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When starting an online store you need to consider almost countless possible factors. You need to consider the platform, the products, shipping, support, and million others. Let’s assume that you are still planning and you need help.
Below are 15 tips that are essential for all newbies who are planning to create their spot in this industry. Pay close attention and read the entire content.
There are a lot of platforms you can use. The most popular ones are Woocommerce and Shopify. They are easy to use, relatively affordable and they are versatile. With a bit of luck, you can create a complete online store within 2 hours. There are a few differences. In order to use Woocommerce, you will need a WordPress website and you will add Woocommerce as a plugin. Shopify is a standalone platform and they can help you create a website and the store.
An online store is basically a website. Google and all other search engines pay close attention to the loading speed. Higher loading speeds will result in lower search result rank! The first thing to do is to avoid posting videos and large files on the site in general. Then, you will have to optimize it. There are a lot of tutorials which are easy to use yet have impressive results. Check the speed using Page Speed test.
Most of you will download and post images and videos the manufacturer provides. This is actually a mistake. You need to make your store stand out from the crowd and images are the best way to do it. For example, use plugins and create 360 degrees images of a product. The situation is the same regardless of the fact you are manufacturing the products or you use products made by another manufacturer.
This is a bit more important tip you must use. Always check the competition and make sure to check out their stores. If there are a lot of stores in the same niche and all of them are high-end stores with professional design, move to another niche. It is almost impossible to rank on the first page of search results when the competition is extremely tough. On the other hand, if the stores of others are poorly designed and they come with old or obsolete designs and there are not a lot of competitors you have a green light. However, this also means that your store must be stunning and much better than all the rest.
Don’t think that an online store is a place to sell your items only. It is much more than that. You can attract visitors, you can create a new brand and you can make a community. The best thing to add to a store is a blog. It helps you complete all the things we mentioned earlier. Also, you will be able to attract more visitors to the website which translates in a higher number of sales.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is the main thing these days. You will have to make sure that all the products have long descriptions and each one is well-written, optimized so search engines can find more details about the product itself and therefore increase your sales. SEO should be used for all the contents on your store. You have Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress that will make sure the content is SEO optimized. Keywords can be found using the Google Keyword Planner.
These days consumers are addicted to writing reviews. They help feel better and in control. You will need to provide the ability to all consumers to provide their opinions when they want. Furthermore, Google ‘’’likes’’ reviews and they may be SEO optimized as well. It is win-win for all of us.
Rich snippets are descriptions of the page. You can see that Google shows them when you type in some popular and well-developed website. You can have the rich snippets as well and they should increase the traffic you will get. Also, chances are high that they will attract more visitors and therefore more consumers.
In some cases, you can make more sales using social media than anything else. This especially refers to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These platforms will help you make your brand and your store well-known and more popular. Also, using them is free and requires a little time. In addition, you can run ads directly on those platforms and gain huge traffic which is specific (you provide specifics of all users who will see your ads).
A newsletter is a service where you will basically send emails to all the visitors who registered to your store. This means that you can promote new products, lower processes or impressive deals. The newsletter is so simple to use and usually, you can find countless plugins within seconds.
This doesn’t mean that you should track them to their home. It means that you should use the service in order to see how many visitors visited your store per day, week and month. There are a lot of options out there, but we believe Google Analytics is the most common. You will have to insert a code into the store to verify and Google Analytics will start tracking. It is actually very simple but also accurate and loaded with options.
It is irrelevant which platform and option you use, you will have to perform backups on a regular basis. A backup will be used when some files of the website or your store are compromised and damaged. You will basically lose the store! Using a backup allows you to load the website from the backup files and restore it. Backing up the site requires 5 minutes of your time. How long will it take to make the same store from scratch?
When a user likes a product he will add it to the chart. From there he can leave the page and not pay for the product simply because shipping is too expensive or unavailable. You can add a fraction of the expense to the price of a product so you can even make shipping free. In this case scenario, we can recommend Helphalf, a service provider which makes shipping so easy and so simple. They will also solve all labeling and tracking issues and make the entire process extremely appealing.
You will have to check the site for any errors, mistakes in typing or anything that may affect the perfection. A well-developed site with no mistakes is the best one and it definitely deserves the most attention. There are all kinds of software that can help you so be free to use all of them if needed. It is mandatory that all the contents and data is accurate and correct and it comes without any flaws.
Discounts can help you gain a lot of traffic within days. But, you will have to plan them, perform polls and also post on social media on a regular basis. Once the day comes, you must provide the discount you mentioned and you should use all possible places, sites, social media and anything else to promote it.
For some of you, these tips are mandatory and extremely important. For others, they are well-known, but also important. The bottom line is that launching an online store isn’t as difficult as you may believe. If you use the tips we explained above, it is an easy task that can be fun and rewarding all year round.
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