6 Ways To Set Up Your Online Store For Success

Building an online store is exciting! Australian companies recently netted $10b of sales through online web stores, boasting 6% of total retail sales… and that percentage figure is growing. While most of the attention is on the big retailers, such as Dick Smith and Office Works, many start-ups, such as fab.com and Warby Parker are managing to make a splash and steal market share by leveraging the power of the internet to boost their online presence. Here we share some of the lessons they have to teach about how to set up an online store to create great online shopping experiences that keep your customers returning and buying through you.

Create A Great Online Web Store Experience

Many business owners make the mistake of assuming that being online is as simple as setting up a website, perhaps through some free online store software, displaying some of their products and making it possible for people to pay. After all – if people are browsing and buying offline why wouldn’t they do the same thing online?

This is not a successful approach. Everyone has had the online experience of landing on a webpage and either immediately clicking somewhere else because it is not appealing or frustratingly spending precious minutes trawling through the information on a website in an attempt to get an answer. Proper ecommerce web design is crucial to the ability of your website to make sales.
Rather than considering the building of an online store simply an extension of your business, consider it as a separate business. The markets you will be targeting are quite different; many people who shop online do not shop offline and visa-versa. The start of creating a great customer experience is to ask the same questions you would ask when creating a bricks-and-mortar retail store:

1. Brand Position
How are you positioning your brand compared to the other online brands? Do a thorough internet search and gain full clarity on the businesses that are your competition and the products that they sell. You may find many more competitors online than you ever knew existed offline. Where do your products sit in your customers’ minds? Why would they turn to your online store rather than another website? Understand clearly what your differentiation and product positioning is in the online market and create an online store with that in mind.

2. Displaying Your Products
High quality, attractive photos are crucial to the success of your online website because customers cannot physically touch the products. Don’t be fooled and think that a shot taken in your house or store with a handy cam will be ‘just as good’. The quality of a photo speaks volumes to a consumer about the quality of the product, even if that correlation isn’t true. Investing in professional product shots is worth it to ensure your products are merchandised and displayed correctly.

3. Upsell and Connect Products
Consider the layout of your website as you would consider the layout of your store. Categories are like product aisles or shelves. You can virtually ‘place products next to each other’ by linking them in a Recommended Products box. Products you know are hot items can be displayed prominently on the front page, like a window display.

4. Run Online Promotions
Drive your customers to your online store by running promotions, the same as you would run a promotion in the window display of a physical store. These promotions can be communicated through your ecommerce marketing efforts.

When Making The Move Online, Make It Easy On Yourself

You can get online the hard way or the easy way. Simply jumping on without much work through an online website builder may seem the easy way but it’s actually the opposite. Setting up a website and having to change it takes much more time than doing it right the first time. Here’s how to make moving your store online easy.

1. Understand what your customers want
A simple survey will give you a realm of understanding about what your customers want from an online store. Don’t assume you know what they want online because you know what they want offline; it may not generate business for you. When choosing between online providers, customers may look for quick delivery, expect more options, buy only in bundled packages, need virtual try-on or require instant chat assistance. All these features take time and money to set up and maintain – choose the ones that will appeal to your audience wisely.

2. Monitor and Tweak
An online store provides so much detail about who is doing what, where and when that it seems crazy for website owners not to take advantage of it. However, it is true that most website owners don’t understand what on their website works and what is failing, preferring instead to assume everything is fine. Monitor what your clients are clicking on, what is attracting their eye in your store and tweak it to help them find what they are looking for easily. Our Online Business 101 series article on analytics can give you an overview of the type of information available on your website and how it can help you understand your customers’ movements.

Find a partner to work with
Ecommerce solutions professionals such as Complete Cloud make online websites that work day in and day out. Because of their years of experience and expertise in design, marketing and ecommerce technology, they can deliver your online store faster and at a higher quality than do-it-yourself options. You have the benefit of learning from their past mistakes so that your first entrance into online sales is hassle free and successful.