Building an ecommerce site from scratch can be a very daunting task, especially if you are on a budget, are not technically proficient and you are working solo.
We’ve put together a quick tutorial below on how you can overcome all these obstacles and achieve entrepreneurial success online.
Choosing Your Platform
There are so many options when it comes to building your own online store, here are four of our preferred platforms and the main features for each one.
Magento
Magento is generally considered the most widely used ecommerce platform across the world – providing both enterprise and open source solutions to both large and small businesses respectively. Magento provides both the community and open source editions which is geared towards startups and SME’s, as its the most cost effective solution. Being open source, you have the flexibility to choose from thousands of different themes of which you can customise to your requirements, making magento a very popular solution for many.
Shopify
Probably by far the easiest and one of the most popular platforms. Endorsed by Tim Ferriss, Shopify is currently the cheapest platform, comes with 100+ templates to choose from, out-of-the-box internet marketing seo friendly, and integrating payment gateways and other 3rd party apps is a breeze. You’ll be up and running in no time!
BigCommerce
One of the key features of BigCommerce is the ability to have a blog integrated into the site. Blogs are a fantastic way to gain SEO traction and to highlight featured products. You can have user reviews, in depth usage of a product or simply provide more photos or videos about the product that users can share easily.
The only downside of BigCommerce is that it is currently the most expensive platform out of the three we review here.
Volusion
Volusion is fantastic for smaller businesses due to its lightweight nature, it’s large selection of free themes, and probably the most important factor – they do NOT charge you any transaction fees! That’s right, the other platforms charge a small percentage to the ecommerce merchant just for a sale to go through, but for Volusion, they believe that you’ve worked hard for your profits and you should get to keep them!
Sourcing Your Products
There are various ways to source your products online. Some can be done by the way of dropshipping or simply buying products wholesale and shipping them out yourself.
Some useful dropshipping companies include WorldWide Brands, Salehoo and Doba are amongst the most popular and well established companies in the game. They vet each company to ensure they are legitimate and uphold a good standard. Check out this Shopify guide for a great write up about finding dropshipping suppliers.
The easiest way to source products yourself is to simply go to Alibaba , search for what you like and find a manufacturer to buy direct from.
Marketing Your Website
This is generally referred to as “the exciting part”. You’ve got your logo and template looking great, products are on display, checkouts are ready to operate, now you just need to get people to your website!
We can’t all be a digital marketing agency, so I would recommend you consult a marketing agency that can best assess your needs, goals and budgets and provide guidance and advice on what you need to do on your website to prepare it best for online success.
The key internet marketing channels and services can be categorised as follows; Google ads management, seo services, Facebook advertisng, Instagram advertising, LinkedIn advertising, Snapchat, email, text and YouTube advertising. Each one has its pros and cons and each one may performance differently depending on your product category. These channels are by no means the only digital channels available to advertise in, however these are the largest networks by audience size and reach and advertising dolars spent in these platforms.
Contacting a professional company locally, whether the best seo company in sydney or a reputable web design agency sydney can help you allocate your budgets to each of these marketing platforms accordingly and to achieve the best return on investment.
Managing the Backend
So you’ve made your first sale, Congratulations! Now what do we do? The next step is to of course, ship your product out to the customer. You should have collected the user’s shipping details (and their money!) and now it’s all about contacting your local courier or post office store and working with them to get your product shipped safely and correctly.
No doubt customers will have questions about their product, when and how it’s being shipped, and possibly even want to return a product. You’ll need to set up a customer service team in place to handle all of this. Hiring people on Upwork or Freelancer is an easy and cost effective strategy to solve this problem. Of course you’ll need to train them up in the short term, but in the long run, they can manage these minor day to day necessities for you.
If you’ve made it this far, well done! The fun is only just beginning. The road to ecommerce success is long and arduous, but will be immensely rewarding. So whether you decide to use Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce or Volusion, its important to make sure you do your research or perhaps speak to a reputable digital marketing agency for advice on what platform is best suitable for your unique project.
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