Setting Up An Online Shop

What is an Online Shop?

In this article we will explain how an online shop can boost your existing business to next levels. Before we dive deeper, let's touch on basics of an online-shop.

Let’s assume you are a retail shop and your business is already set-up & running well. You are getting fair amount of sales made by customers visiting your retail shop. Now what is next that you can do to increase your sales? You will run some sort of marketing campaigns, road shows or events, or will advertise about your brand in printed media. As we know most of the people today do not get attracted by conventional advertisements & campaigns or events. Even if you are able to succeed in getting attention of some new customers via conventional advertisement methods, still the amount of audience you can expect is very limited. Now again the question arises, what is that next thing that you can do to boost your sales to next level? Oh well, the answer is eCommerce

I am sure we have heard of eCommerce many times. Today most of people around the world like to spend most of their free time on internet via phone, tablets or personal computers. Internet has become an important part of everyone's life. From watching movies, to gaming, to finding any information or spending time sharing photos and tweets on a social media platform, is all part of the same game. Have you ever thought of getting your business reachable to all these online users of internet? If not yet, you are already missing a huge chunk of potential customers who could have added a huge revenue to your business sales.

They say, it is never too late. Let's understand what it takes to get you there

Ecommerce Website

This will be your first step once you decided to go online for your business. Set your website right for your target audience. If you are technology savvy, there are many ready to use frameworks (e.g. WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart Shopify etc) for you to build an online shop. This being said, you need good experience or knowledge to set-up your initial basic shop. If this sounds too much for you, then you must look for a web development agency or a freelance software developer to help you in selecting the right framework for your shop.
Choosing the right technology for your website is the crucial step for your digital business, as it will decide the future maintenance for your online shop. You ideally would like to choose a framework which is easy to maintain and not too heavy on your wallet. At the same time you need to consider how complex and advance features you need to develop in your ecommerce shop. Some frameworks are easy to setup and maintain but do not have all the features that you may need. If you need assistance in selecting the right eCommerce framework for your online shop, you can also contact our experts by clicking on Contact Us

User Experience

In digital world your office infrastructure doesn’t matter, what actually matter is the user experiencing your website, reading your content and how impressive the design looks. Once you have your online shop set-up, the most important thing you must ensure that your website is user friendly. User experience on your website is driven by design elements, systematic presentation of information, attractive graphics, and ergonomic structure of content.

Here are few key points that you must adhere to

• Content is readable easily on all different size of screens
• Content & Images are optimized to ensure fast page download speed. Ideally page should not take more than 2-3 seconds to open
• Action buttons "Contact Us" must be visible and accessible easily to visitors
• Content is interesting, well structured & supported with attractive graphics

Search Engine & Social Media Marketing

• • The next step is to create awareness among your audience, let user consider your brand.
  It is a serious business as how well you market your business digitally will impact your brand image accordingly. Content going out to customer through this medium will create your brand name.
• • Acquiring customers through this medium depends on you.
  For e.g.: On social media you cannot sell your product and can only spread the news about your business and product but you can on a search engine. Social media plays an important role as it improves your chances of building a customer base, as it will allow you to reach to potential customers and other interested buyers to capture easily via this channel. You have to decide right keyword for a search engine, making it responsive as to get good rankings on search engine. A good ranking can divert the active users looking for product/services.

In the end, a nice website supported with positive word of mouth creates the right impact for your business in global market.

Benefits of Online Shop

Now let’s discuss foew of advantages of online business are:

• The main advantage 24 hours and 7 days a week accessibility.
• You can manage your business from anywhere in the world.
• Targeting audience on the basis of demographic.
  For e.g: you might want to advertise snow shovels to customers in New England, but it would be pointless to do so in Florida, online business provide you ease to do business in any region of the world while you stay at your native place.
• Customer may not prefer to visit your job site due to any reason but having an online site will give an ease to your customer. He can visit the site from anywhere and at any time.
• Transactions through the internet allow you to collect data. Whenever a customer purchases a product through a company’s website, the data is captured. Your business can use this data in varying ways. Most businesses analyze the data to find out what product and/or services sell frequently.
• Furthermore, the data collected can help segment customers, so your business can send them ads and other promotional materials based on their buying habits and interests.
• Now a days business cards or pamphlets have become a traditional way of marketing, it is possible that your user might misplace or lose the card, While it is different in case of online marketing a buyer can reach you easily through the contact details provided by you on your site in this way you won’t be losing your customers and can convince your buyer to return.
• Social media networks to build relationships with important people and for character development.
• An ecommerce website can sell 24 hours. A blog can be read by the user anytime. This is not possible in offline business. In offline business customers come when you open the shutter of your shop.
• Customer support is most essential part of business process. Using social media pages, chat plugin in a website is very beneficial and less costly to solve customer problems without the visiting physical location of business.
• Yes, we all have office timings e.g. 9 am to 8 pm but after that, we do not have option keep running the business after that. But today, you can receive the order, you can market product, accept payment and services anytime, and anywhere in the world.

As a summary, if you want to step up and make your local business reach out to global customers or a large volume of customers, online shop is a MUST!