Get the
basics wrong and nothing can go right.
CONTRIBUTOR
Entrepreneur
and Online Marketing Expert
Source: Entrepreneur
Apparently, one of the biggest benefits the Internet has brought
into the world (and even our lives) today is the ease of shopping online. You
can see stuff you like online today, buy it and have it delivered to your
doorstep -- without you having to step out of your house.
In the same vein, you can also decide to start an ecommerce
business and sell to people -- regardless of where they are.
If starting an ecommerce business is something you’re looking
into, here are five important things you need to do:
1. Have checkout process
at PayPal.
PayPal is pretty much the quickest and easiest payment transfer
solution on the Internet today. You don’t have to fill any form unless you’re
using it for the first time and a sizeable number of people accept it as their
preferred payment method.
However, as 56 percent of people -- according to data from
Milo -- expect
that you provide a variety of payment options, you want to make sure that your
other payment options are as easy and quick as (or nearly as) PayPal.
When I asked Eyal Lasker,Senior Product Manager of Customer
Experience at Klarna,
about how checkout processes affect overall shopping experience online, he
said:
“…there are these long forms to complete with questions that
have nothing to do with the action you’re taking, a complete context switch and
loss of focus. When I checkout in an offline store, the cashier doesn’t ask me
for my mother’s maiden name or my first pet’s name; so why do so when I'm
buying online? I want to pay and get it over with, I don't want to create an
account or type a password -- twice. It should be quick and effective.”
2. Make SEO one of your
priorities.
In a post on Kissmetrics,Yotpo’s Content and Social
Marketing Manager, Justin Bullion mentioned that he analyzed more than 18,000
ecommerce sites in Yotpo’s database and found that 30.5 percent of all the traffic
to those sites was coming from organic searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and
other search engines.
If the average ecommerce business gets 30.5 percent of its
traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, then search should
be taken seriously. Get backlinks from reputable sites, use targeted keywords
on your site, and so on. Make SEO a priority.
Related: Managing the data of short-tail and long-tail keywords can be challenging at scale. Use a tool like Linkio to keep your various keywords organized.
Related: Managing the data of short-tail and long-tail keywords can be challenging at scale. Use a tool like Linkio to keep your various keywords organized.
3. Get a social media manager.
Your presence on social media means a lot. It helps to build a
strong reputation, rapport with customers/prospects, gain traffic, and so on.
But you need an expert to manage your social channels so you can focus your
time and resources on growing your business. You need a social media manager.
Yes, once in a while, you can head over to your company’s
Twitter and post something. But that can’t be all the time. You need to get a
social media manager who will spend hours on your social channels, and bring
the best out of it.
4. Tread carefully on list
prices.
You might want to consider quoting your products below list
prices to entice customers. That’s a great idea. But make sure you’re not
trying to use that to mislead anyone into buying your stuff. According to a
post on WIRED,
Overstock.com recently was fined $6.8 million for "false
advertising".
In a recent article on Upstream
Commerce (a retail
intelligence company), Naomi Shapiro listed some of the common charges that
many retailers are taken to court for:
·
Referring to list prices that never existed;
·
Citing prices (for comparison) that virtually no-one is selling
at;
·
Selling goods at "rack" or "outlet" stores
that customers thought were from the main store, when, in fact, the products
were exclusively manufactured for sale in the outlet stores.
5. Pick a simple business name.
Last but not least, you definitely don’t want your business to
carry a name that’s hard to remember. When you pick a name that is simple, it’s
easy to stick to people’s minds. In a post on The Next Web, Victor
Ijidola puts it this way: When a business name is simple, over time it becomes
memorable, easily marketable and ultimately, strong.
In another article, Alexandra Watkins -- the chief innovation
officer of Eat My Words -- says "Any time you have to explain your name or
apologize for it, you're just devaluing your brand." In other words, your
business name should be so simple that people understand what it means without
you having to explain it.
There are several other things to consider when it comes to
starting an ecommerce business, but the few tips above are highly important.
When you get them right, you’re mostly on your way to establishing a strong and
successful ecommerce business.
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