Setting up Your Online Store

Now that you know what you have to do before starting your own online store, it is time to start building it. In order to achieve this, you would have to picture yourself when you are about to start a shop in the “real” world. This is important since the whole set up of your online store will be based on which customers you are targeting. An important thing that you could do would be to implement the right SEO techniques for your ecommerce store. Here are some points that you may consider in order to help you with the whole process:·

What subjects do you have a lot of knowledge about?

This is extremely important since you would have to convert the customers that you are getting from just “interested people” to “buyers”. You will have to convince them to buy from your store & in order to do that you will need to have solid knowledge about what you are selling.

How enthusiastic are you?

Can you transfer the energy, the passion, the enthusiasm in you to your visitors as well? This is a really important step in setting up your ecommerce store because people won’t stay watching your store for long. Whatever your sales letter or sales pitch is will have to be delivered to them within a few seconds after they visit your web store. Once you have their attention, you will need to impress them with your enthusiasm & knowledge about the products. This will impress them a great deal & will probably even convert them from just visitors to buyers.

What is your budget?

This is an extremely important question as, like in real life, there will be some initial investments that you will make to set up your store properly. This may include advertising costs, shipping costs etc. Just like in real life, you will have to carefully plan your budget. The returns can be higher with an online store than a “real life” store because people like to sit at their homes & do everything. This includes shopping as well which is good news for your ecommerce store. I am telling you about this because I want you to fully understand that ecommerce stores are gaining huge amounts of popularity every day. If you have done any kind of shopping online, you may have done it through an online store without realizing it because they look just like any other website. So, you are going to have to calculate the profits that you are going to make per item sold & spend accordingly.

Are you targeting your customers geographically?

Before you start you will have to decide if the products you are selling on your online store will attract people only from certain areas in the world. For example, if you are selling a book on “Chinese food” & promoting it on the internet all over the world & not specifically in China, then you may end up losing a lot of money. Chinese food may not be good example here as people from other countries may be interested in trying out Chinese food.

But you get what I am staying, right?

Trust me; it always pays if you promote your online business in a particular area. If you are saying that it is not possible to promote something in a particular area on the internet as people from all over the world can view your content, think again. If you are in Canada & search for something on Google, priority will be given to those websites that have been advertised specifically in Canada.

There are many other factors that are extremely important & have to be used for setting up your online store & I will address those points in one of my future posts. There is one fundamental difference between doing business online & doing business in “real life”. Research has shown that good businesses in real life have succeeded not only because of the quality of their products but also because of advertising. Now in real life, verbal skills are extremely important as that is the primary mode of communication between the customers & the visitors. But in the case of your websites, your writing skills are more important.

Everyone is faceless on the Internet. You don’t know your customers & your customers don’t know you. It is your job to “connect” to your customers by writing effectively. So, writing good sales pitches & sales letters that have a personal factor in them is important in the overall set up of your online store. This will not only generate sales from the customers that do visit your web store, but also you can continue to keep in touch with them about the products that you are planning to sell in the future.

Having read the above, you may have generated some ideas for . More interesting posts on which e-commerce software to use & more tips on "making your store a success" coming up. Watch out for them.