Research

This is so important to your business as your research will be your groundwork and investigation into the key trends in your industry, helping you position yourself better in the market. Take note of what your competition are doing, what works for them and what doesn’t in order to guide your strategy. So you’ve got your industry and competitors sussed out, but what about your audience? Identify your target market and get an understanding of their behaviour- how do they shop online and offline? What makes them stop to purchase an item?

Brand

Now that you’ve got your business model down. Identify who you are as a brand- why do you do what you do and what makes you and your story different from everyone else. Your brand strategy should encompass the how, what, where, when and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering your brand messages.

Layout

Now it’s time to think about the design and layout of your website. Image the structure and the user flow. Organise all your written content, product images and videos in advance. Having all your materials ready ahead of time will enable you to easily piece your website together.

Build your Amazing website!

Here’s the fun bit! Choose a catchy and memorable domain, host your domain and find the right publishing platform for your business. Build build build. This will take time so stick with it and always test every aspect is working. Don’t forget to make it mobile-friendly too! We suggest hosting your domain with GoDaddy, 1&1 or NameCheap. Not sure which one to go for? We would recommend going with NameCheap as it’s of great value and offers free anonymous WHOIS registration as standard.

Promote your store

So having a beautiful website won’t bring you customers if no one knows it exists! Here’s where you’ll need a strategy to bring your new business to your potential customers. Make it SEO optimised in order for people to find your website and use Google Analytics in order to keep track of your visitors. Get social and share your collection across all your social channels.

There you have it, a quick checklist to get you going with your online store.

If you have any other tips you’d like to share, do comment below, we’d love to hear what’s on your checklist!

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1. Don’t launch until you’re completely ready

One of the biggest mistakes budding ecomm entrepreneurs make is getting over excited to have their site out there and rushing the launch. As the old adage goes, ‘you only get one shot at a first impression’. By all means put out a beautiful teaser, ‘coming soon’ page and start building an Instagram following with some lifestyle imaging that is driving your creative vision, but don’t commit to putting out what you think are finished products, services, etc until you have everything in place and ready to roll.

2. Test and then test again

Do this before you launch, and get friends and family involved as you may miss small things through having seen them too many times, also we all use websites in different way and how someone else does it may throw up problems that you don’t encounter. Continue testing after you launch any ecommerce business, you should invest in testing and analytics. Any marketing you run consider using A/B testing tools to get the maximum bang for your buck.

3. Work closely with your own social

There are many people offering quick fixes to getting followers and boosting your social media presence, but don’t take shortcuts. You may not really like social media but it’s worth getting to know it, as an ecommerce business it’s sometimes as close as you can get to your potential customers.

4. Don’t neglect mobile

An increasing amount of shopping is being done on mobile, especially now we are all supersizing our devices and products can be displayed in much more detail. It’s all very well getting your desktop site looking stunning, but if you neglect your mobile users on phone and tablet then you could be missing as much as 90% of your traffic from some sources such as Instagram.

5. SEO is the key

There are an increasing amount of sites out there filling the market place, even for many previous ‘niche’ interests. Getting your SEO right will help you to stay on the top of the pile, also for small businesses with small marketing budgets, getting SEO right is basically providing free marketing. It isn’t something that can be done overnight, and will require a well set out plan from website design to content strategy and partnership building.

6. It’s a learning curve

Some people will hit onto a really successful idea the first time around, the majority of people though will not get the results they expected and give up pretty quickly. Between the 2 are the core of entrepreneurs who suffer set-backs, learn their lessons, refine their ideas and go again. If your first site doesn’t succeed then learn your lessons and come back meaner and leaner.

7. Continue evolving

I don’t mean keep tinkering away everyday, but you’ll find better solutions, discover a useful tool, find a new social media or marketing trend, etc. Don’t be afraid to implement changes, as long as they aren’t so dramatic that people have to learn what you’re about each time they visit the site, it’ll be seen as a progressive and positive thing.

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