Previously to creating an e-commerce, choose the niche that you are focusing on. Evaluate the market to see if your business idea is competitive. Make sure to find a balance: an absence of competition is an indication that there is no market, while an oversaturated niche will be extremely difficult to compete in.
1. Register your Business
Once you are ready to create an e-commerce, you should register the company to avoid any legal problems.
2. Choose your company’s name and domain
As you are ready to create the e-commerce you should think of a domain name. The domain name is a crucial factor in your website since it defines your brand. Make sure your website’s name is related to the content and to the brand itself. A good domain name increases brand recognition, and it is part of the first impression a user gets as they land there.
- Come up with a domain name that is easy to remember so customers come back to your store. The name should be short and simple, easy to pronounce and related to the content of the website. Also, it’s not a good idea to include numbers and hyphens. Lastly, try to use common extensions such as “.com”, “.org”, or ,”.net”.
- Another reason you should carefully consider the name of your domain is that the keywords inside it affect the SEO ranking, meaning, it can help you increase your visibility in the search engine as users type such keywords.
3. Hire a good web hosting service
Choosing a good quality hosting will determine the speed of your website: speed crucial to avoid high bouncing rates.
Pages that load in 2 seconds or less have an average bounce rate of 9%. Bounce rates start rising when websites last more than 2 seconds, but the increment is alarming as soon as 3 loading seconds pass by. A website that lasts 4 seconds to load, can have up to a 22% bounce rate, while one that lasts 7 seconds, a 38% one.
Having a good hosting is also necessary to avoid, or quickly solve any technical problems like the server going down so your website can be available every day of the year at all times.
4. Choose a CMS and a PIM system as your business grows
It’s important to think about what software we are implementing to manage our company’s information ahead of time, since switching is extremely complicated.
The main objective of a CMS software is to connect the company’s content to the website; it it helps to unify the information and allow seamless transitions between channels, and essential when we are dealing with vast amounts of data.
On the other hand, implementing an e-commerce product manager, such as a PIM system will aid in the organization and management of a company’s products information: this could be inventory, and everything related to it such as technical data and product descriptions. The information can be managed in real time and be distributed across all different channels while eliminating duplicate information. This also reduces operating time, and improves efficiency because actions are automated.
It may be a good idea to take into account business growth metrics and predictions, since the capacity of our CMS and PIM software will depend on the amount of information a business contains and generates.
5. Have multiple paying methods
It is very simple, if you are not providing the most common payment methods for your customers, you are losing sales; 8% to 19% of users leave the shopping cart when their preferred payment method is not available.
Payment methods vary depending on countries, so the key lies on finding out the most common methods your target market uses and including them in your website. However, don’t stop there; make sure to update and include the latest payment methods in the market, since new ones grow in popularity as time goes by. Efficient payment methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, Paypal and Square are becoming more and more common, especially when it comes to mobile shopping, which is also increasing in time.
6. Create a blog
Sometimes having a blog section in your website can be a good idea to drive traffic into it as you can add keywords in the content, increasing the visibility in the search engine.
