If you are not blind to what is happening with the online stores in the recent past, you must have already noticed it. Yes, there has been a considerable shift towards small business on the internet. Large global brands are increasingly being forced to give space to the smaller brands with a unique value proposition.
This is actually not something new and statistics prove it. In a span of twenty years the third-party retail sales on Amazon went up from a mere 3% to a whopping 58% and in all these times Amazon has become merely a seller of third-party products. No wonder, a vast majority of these third-party products belong to smaller brands from all over the globe. So, online business is actually proving to be the turf for small businesses more than ever before.
With all the major online brands are experiencing a slowdown in growth, it is the small business retailers who can catch up with the growth and come out victorious. As an online product seller if you want to build your own custom eCommerce store and start reaching out to your customers directly, for this there cannot be a more opportune moment than now. But where to start from and how to proceed? Well, here we are to explain the steps. Just read on.
Make A Research on Various Niches
There are so many retail stores with hundreds and thousands of products from all niches and several dozens of categories. But many of these stores just fail to garner any sales simply because of the lack of real focus on a particular niche. If you cannot pump-in billions of dollars as investment, trying to be the next Amazon is just synonymous with building a castle in the air.
On a realistic note, you need to develop your eCommerce website with a focus on a particular niche. This would give you better exposure, a strong bond with the customers of that niche and a solid ground for branding. One of the most commonly forgotten eCommerce app development tips is that instead of going away from competition, you need to find out ways to dominate the competition. When selecting a niche always opt for something competitive since competition guarantees that the products have real demand in the market.
When selecting a product niche always choose something that naturally interests you and make you think creatively about various aspects of the business. Secondly, always go for a niche with at least 1000 or more popular search terms or keywords that make their appearance on the web and search engine frequently. Lastly, choose a niche that is already popular across social channels.
Personas and Product Selection
Once the niche is decided upon, it is time to select the products and the user persona who will need them most. Before digging your head into the product ideas too much, think about the persona. You need to create an impression for your store brand that lasts long. If you are into fashion wear selling, your store should choose either fashion wear for men or women or kids. You cannot sell furnishings and fashion wear from the same store unless you are really big.
The persona you create for your online store should perfectly match what your existing customers already expect from your store. You need to have a clear idea about the people for whom you are catering to your products. When you have created the persona it is time to select the products you want to start with. In the beginning, start with not more than two or three products to test the water.
As for the products, always give utmost priority in quality control and evaluation more than anything else. Always judge products by taking yourself in the role of customers. If you are not absolutely sure about the product, take some more time or the help of affiliate marketing for perfect evaluation.
Book a Domain and Choose a Platform
You can always start your eCommerce store with a sub-domain as well but the only problem is that without a custom domain you can neither create an impressive brand identity nor you can reach out to a wide number of people.
A custom domain helps an eCommerce store in multiple ways including an instantly recognizable brand for the business, a professional email contact address, and search engine benefits in traffic and business conversion. You can book a domain name of your preference.
Now, you also need to choose a quality eCommerce platform for your business. There are many credible and reputed eCommerce platforms and each one of them has its pros and cons. Magento is a great platform with a lot of features and unmatched productivity. But Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and several others need separate hosting services. Shopify offers a fully managed platform with hosting services.
Drawing Customers to the Store
The most important step after establishing the store is to market the store to drive traffic and boost business conversion. This requires doing SEO to boost search rank for each page. Besides doing keyword research and publishing expert business blogs targeting search rank, you also need to use pay per click ads, social media presence and built-in tools like newsletter subscription.
Email marketing loaded with promotional offers and discounts is a great way to promote your products and boost sales. Apart from that, you need to do content marketing through blogs, guest posting on other websites and engage social media and industry influencers to talk about your brand. To get a detailed analysis of the user behavior, reactions and intents, take the help of the analytics. You should also utilize affiliate marketing by partnering with other brands and financial institutions. Reaching out to the bloggers with free product samples and making them recommend your items to their audience is a great way to expand your reach.
Conclusion
Building an eCommerce store is not as much a big thing as making it successful. Making your online store a success, you constantly need to be vigilant and try to address the issues that are making customers leave your store.
