Guest post from Robert Rand, VP of Operations at Rand Marketing
Launching a digital storefront is an important step that many businesses take in order to make shopping user-friendly and stay competitive with other businesses that customers use to shop online. While each eCommerce website is different, there are some major points to look at when creating an online store:
Specifications
Just like you’d have when building a brick-and-mortar store, you’ll want a project plan. This helps everyone involved in the project understand the expectations of deliverables and costs. You may even create a secondary “wishlist” of things that you’d like to add later on, after the initial site launches. Keeping a lean scope for launch can help you to have your new website up, running, and generating sales while you add more features or continue to tweak in the future.
URL
It’s getting harder and harder to find good domain names, as so many are already in use. Before you get to far into your project, it’s a good idea to secure your “.com”. Otherwise, you run the risk of having to make many changes and updates later on as a result.
Select a Shopping Cart Software System
Luckily, businesses don’t need to build shopping carts from the ground up anymore. You can now select from many out-of-the-box platforms. Each platform has it’s up’s and down’s. If you’re working with a team with broad eCommerce experience, they can help you to identify potential matches for your business plan and objectives, but you can also do some great research online.
Examples include Magento, WooCommerce, Zoey, Miva, Shopify, 3dCart, and BigCommerce.
Hosting & Security
Depending on which eCommerce platform you choose, you may also need a hosting company to keep your website up and running. Different hosts specialize in different eCommerce platforms like Magento or WooCommerce, and offer a variety of different plans depending on how big your website is, how much traffic you anticipate, and how mission-critical it is to keep your website up and running.
There are also vendors that can play an additional security role, watching your website for possible intrusion or malware, and helping to protect against certain types of cyber-attacks. These kinds of services can provide extra peace-of-mind, keeping your website up and running more steadily, and helping to avoid the potential costs of cleaning up after hackers.
Design Your Website
Your website is an extension of your brand. The look and feel can play a crucial role in the shopping process, helping consumers to feel safe and comfortable, and providing a memorable experience. Depending on the platform that you choose, you may start from a template, or may start from scratch designing the layout that you’ll use. Either way you’ll need elements like a logo, as well as buttons, banners, fonts, colors, and other collateral to work together to meet your needs.
Running Your Site
Your business will need to keep content, products, categories, and other variables in the site up-to-date. You’ll also need to have a plan to fulfill orders. Every store needs management whether digital or physical. Labor can be a big challenge for many businesses, so identifying the correct vendors and systems, like iD Commerce + Logistics to manage your fulfillment, can be crucial to a successful eCommerce business plan.
eCommerce Decisions
As a store on the world wide web, you’ll need to choose and set up parameters like credit card processing, shipping, sales taxes, and other variables that are specific to your business. Depending on your needs, you may actually find yourself gravitating to one eCommerce platform over another based upon available built-in features, and available add-ons.
Pre-Launch Testing
Before serving your customers, it’s always best to “taste the soup on the way out of the kitchen”. An online store is the culmination of many working parts. It’s important to make sure that you’re satisfied with the experience that shoppers will have, as well as the fulfillment and management processes that your company has put into place.
Create a Plan for Success
If you build it, will they buy? Most businesses don’t want to invest time, money, long-term operating expenses, and other resources into a store without a plan to generate sales. There are many ways to attract targeted traffic to your website. It’s best to have a plan and budget ready for this before you break ground on your site. When in doubt, reach out to an agency that’s experienced in eCommerce marketing in order to compare options like search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and other options.
About Rand Marketing
Rand Marketing is a Ft. Lauderdale, FL-based firm specializing in responsive website design and programming, including WordPress; e-commerce web development, including Magento; search engine marketing including SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click marketing); social media marketing; and, online content marketing, including blogging, article writing, and press release writing and distribution.
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