In the digital world, e-commerce is the fastest-growing industry. E-commerce helps you to increase your sales online; with the help of different digital platforms, you can increase your reach towards your audience globally.
In e-commerce, your customers can shop from anywhere in the world, can see your product catalogue from anywhere, and can purchase from home or office with any device, like using a mobile device when travelling. Creating a website and continuously working on it is one of the best moves to get an edge towards your competitor in your niche.
Why you Need to Build your E-Commerce Store
When you decide to build your e-commerce website, you have decided to build your brand name in your business.
Here are some key advantages:
1. Custom Branding: You can completely customize your brand according to your targeted market. By building your e-commerce website, you can define your own brand voice, style, logo and personality.
2. Enhanced Flexibility: In today’s changing world, you need to be flexible to adapt to change, which is why flexible branding helps you remove elements like colour, font, and tone of your brand according to the trend.
3. Scalability: A scalable site can handle more visitors and orders without crashing or hanging. You need to ensure your online store is scalable and user-friendly as scalability and performance move parallel.
4. Cost Efficiency: Cost efficiency is crucial for any business, and building your online store can be more economical and cost-efficient than a physical store.
5. Improved SEO and Marketing Control: Optimize every product and category page of your e-commerce website according to the search engine, which will enhance your online visibility and give you better control over your marketing campaigns.
Steps to Build a Website to Sell Products
To make a beautiful e-commerce website, follow the steps given below:
1. Choose the Right Platform: Selecting the right e-commerce platform for your website is most important. There are some popular options which are included:
Shopify: An e-commerce platform that helps you sell online. Shopify offers a lot of templates and tools to start a business of any size.
WooCommerce: Open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It provides complete e-commerce features with extensive customization options designed for small to large business organizations.
BigCommerce: Ideal for larger businesses with robust features for scalability.
Magento: A powerful option for advanced users who require high levels of customization.
2. Plan Your Store Structure: The structure of your online store should be well-planned. First, you need to define your requirements, the number of product categories and layout of the product pages, the flow of your customer purchase journey, and the complete design of your website.
3. Secure a Domain and Hosting: Select a professional domain name because it will be your Brand name. Also, select the hosting provider wisely because the speed and scalability of your website affect its performance, and finally, it impacts its sales.
4. Design Your Store: The design of your store will define the layout and navigation of your website; choose your theme the way you want to design your website, make sure your theme is mobile responsive with ease of navigation.
5. Add Products: Enter the title and description of your products with high-quality images with discounted prices or offer some coupons.
6. Integrate Payment Gateways: Ensure that the Integrate Payment Gateways system accepts secure and diverse digital payments from customers.
7. Optimize for SEO: Implement on-page SEO strategies, such as using relevant keywords like “creating an online store” and “e-commerce stores for sale” to drive organic traffic.
8. Launch and Market: Once you launch your website, start doing the marketing activity to promote your website, such as SEO, PPC, Social media marketing, Email marketing, etc.
Comparing Popular E-Commerce Platforms
1. Shopify
Pros: Shopify payment system, variety of themes, app store, inventory management, and marketing.
Cons: Shopify has a high processing fee, needs to pay for multiple apps, creates app dependency, has limited customization, no email hosting, basic blogging functionality, and is difficult to exit.
Best For: Beginners with zero technical knowledge.
2. WooCommerce
Pros: Free WordPress plugin, gives complete control over your data, and provides highly customizable options, security, and vase plugin support.
Cons: Self-hosting requirement, Required premium plugin for advanced functionality.
Best For: Small and large businesses.
3. BigCommerce
Pros: Provide lots of features, Product variants, and scalability with no transaction fees.
Cons: Automatically upgrade your plan if your sale increase, No email marketing tools, no subscription features and no multilingual option.
Best For: Businesses with plans to scale in the future need more flexibility with minimal maintenance.
4. Magento
Pros: Flexible Content Management System, Optimized performance and scalability, multiple store view with multilingual and multi-currency support.
Cons: Magento is expensive and requires dedicated hosting.
Best For: Magento is best for large Enterprises.
Why Building is Better Than Buying
Purchasing an established e-commerce store is always as costly as building a new one; building your online store has many benefits compared to purchasing one:
Complete Ownership: Building a website gives you complete control over your brand, tone, and style, while with the purchased one, you can go along with fixed core principles.
Tailored Features: Custom-built stores can include unique features that pre-made sites may lack.
Long-Term Value: Investing in creating a website to sell products ensures it is optimized for your needs, increasing its value over time. Lower Risks: Purchased stores may have hidden issues, such as poor SEO or unsatisfied customers. Building your own eliminates these risks.
Lower Risks: It is difficult to figure out the hidden issues related to the existing brand, such as negative reviews or any major technical glitch or SEO issues. Developing your site removes these risks.
Tips for Setting Up an Online Store Successfully
Choose your Ecommerce Store: Select your e-commerce store wisely because it will impact your entire business plan, so do all the research work before opting for the E-commerce platform.
Product Showcase: Upload all your products with high quality images and optimize all your product pages.
Provide Secure Payment Gateway: Provide multiple payment options to your customers so they do not face any issues or difficulties related to payment, and it will reduce your cart abandonment.
Define Shipping Options: You need to define your shipping strategy because a bad delivery experience will turn off your customers.
Optimize and Market Your Business: Optimize your online store and start SEO and Social media activity to promote your online store.
The Future of Your E-Commerce Business
Once you build your own eCommerce store, you have started building your brand. Give your customers a unique experience on your website. They will become your loyal customers, and implement some loyalty programmes for them; with the right platform, strategy, and execution, you can stand out among your competitors.
So, why go for someone else’s vision when you can build your own e-commerce website and implement your unique ideas?
Invest today, and tomorrow, your online store becomes a Money tree for you.