From $1.5 trillion in 2015, the Global retail e-commerce sales are projected to grow up to $4 trillion in 2020. The growth from 2015 to 2020 is expected to be nearly 166%, a figure too significant to overlook. Also, the share of e-commerce in overall retail sales in the US, which stood at around 22.6% in 2015, is expected to grow substantially.
So, as the e-commerce economy is likely to continue to grow rapidly, entrepreneurs have a promising and exciting opportunity for success. This applies equally to those who are already involved in e-commerce and those hoping to launch an e-commerce store with help of an expert eCommerce development company. However, you can expect to achieve the results you desire only if you follow the right approach, as outlined below.
Use Your Resources and Time Well
Know the demand for what you want to sell before you build up an inventory. You may want to search online marketplaces to find out how many have sold in the last month or year to get to know about demand for the product.
Know About Your Niche
Don’t try to target too many different customer types with too many different product types. Try to get an edge by meeting needs that other online marketplaces don’t or offering a product that is one of a kind. Be as specific as you can and focus on categories not seen anywhere else. That way you can target customers with specific expertise and knowledge about the product.
Launch Only When You are Fully Prepared
Get the domain name you want and put up a nice “coming soon” page, but don’t hurry the launch of your website. Put in the required groundwork in the form of paid as well as organic promotion of your business idea first, to ensure that it is received well at the time of its launch.
Work Hard on Social Media
Involve yourself closely with social media as it is among the best ways to connect with your customers. Delegation or outsourcing of social media interaction, at least initially, may not be the best idea.
Share behind-the-scenes photos and information about new offerings to make your brand accessible to customers and to make them feel like being a part of your company’s story. Establish a dialogue with your customers to find out how to serve them better and quiz them on the direction they would like your business to take.
Encourage satisfied customers to write reviews of your products in order to create favorable social proof that may lead to increased conversions.
Develop an Overall SEO Strategy
Not doing SEO properly or not doing it at all is one of the common problems with new online stores. Even though it may take a while to show success, it is of great significance. It is among the most powerful tools that can consistently bring targeted traffic to your website, unlike paid channels that don’t deliver traffic when you stop paying.
Find out the top keywords you want to target in the long term and keep working on including them in your web content and messaging.
Include Social Elements on Your Website
Help prospects move along the conversion funnel by providing social login options, follow buttons, testimonials and product reviews on your e-commerce site.
A Logo and About and Contact Pages
Since a logo is generally the first thing visitors see on your online store, it goes a long way towards creating a great first impression. Similarly, an About page acquaints the visitors with your story and helps them relate to you and your business. A Contact page also helps build trust and informs visitors whether they need to consider customs and duties if they require products to be shipped to another country.
Consider All Marketing Channels
Along with SEO and social media interaction, also focus on other channels such as paid advertising and reaching out to influencers. Choose the channels that you think will help your business the most and understand their working. Devote enough time, money and effort to each channel and carefully track the results to be able to make improvements.
Invest in Analytics and Testing
To figure out what is working and what is not and why, you have to be able to think like the customer. Make no compromise to invest in a good “business intelligence services” to collect data for optimal decision making.
Keep Evolving
Customer tastes, trends and technology is constantly changing in today’s times and it is highly important to adapt in order to succeed. For instance, consumer spending through mobile has seen an average increase of 20% in the United States alone making it extremely important for businesses to hire a mobile app development company to execute their mobile strategy well.
If you have all of the above in mind while launching and, thereafter, running your e-commerce business, you could very well be on your way to success in your venture.
Would it be better to decide a launch date beforehand and market the launch accordingly?
There would be no harm in doing that. However, it is recommended not to reveal the final launch date until you’re actually ready to go live. Often times last minute errors or incomplete work force the date to be postponed which is not a good first impression. You could however go for a soft launch first to make sure this doesn’t happen.
How can we market on social media prior to the launch of our store?
Prior to your launch, you should use social media to market the process and a bit of your products. Post behind the scene photos, interesting stories, save the date campaigns (once you’re completely ready to launch) etc. You can start a temporary blog to get a hold of your niche audience and then move it to your main site post launch. Send samples of your product to popular users and ask them to promote you. These are some of the basics you can do.
Would it help to launch the website and its mobile app together?
While a mobile apps are definitely crucial for your store, it is always better to gain some traction initially with your website and launch an app after a while. You could however launch them together if your soft launch drew a lot of attention in your niche.
What kind of analytics would help us understand our market?
Well for starters, simple factors like web traffic, bounce rate, search engine ranking are a good start. Then, with the help of a web scraping tool, you can accumulate and organize to study about competitor pricing trends, customer reviews and response on social media, buying frequency, order size, demand demographics etc.