see it in real life, so making the image as clear as possible lets the consumer properly view the product.. It’s also important that the images load fast. Slow loading photos or photos that don’t load at all, could easily cause the customer to lose interest in the product. The same goes for your entire website, if your website takes too long to load most likely, people will just leave the page.
Show Off Your Products
Having excellent product descriptions will help show off and sell the product to users whilst giving the potential buyer information on what they may be buying. User reviews are extremely helpful, this allows the buyer to consider whether the product is right for them, how useful it would be to them and how good the product actually is. They will also make your customer more likely to purchase a product as they can see other people have purchased and given their opinions.
Make Use Of Analytics
One of the most important things in keeping your website going is making sure what you are doing is giving you results. If your site isn’t converting customers successfully, or bringing in much revenue it might be an indication that you need to change something on your website. Analytics are very valuable to your website, it will highlight what is working and what needs improving to get the best results from your business.
So, Are you Ready to Build Your First eCommerce Website?
Create your website and kick start your business! Before you do, remember to keep in mind a few important things. Fail to plan, plan to fail. Make sure you have a good strategy, and plan, so you don’t over complicate and overwhelm yourself with problems. Keep your website simple and easy for your customers to use, whilst also being appealing to the consumer’s eyes, and crucially, keep up to date with analytics so you’re aware of any problems.