Building up a successful online store with Shopiko requires a lot of time, efforts and persistence. Due to the popularisation and development of SaaS (Software as a Service) you can already create an online store with just a few clicks, but the real work actually begins afterwards. Let’s assume you’ve chosen super products to sell on a competitive price, your store is ready and running, but you have no sales! There are no grounds to give up on it immediately. You just need to look for the possible reasons of this outcome. All leading online retailers are distinguished by the ability to identify, analyze and solve problems.
Let’s have a look at the most common mistakes in eCommerce:
Always remember that cutting a dash is very important.
Choose the best design for your new e-store. Be meticulous and pay attention to details. Don’t underestimate logos, banners and images used to present your business on the web. All images for products, categories, pages and posts should look professionally done so that they build trust with your customers.
If you exist in Google’s index, you truly exist online.
When your store is ready you need to start working on SEO. In the previous article „7 Ideas How to Drive More Traffic to Your Online Store“ we described in detail how to add your online store to the Google Search Console, how to add XML sitemap to your website and gave you other useful tips. Today we have six more steps for the initial search engine optimization.
- Check out your store’s title and description – the title should contain up to 70 characters and must include a keyword in relation to its main activity. The description should be no longer than 255 characters. Try presenting your business to the audience in a very brief manner. Include keywords specific for your store in the first 160 characters so as to make sure that search engines can reach and understand correctly the most important information for your business.
- Generate detailed titles and descriptions for all products.
- Check the URLs of all pages including products, categories, internal pages, etc. Each URL should be detailed and give exact information for the respective product, category or internal page.
- Include also detailed descriptions for category pages. When your customers read the description they should be informed what products they can find in the category.
- Add Meta titles and descriptions to all pages in the store.
- Enable mobile version or use responsive design. This way your Skopiko store will be properly resized on all mobile devices.
What about prices?
When you launch your online business you need to do a market research in the respective field. Check the competition, how they sell and what prices and services they offer. Analyze your competitors and try to think how to outperform them, how the audience can notice you because of a certain benefit. Don’t count on lower prices! If this is your only advantage, you might need to reconsider your whole business strategy. You need to find the right answer to the question why a customer would prefer you instead of the competition.
Content is VIP.
Besides your nice appearance, high-quality products, good level of service and reasonable prices, you should also add value to your business. Generate content for your customers to help them solve a problem or inform them on making the best choice. What types of content can you create? Here are a few ideas:
- Articles;
- Videos;
- Infographics;
- E-books;
- Presentations;
- Analyses and Statistics;
- Feedback from happy customers and their stories.
No hits, no customers. No hits, no customers.
Very often online beginner retailers hardly know what to expect and have huge expectations for their sales. Sometimes they think that right after an online store is launched they will make a fortune out of it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In order to start selling, your online store must be visited by customers. So you need more visitors and traffic targeting but to achieve that you also need to advertise.
There are many online advertising opportunities. For a startup business we recommend Facebook ads, Google AdWords campaigns, email marketing and remarketing. If you plan to sell online you most probably have already heard those terms. If the notion of “remarketing” sounds a bit extravagant, let us tell you more.
Stats show that about 2% of your visitors will buy something during their first visit. If you have 100 visitors per day, theoretically you should receive at least 1-2 orders. But what happens to the other 98 visitors? Have you lost those customers? No, you can always reach them through retargeting. Such campaigns can be implemented by a piece of code put on your website so as to collect data from all the visitors. In Google this code is called Google remarketing tag, and on Facebook it is the Facebook Pixel.
Adding the code doesn’t influence the website’s operation and it cannot be seen by users. When a visitor accesses your website, the data for its browsing history is saved by a cookie as this enables you to make an advertising campaign targeted at all users of your online store who have not ordered anything yet.
Remarketing example: You own a store selling sneakers. A certain customer will visit it, look through a pair of running shoes and then leave the store. If a remarketing campaign is enabled, the customer will see this pair of running shoes on banners while surfing the web as well on Facebook. This way your potential buyer will get reminders and this will increase the chance that he places an order.
Conclusion: If you want to sell, you need to start advertising. Without advertisements you can’t grow and develop your business idea.
Happy customers.
Happy customers might become passionate followers and turn into effective advertising agents for your business. Good service, fair attitude and meeting delivery deadlines are important prerequisites for every store’s success. Encourage customers to leave their feedback, to comment on social networks or on a specific product page. Positive feedback from customers who have already ordered products from your online store might make other users buy.
- Tip 1 – Create a focus group from friends and acquaintances whose opinion you rely on so that they can give you objective assessment. Show them your store and ask them to buy something. Then make them tell you what difficulties they have experienced, if they got the necessary information, what they lacked and what they would change.
- Tip 2 – Build trust among your customers. Be open to the maximum possible extend. If you are new, people won’t be familiar with you just yet. It is up to you to win their trust. You can do this by generating content to show your expertise, through all options for getting feedback or just leaving all possible means of communication – telephone, email, address, contact form, online chat and others. Respond quickly and precisely to all inquiries you receive.
- Tip 3 – Analyze. Analyze advertising channels, how effective they are, if your advertising messages work, how users behave, the results and feedback you get based on the content you post. Analyze each and every aspect of your online business. This is an important process that has to be consistent because it gives you growth opportunities, it tells you what your strengths and weaknesses are, what you need to change and what really works for you and helps you improve.
You can’t develop a successful store for an hour, two days or a few weeks. This is an ongoing process that demands dedication and hard work. There are a lot of growth opportunities and you are the one to define whether your store would be preferred and visited by more than 1.100.000 customers shopping online.
You still don’t have an online store? Use Shopiko to create a store with just a few clicks. Try the free 14-day trial!
