When you’re thinking about opening an online store for the first time, you need to consider a series of factors that will be crucial to making sure you’re on the road to success—although, as with everything, there are always exceptions.
In outline, these are the points to keep in mind:
• Choosing the platform
• Design
• Commitment
• Keeping the store “alive”
• Social media
• SEO
• Ongoing customer service
• Monitoring tools, customer reviews and online reputation
Your choice of platform can affect your store’s rankings and performance.
Broadly speaking, we need to make sure its structure is 100% indexable by search engines and properly optimized, that its interface is intuitive, and that it simplifies the work we’ll do every day. It should also be scalable so we’re ready when success arrives. It should let us edit meta tags, with friendly URLs, heading tags in its structure (H1, H2…), Rich Snippets… and fast load times.
Design: simplicity and functionality are your allies.
If we don’t have much experience, we should start with a simple, intuitive design for our potential customers. Later on, with data in hand, we can start getting creative and redesign the store.
Rely on the advice of the company you hire for the service—experience is very important.
If you don’t have time to devote to it, don’t start.
Today, succeeding with an online store means spending time on it every day to keep it “alive.” If we constantly change offers, run new promotions and contests, and engage socially, we have a good chance of success. Google currently pays a lot of attention to the social engagement of websites, and a store is no exception: if we get our potential customers involved, we’re already well ahead.
SEO, our best friend.
Today, if you ask me whether you need to invest in SEO, in 99% of cases I’ll give you a resounding yes. There may be 1% of products with an unsaturated market where investing in online marketing isn’t decisive for success, but everyone else shouldn’t even think about skipping these services: if we don’t invest in online marketing, our days are numbered. Fierce competition in almost every sector makes it essential. We must choose carefully who handles it, be wary of short-term promises and invest consistently.
Build loyalty the oldest way: with good customer service.
When a customer makes a purchase, we need to keep them informed about their order at every status change. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. You have to strike a balance in communications: send important messages and be direct and clear. If we overdo it, customers won’t read our emails or may even mark them as spam. I recommend rewarding their purchases to increase repeat buying across our customer base.
We have the data—let’s use it.
Google Analytics gives us a complete “X-ray” of our visitors’ profiles and how they use our online store. We need to learn to read all this data very well so we can take the right actions to improve any metric that helps us sell more.
If we receive input from our customers, we should also take it very seriously to learn what they think we’re doing right and wrong. Customers will shape our online store’s reputation on the internet, and it should be positive; if it isn’t, Google will penalize us. Remember: the customer is always right—and if they’re not, we let them be.
A simple way to approach creating an online store is to picture all these steps as if we were talking about a physical store. In the end, the creation process is very similar, and the basic concepts are identical for both types of business.
Is there anything else you’d add that you consider important?
