If you have decided to start trading online and launch an online store, this is definitely the right decision. The “RA-SOLO” web studio team has prepared this article to help you create a selling website, avoiding mistakes and excessive spending. Read this article to the end, and you will be able to able to get an answers to many questions related to creating an online store before funding certain items of the technical task .
Why e-commerce is especially relevant in 2022
Until recently, online shopping was just one of the convenient ways to buy products, but the coronavirus events have turned it into almost the only possible way. Moreover, online shopping is expected to continue to be popular after the strict lockdown requirements are lifted around the world.
E-commerce is profitable, convenient and safe not only from the point of view of buyers. Many companies that previously paid attention to the development of a network of physical points of sale are now forced to move into the online space. Apparently, many of these companies will never return to their previous business models.
Of course, competition among e-commerce sites is constantly intensifying. And so that your business does not lose profitability, you should work as productively as possible and invest in creating an online store. If you do this in a timely manner, then you have a chance to launch a well-thought-out and successful e-commerce startup that will meet the current market realities, as well as the current preferences and demands of buyers.
Six Types of Online Business
If you have decided to start your online business from scratch, the first thing you should decide is the business scheme that your startup will operate under. Here are short and clear descriptions for all six schemes:
You sell goods to another business structure or provide services to it.
A classic retail scheme where you sell goods and/or services to the end consumer.
You yourself are a consumer and sell goods/services to another buyer/consumer.
Your repeat customers or one-time customers perform services for you, such as promoting your products through reviews or through legitimate lobbying, such as including information about your products in their video blogs.
You sell your goods to government agencies, for example, through electronic tendering platforms.
There is an interaction between individuals and organizations, for example, when a patient makes an appointment at a public clinic using an online service.
Find the right niche and audience - 4 business techniques
Be sure to use all of these techniques as it will help you significantly reduce the cost of creating an online store and increase the profitability of your business.
Is it better to create a new website or update an existing one?
The first thing to start with is to decide what is better – to make a new site from scratch or to update the design and engine of an existing one? Of course, the solution to this dilemma will dramatically affect the cost of a new online store.
Answer to the question!
Updating a site makes sense when you already have a good site and just need to improve it a bit.
Of course, there is no definite answer here. It is necessary to evaluate the technology with which the existing site was created, how outdated it is. In addition, it is important to think through and comprehend the new business strategy and new ideas that you are going to implement. A simple redesign is appropriate when you already have a full-fledged site with an active audience, and you just want to implement new trends in web page design or make the site more convenient for visitors.
Creating a site from scratch gives more opportunities for creativity and taking into account customer‘s individual wishes. In addition, it is easier to install modern components on a new site, such as, for example, a recommendation engine. The new site is much easier to integrate with advanced payment systems. And, of course, the new site will be much more resistant to hacking attempts.
Of course, the cost of developing an online store from scratch will be higher than updating an existing site. But, of course, a well-designed platform, combined with a clear business strategy, will allow the investor to recoup the investment and make a profit.
Common mistakes while setting up an e-commerce website
Regardless of the type of task you want to solve by creating an online store, try to avoid the mistakes listed below. This will greatly reduce your development costs and will certainly significantly increase your chances of winning the competition in the e-commerce market.
Blindly following trends is not always the best solution. Especially when it comes to creating an online store. First and foremost, your website needs to sell products, so it‘s important to strike a balance between usability, beautiful design, and functionality.
This error does not even need further explanation. All information about the product should always be in front of the eyes of a potential buyer, and images should be of high quality and have sufficient resolution.
According to modern usability standards for online stores, a site visitor should receive the required information in no more than three clicks.
If your online store sells many items of goods, then it should be possible to filter the goods by price, popularity, as well as by a variety of distinguishing features. In addition, tracking visitor filtering activities provides valuable information for manufacturers. Oftentimes, the addition of one custom filter can make searches much easier and, consequently, dramatically increase sales.
The maximum acceptable page load time for a website is 3 seconds. And the point here is not only that the site, the pages of which open for a long time, will immediately be pessimized by search engines, and, as a result, the site traffic drop sharply. Studies show that most users do not wait for a page to open, but simply move to other Internet resources.
The user registration form should contain no more than three lines. It is also desirable that the possibility of quick registration by phone number or social network account be implemented.
In 2019, two billion users made purchases using mobile devices. And, if your online store is not adapted accordingly, you will lose a large number of customers, which means a lot of money.
According to numerous studies, 84 % of users trust product reviews on the pages of an online store. At the same time, a large number of reviews are fake. Do not abuse the number of reviews if you do not want to risk the reputation of your business.
The development of chatbots has been popular for a long time, and the progress in social networks has led to the emergence of a new term: social commerce.
Personalization and e-commerce are inseparable from each other today. The product recommendation system is just one of the elements of personalizing the interaction with customers. Are there any doubts about the need for such an approach? According to the Rejoiner, Amazon receives 35 % of its profits through a product recommendation system.
Not all visitors to your site speak the local state language. It makes sense to provide a separate version of the site for each local language group, as well as an English version.
Publish information about refund and delivery conditions on your website. The availability of such information could help them make a decision on the purchase of a particular product.
Standard engines or custom development?
The most popular engines for creating an online store are Shopify, Magento and Woocommerce. Any of these platforms allows you to create an online store for free or almost free. However, such an online store will be difficult to modify in order to implement the individual features of your business. The standard engine option is quite suitable for small businesses.
Custom development is a much more expensive and time-consuming way to create an online store. However, the return on investment in such a project can be much higher. However, it should be remembered that a professionally developed custom online store, will not be economically effective without a competent marketing strategy. Without such a strategy, the results of your startup will be unpredictable.
Be that as it may, an investor should always look for ways to cut costs. It is necessary to minimize the time between the start of drawing up a requirement specification and the release of the finished project to the market, without sacrificing quality. Here are some important steps you can take to get an effective online store while avoiding mistakes and unnecessary investments.
Stages of developing an online store
It is necessary to get a professional opinion and decide whether it makes sense to apply a conventional design or have to create a high-quality project from scratch.
Your first draft of the terms of reference will reflect the main sections of your future site and the navigation scheme. When creating a technical requirements list, you need to keep in mind the content of the site and the promotion strategy. Content topics in different sections should be consistent with each other. Make sure the content matches the overall concept of the site. The right decisions at the initial stage significantly prevent unnecessary expenses in the future.
At the stage of creating a color scheme and layout of the future site, it is advisable to order a designer to develop a corporate identity, taking into account modern web design trends and the subtleties of the psychological perception of a particular color scheme. For example, the blue and white colours are associated with security and stability, the green colour is associated with the environment, and the red colour does attract attention and inspires the need for quick decision making.
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a site that works but with a minimal set of features. This is what should be on the site of an online store at the MVP stage: a login form for registered users, at least some sections of product categories, at least one payment gateway for paying for an order.
At this stage, it is necessary to check the performance of the MVP, as well as get feedback on the site.
Analyzing customer feedback is extremely important because it often contains useful ideas that could lead you to change the entire project strategy. It is obvious that the timely change of the concept is extremely beneficial. On the one hand, unnecessary expenses can be avoided. On the other hand, there is a chance to significantly improve the quality of the project.
Now that you have numerous customer reviews, you can create a full-fledged online store. It is best to use the LEAN method – lean startup method . This means that you should analyze customer feedback each time you add a new feature set. This should be done until your customers are satisfied with the project and start buying goods in your new store.
There is no point in investing in an online store without a proper marketing and SEO strategy. Be sure to use social media, paid advertising, promoters as well as video marketing.
You will definitely need the services of highly qualified programmers to ensure the performance of the online store. Therefore, provide appropriate items of expenditure in your budget.
Online store page design
According to research, your online store design determines up to 94 % of the visitor‘s first visit experience, and it will be difficult to change this impression later on. This is why the appearance of the pages must be balanced. Ideally, the pages of the site should be visually pleasing, but at the same time not mask the important information necessary for effective sales.
Conversion Rate Optimization
The conversion rate is the ratio of the number of sales to the total number of site visitors, as a percentage. Optimization of this coefficient is a continuous process. This means that you should constantly monitor user activity on your site. The purpose of this tracking is to build a user-friendly layout and site navigation system that makes it easier for users to make purchases.
In other words, your site should not have logical and visual obstacles for the user. Tracking visitor activity allows you to find and eliminate such obstacles.
Ecommerce conversion funnel
The ecommerce conversion funnel has four levels:
- awareness;
- desire;
- желание;
- action.
It is necessary to ensure that each section of your site corresponds to the element of the conversion funnel. Literally every element of design and navigation is important here, their purpose is to help site visitors move through the elements of the funnel to making a purchase decision.
Modern design trends
Your site must be adapted to all screen formats of visitors, incl. for mobile devices. Modern trends are characterized by the use of animated backgrounds, asymmetrical layouts. Minimalism is still in vogue, the use of white space combined with original typography.
Recommended functionality of the online store
Modern content management systems allow you to implement many useful functions. Moreover, this can be done without significant efforts of the programmer. Here is what we recommend to include in your marketplace software algorithm:
The site visitor creates his personal account (i.e. an account in the database) and receives a personal account page. Be sure to implement the possibility of recovering a forgotten password. Login and registration forms must be protected by a captcha algorithm.
An online store cannot work without a shopping cart. Try to make the cart convenient, informative and ergonomic. It is necessary to exclude the disappearance of goods from the cart due to technical problems on the server.
These features will help you maintain a high volume of sales, and they are also very user-friendly. Every user gets more opportunities to choose products, compare them with each other and plan his future purchases.
These features will help you maintain a high volume of sales, and they are also very user-friendly. Every user gets more opportunities to choose products, compare them with each other and plan his future purchases. As soon as an account is created, the site will store the order history, personal data and other individual information. It becomes possible to dynamically change the prices of products for certain users, for example, for different categories of buyers. To do this, you need to program on the site discount system.
Create an opportunity for your customers to choose a payment method from the list of the most popular payment systems, for example, “Privatbank” or “PayPal”. Sometimes it turns out to be useful to create the possibility of paying with cash and cryptocurrencies. It is important that all financial transactions that visitors make on your site are securely secured using SSL technology or similar security measures.
These are all must-have features for your online store as they help shoppers find information easily without taking up call center staff time. The site should include links to your social media accounts, with their help, users can interact more closely with the store staff.
The feature articles section will help you kill two birds with one stone. With a blog, you can attract new visitors to your site from search engine pages, and provide customers with valuable information about your products, industry trends and promotions of the company.
With these features, you can manage non-standard features of your website. Tracking analytics is very important for making the right decisions regarding certain marketing strategies.
How much does it cost to create an online store?
There is no single answer to the question posed. The final amount of the contract is influenced by many factors, in particular, the complexity of the project, the technologies used and the time spent by the web studio staff. When preparing a budget, it must be remembered that after the launch of the MZHP, the cost of work can increase significantly.
Obviously, even the geographical location of the developers you hire to make the site affects the final amount of the contract. It is possible to make the final cost of the work only after a thorough discussion of all the details and the specification of the stages of the technical task in a separate document.
According to our experience, the minimum cost of creating an online store cannot be less than two hundred US dollars. The maximum cost of an online store, as is often the case, is limited only by the customer‘s budget. Projects based on advanced state-of-the-art web site technologies can cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Does it make sense to start an online business?
The answer is unequivocal and beyond doubt: there is a meaning. You don‘t have to be a marketing expert to see how every year more and more companies, in a variety of industries, are actively developing their Internet infrastructure. More and more potential customers stop visiting mega malls and start looking for their purchases on the Internet. To date, there are simply no serious enterprises left that have not acquired a fully functional online store.
Of course, there are always certain risks when you start a new business. However, you will have a good chance of success if you:
- have conducted a thorough market analysis;
- have made sure that your products are really in demand;
- were able to set attractive prices for their products;
- have created a modern website, the most convenient for buyers;
- have found reliable developers of their online store, with whom they managed to conclude a profitable contract for the development of an online store for an acceptable cost.
The employees of our web studio have all the necessary skills and rich experience in creating complex and effective Internet projects. Contact us and we will develop a modern online store with which you can reach your target audience and significantly increase the efficiency of your business.
