Move your business online – Planning
With our latest article, we launched a series on “Migrating offline business to online.” There, we answered the questions – why to start selling online and what are the advantages of internet commerce. If you have not read it yet, you can do so Here.
Today we continue with the second article in the series, where we will talk about the planning process.
To help you create a clear action plan, we have created a list of steps you need to take.
Do your homework
Before you start building an online store, take your time to do some marketing research. Understand what your competitors are doing and what is your advantage over them. What are the sales techniques they use in the digital space? What are the prices of similar products as well as substitute products? What is the frequency of their search, and is there seasonal peaks in traffic and sales?
Domain name
Choosing a domain is extremely important for the success of your online business. If you choose the wrong one, changing it can hurt the brand and search engine rankings.
Create a online store
This point includes the following tasks:
- Choose ecommerce platform;
- Design – including both the right of theme for your brand and its visualization on different devices;
- Content – what information to put in there;
- SEO (search engine optimization).
The pricing
Make sure the prices of your products are not lower than you can afford. Choosing a pricing strategy is extremely important because the consequences of a wrong choice could bring negative effects to the business. Many companies entering ecommerce prefer to use lower prices to gain more market share. But if the company has not estimated the costs that accompany the launch of a business, their pricing strategy will make them unprofitable.
Payment methods
It’s important to add the most used and convenient for your customers. You don’t want to lose them at the final stage of their purchase.
Courier services
Delivery on time is one of the main factors influencing the best user experience after the customer has placed an order. Decide whether you or the customer should pay the courier fee.
Marketing
Creating a comprehensive marketing strategy – from start-up to growth and retention – is the most valuable thing. Gather the contacts of your current customers and try to turn them into online users. Explore the opportunities that social media provides, how to use the power of email marketing, which influencers would be appropriate for your business, and tools for analyzing results.
Marketplaces
Marketplaces are a type of virtual market. In them, you can upload your products and sell them separately from your online store. Explore the possibilities of expanding sales channels using them.
Legal procedures
Starting an online business does not mean that you are automatically exempt from legal procedures. You may even need to meet a few more requirements. Here, companies must comply not only with the standard legal norms but also with the standards related to the GDPR, as well as the terms of the individual advertising platforms.
Stock in warehouse
When customers buy a product from your online store, they want to know when they will receive it. To provide this information, the stocks you have in the warehouse must be reflected in the product catalog and based on them to show information about the delivery time or to hide a product in case of inability to deliver it by you in an acceptable term.
All these things mentioned above are very serious and you don’t have to underestimate their impact. We are trying to help each online retailer with proven useful advices from our experience that’s why we will dive deeply in detail for each of the problems pointed out in this article.
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