On the 5th Day of Content, Flint Studios gave to me… 5 golden steps.
Starting up an eCommerce business can seem a little daunting. It can be difficult to know where to even begin!
This is why Flint Studios have created this blog to help all the budding entrepreneur’s out there with these 5 essentials steps to start an eCommerce business. It’s important that we point out that this is just basic overview; this blog has been written for those who want a more general understanding of the process and who are in the early stages of planning their eCommerce business.
If you are looking something a bit more in-depth, such as integrated eCommerce strategy, give us a call on 028 9045 554 and we can have a chat through your business needs and requirements.
1. Choose your Niche and Product
Before you start designing and developing your eCommerce site, you need to decide on your business niche and products that you want to sell. Your Unique Selling Point (USP) is very important.
When choosing your niche, you need to pick something that you’re passionate about. Selling products for the sake of it won’t help your motivation. By selling products that you are interested in will make it easier to be enthusiastic about them.
Once you have decided on your niche, you need to start thinking about the kind of products you are going to sell. We recommend learning to walk before starting to run… Starting out by focusing on a single product where possible, will be a lot easier to manage as you’re getting up and running.
Once you’ve come up with a few product ideas you wish to sell, you will need to carry out a market evaluation and see if there is room for your product to be sold. If your product idea looks encouraging, then you can move on and carry out a competitor analysis. This will help you understand the level of competition you might find yourself in and will allow you to benchmark yourself against other eCommerce sites.
2. Establish your eCommerce Brand
Now that you understand your business’s niche and product, you can begin to design and create your own brand that is relevant to what you do.
It’s important to remember that when you are creating your brand image, that this is what people are going to associate you with. If you are thinking about selling gardening tools, then there is no point to have a sport’s car and a car-related name as your logo: keep it simple and relevant to what you are selling.
What does a brand include?
- Name
Go for brief, easy to remember, original and suitable for a domain name.
- Logo
Keep it simple, no more than a couple of colours and representative of your brand.
3. Determine your Target Audience
One of the most important factors of building your eCommerce business is determining who your target audience are.
Creating a target persona is a great way to help you figure out the kind of people you wish to target. Your target persona involves thinking of traits that the person who is most likely going to buy your products.
Knowing and understanding your target persona is critical in figuring out how you are going to market your product to them.
4. Build your eCommerce Website
Your next step is deciding on which eCommerce platform you would like to use for your website. Here at Flint Studios, we only see one real contender: Magento. The world’s most popular, open-source eCommerce platform.
Designing and developing an eCommerce website can be quite a challenge, especially without prior experience. Although you could create a very basic website, this will not be engaging to your customers, especially when you look at the other creative websites out there.
If you would like to create an engaging, professional and scalable site, contact Flint Studios to find out how we can help you in this integral step of your business.
5. Drive Traffic to your eCommerce Store
The last step of creating your eCommerce store is creating a marketing strategy in order to let the world know about your new amazing brand, drive traffic to your website to boost those all-important conversion rates.
There are some main elements we recommend you think about when it comes to your marketing strategy:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- PPC advertising (Pay-Per-Click)
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing.
Depending on who your target persona is, will determine how you strategies each of these elements.
If you are struggling to come up with a marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 028 9045 554 or email us on [email protected] and we can see what we can do for you in order to improve your marketing message to your target audience.