The Ecwid team wishes you a very happy, productive, and profitable new year. As the manager of an e-commerce shop, you no doubt have some ambitious resolutions to kick things into a higher gear in 2016, and we want to help. In order to make your 2016 even more successful than your 2015, we’ve assembled our best blog posts of the year right here for your reading pleasure.
Opening Your Store
For those of you about to open, we salute you. Congratulations on getting yourself to the point where you can own and operate your own business. There are, of course, a variety of questions that you need to answer along the way to getting yourself to opening day. What are you going to sell? How should you price it? How should you get it manufactured?
These are perfectly appropriate questions to be asking yourself along your e-commerce journey. And what luck: the answers to each of them and more appear in the links below.
If you are in the earliest stages of getting your business off the ground, you ought to get this question answered as quickly as possible so that the rest can come into place. We’ve got the pointers for you.
Need Help Figuring Out What to Sell Online?
Don’t be intimidated by what might seem like a daunting prospect. Every business of consequence deals with manufacturers to make their products at scale, and you can do it too.
How to Find a Manufacturer for Your Product Idea
Did you know there’s an entire branch of statistics called "pricing science?" We’ll walk you through the most robust, scientific way to price your items such that your customers get a deal and you get paid.
How to Price Your Products? A Science-Backed Answer
How do you register a domain? What do you do if the domain you want to buy is already taken? Read this post to get some answers to this essential step in setting up your e-commerce business.
How to Buy the Perfect Domain Name for Your Store
It’s entirely possible to build a thriving business by selling on social networks like Instagram and Facebook. If you don’t have a domain of your own, Ecwid will set you up with a starter site, no technical skills needed.
How to Create An Online Store Without a Website
Designing Your Store
Just as well-designed brick-and-mortar stores have their own distinctive looks and feels, so do the best online stores. Consider the Apple Store with its sleek design and unmistakable employee uniforms. Your e-commerce site can match this same attention to detail and care for how your customers navigate your digital storefront. The following posts will help you get there.
It’s of utmost importance to have beautiful images on your site. They make your products look great, and when products look great, people want to buy them. From adjusting sizes to cropping pictures just right, the above guide has everything you need when it comes to imagery for your store.
How to Optimize Product Images: Step-By-Step Instructions and An Overview of Services
A good logo sticks in the customer’s mind and makes it easy for them to recognize your products in the future. A store without a logo looks lazy at best, or suspicious at worst. Skip these problems by following the few short steps needed to generate a great logo for your business.
How To Create An Awesome Logo For Your Brand
How do you clone that background-less look so often found on other major retail sites? It’s easier than you might think. Whether you want someone else’s help or a way to do it yourself, here’s everything you need to know to make backgrounds disappear.
How to Make a Good Background in Pictures of Your Products Without Using Photoshop
Don’t have a writer’s bone in your body? No worries. There are some simple guidelines found in the link above that will have you writing quality product descriptions very quickly, no creative writing degree required.
How to Write Awesome Product Descriptions that Sell
Sure, you can edit product photos after the fact to make a product look more appealing, but if you start with a good photograph, then everything is easier after that. Here’s what you need to know in order to take worthwhile product photos.
Simple Product Photography Tips to Beautifully Showcase on Your Store
Promoting Your Store
People won’t find you if they don’t know you exist. Thankfully there are clear guidelines on what one must do in order to get his or her brand into the hearts and minds of consumers around the world. The posts below effectively constitute a playbook on how to take an unknown brand and turn it into the talk of the town. And the Internet-assisted beauty of e-commerce is that the talk of the town can travel around the world in an instant.
Let’s be real: if you operate in a vacuum, your business is going to fail. It behooves the successful businessperson to take a look around at the market he or she is entering, and to take note of worthwhile competitors edging in on said market. This post will help you build out your "spy toolkit" to learn details on your competitor’s traffic and technical operations, and provides a set of questions to help you compare yourself practically to your competitors.
How to Analyze Competitors? 12 Questions and 9 Services
YouTube is the dominant video platform in the world, home to 4 billion video views per day. With all the attention directed there, it makes total sense for your business to implement it as a means of driving sales revenue and traffic to your site. We walk you through how to get started with your business’s YouTube effort and give you content ideas for your first several videos.
How to Sell Using YouTube
Humans are visual creatures, with the sense of sight accounting for some 80% of sensory data that’s fed to our brains every moment. Instagram’s photo-sharing paradigm frees you to go well beyond standard product photography. Show your products far away from the conventional white backdrop; show them in use. The severely social nature of Instagram means that your images are more likely to travel far and wide, and if you’ve successfully pointed your Instagram account to your e-commerce shop, that more easily translates into income.
7 Ways to Use Instagram to Promote Your Store
Sure, you could spring for a large expense and hire a PR professional to get the word out about your store. But you’d be surprised what you can get done on your own with some well-written emails and a concise story pitch. Here’s what you need in order to navigate the complex world of publicity—and not one of them is "money."
Publicity on a Budget
87% of Pinterest users report finding a product on the social pin-sharing site that they bought later. As an e-commerce shop manager, you need to get in on this action. We’ve provided you with five strategies that you can implement to get your products seen up close and personal by many more people than you might otherwise have access to.
5 Pinterest Strategies That Can Increase Your Sales
First of all, having a regularly updated blog attached to your shop’s website will help you rank better in search engine results—it’s a positive bump in your SEO. Beyond this, they help you tell stories and provide a voice to a business that might otherwise be a bunch of product photos and price tags.
The Importance of a Blog and How to Start One for Your Store
Operating Your Store
How will you hold the reins and crank the gears of your e-commerce operation? What will you do when the going gets tough? These are big, heady questions that merit some contemplation. We’ve given you some tips and tricks on navigating the nitty gritty details you’ll need for everything from registering a trademark to getting a brick-and-mortar store online.
Perhaps you’ve operated a physical retail location without issue for a long time. It’s time to step up your game and get that store represented online. In just five simple steps, we provide you with all the knowledge you need to get a profitable Internet presence off the ground.
How to Move Your Brick and Mortar Store Online: A 5-Step Guide
So you’ve got a store name, a logo, and a cool slogan, but what steps have you taken to protect it all? This post deals with protecting your intellectual property. Trademarking these pertinent aspects of your business will help keep malicious copycats away from you. Rather than waste time and money fighting them in court, you will be more readily freed up to get back to the task at hand: running your business.
Protecting the Brand: How To Register a Trademark For Your Online Store
How do you want your business to be seen in the eyes of the law? Whether you register it as an LLC or a corporation, each has its advantages and drawbacks alike. This post breaks down the differences, and helps you arrive at which decision is best for you when your business reaches the size that it needs to become a legally recognized entity.
Registering Your eCommerce Business: LLC or Corporation?
Google Analytics is a sacred tool belt for making sense of the incoming traffic to one’s website. It helps you track visitors as they move throughout your shop, monitor the quantity of traffic traveling through your site, and perhaps even find ways to more easily turn these visitors into conversions. Everything you seek is in the link above.
The Beginner’s Guide To Google Analytics For E-Commerce Stores
Whether you realize it or not, your customers go through a multi-stage "journey" before they ever spend any money with you. It’s a journey that might see them go from discovering to researching your company, then ultimately making a purchase and perhaps even evangelizing new customers on your behalf. You can’t afford to ignore the buyer’s journey.
What is the Buyer’s Journey and Why Should You Care?
Are you structuring your site in a way to make Google love you? The practice of SEO, search engine optimization, is one of the reliable tools to drive traffic to your site. Done well, your site can appear in the search results for a variety of topics related to your retail dealings. This will drive incidental traffic to your site—and traffic more readily leads to income.
The E-Commerce Guide to SEO
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May your 2016 be a bountiful year, filled with lots of sales and new best practices to help your business bloom. When in doubt refer to one of the relevant guides above, which is sure to help you cut through the noise and help you take the requisite steps to get things on track.
E-commerce can be a quirky business, but we are glad (especially at this time of year) to be here to help you navigate its quagmires and be met with prosperity.