Do you have the thoughts of starting your very own online store? Good, as the barrier to enter into online business is getting lower these days, a small personal seller to a large multinational corporation can easily enter into the world of online business by simply building an online store.
However, how do you make sure your online store and business is profitable? You will need to spend money upfront as investment, but can you make sure your online store will surely be profitable?
Below is the check-list that you should go through to learn how to build an online store that is profitable!
Attractive or Stunning design
First impressions are everything, you probably learn that from your life experience. Your online store homepage is THE most important one page that will determine the probability of visitors buying from your website.
Use graphics smartly. Do not overload your home page with too much graphics as this will slow down the loading time, which is really bad and will turn visitors away.
Many starters want to follow the footstep of Taobao, which chunk out a lot of information and categories in the home page. This may not be a good idea after all if your online store don’t really covers products from a lot of categories, you are overloading your visitors with information instead.
Use a simple, straight to the point design that people can understand what you are selling and offering in a glance.
Opt-in for leads
Before you ask how to build an online store, you should ask how to generate leads and customers.
Include a newsletter subscription form that can gather the contact information of your visitors. People may not buy from you the first time but they might be waiting for you to throw in some promotions before they do so.
Gathering these leads is very useful for future upselling purpose. With your own mailing list, you have your own list of prospective customers and do not need to spend more time in harvesting leads!
Understanding “Why”
The reason of most businesses fail is that they do not understand which part they did wrong or why they failed. So, by understanding the “why” beforehand, you can prevent the problems from happening to you!
As referred to the infographic above made by Nextopia, you can see that the top reason of most shoppers leave without making a purchase is getting presented with unexpected costs. Which means, you should always display out the total costs of buying your products/services very clearly.
Other things you should take note are making your prices competitive, ensure your website navigation is easy, shorten your checkout and payment process, give multiple currencies options and be certain that your website is secure and stable.
By eliminating these problems from your online store, you are deducting the odds of shoppers leaving your website without making a purchase.
Powerful and Effective Product Page
When people ask us about how to build an online store that is profitable, we tell them their product page plays a big role as well.
Your home page is not the only page that is important, the second most important page is your product page. The product page is the page that the product will display to your visitors, and the place that they will decide whether to “Buy” or add that product to their shopping cart or not.
How to optimize your product page?
- Use story telling method and write descriptive and convincing product descriptions. You can use enticing words and words that get the readers excited, but keeping in mind that it should be simple enough for everyone to understand.
- An obvious and well-placed Call to Action button. Whether it’s a “BUY NOW”, “ORDER NOW” or “ADD TO CART” button, it should be well placed and instantly visible to the visitors.
- Thorough product photos. Capture almost every single angle of your product or pay attention to details that your buyers may want to see. Hire a professional photographer and you can see the result will be much different compare to using only your cell phone camera to take your product photos.
- Social sharing. Enable Facebook and other social media sharing buttons on your product page, so even if your visitors do not want to buy it for themselves, they can share it to their friends who are looking for the same product.
- Customers reviews. Showing out your previous customers reviews about this product can strengthen the confidence of your visitors to buy the same item from you.
Build Relationship with Your Customers
Building a good relationship with your customers can enhance their loyalty to your brand and encourage return purchase. Having a good relationship with your customers only have advantages, as they may also tend to introduce your online store to their friends and family and spreading your brand via words of mouth, which is an invaluable way of marketing.
Send greetings and follow up emails occasionally. Keep them in check and show that you care about them. Treat your customers as friends and not strangers!
Retention & Recovery
If a visitor is trying to leave your online store, you can try to retain them by displaying a pop up message and maybe by offering them a coupon code to try your product or service.
Another good way to recover lost purchase is by sending recovery emails. Recovery emails are sent whenever your visitors have abandoned their cart without completing the transaction or payment.
You should send out recovery emails as long as there’s something in the customers’ cart, as it shows that they still have the intention to purchase those items, but due to some other reasons they are not purchasing the items yet.
Related Products
You don’t want your visitors to buy only 1 product, you want them to buy as many as they can. Link your products with related products feature, such as displaying toothbrush to someone who is browsing toothpaste, or display phone cases to someone who is browsing mobile phones.
Related products can drive your sales by at least 50%.
Build Your Online Store Now!
You should be ready by now as you’ve read through the above on how to build an online store that is profitable. Get your own online store started today and start making extra profit!
Sanz Teoh
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