Tips For Creating a Successful Web Store

When you visit a bookstore, what do you see in the showcase at the front of the bookstore? You see the latest releases or the most popular books that the store has, right? You should use the same analogy when creating your online store as well. You should showcase the latest products that you are selling or products that you know are “winners” & have generated a lot of sales for you in the past. Before you read this be sure to also check out my other post on how to optimize your web/online store for the right keywords and my other post on what to sell online.

Just for a moment, imagine how it would be if the same bookstore that we talked about in the first paragraph, had a big sheet of paper with a list of the latest books written with very beautiful handwriting. Even if the bookstore had some excellent books, do you think it would generate a lot of sales? Other than the odd person who is interested in reading the list in detail, no one else would even pay a visit to the store. The same applies with your ecommerce store as well. The homepage should contain your bestsellers & should immediately attract the attention of your customers like saying, “This is why you are here at my online store, I want you to check out the following products”.

In brief, what I am telling you is that your homepage should not have a lot of content with lot of text even though it may be relevant. Put a lot of images. Make it aesthetically pleasing. The easy way to do this is to to choose a prewritten template from one of the established web store creators which is listed here.

The best example for this Google. One reason why Google is so popular, experts say, is because of the simplicity of its home page. There is nothing but white space with a big search toolbar in the middle of the page. Google wants you to search for content from its homepage because that’s what Google is, a search engine. The links that you see at the top of the page such as gmail, maps, photos etc. is all secondary.

I am not saying that your store should also be built in exactly the same way. But what I am suggesting is that it should be similar in that it should be nice & simple with images & a couple of boldly written links leading to other important parts of your website. Overall, try to keep the information as simple as possible.

Let’s go back to the bookstore for a moment again. Suppose there are 2 bookstores standing side-by-side. One has magnificent lighting with very attractive colours & lights used in the showcase. The other bookstore also, let’s assume, has the same books as the first one but has duller lighting with not much importance being given to lighting & appearance.

Which of the two shops would you go to first?

As long as you are not an abnormal person, you would go to the one with attractive lighting. The same applies to your store as well. You will have to “outshine your competitors”. Use attractive colours & attractive text size & font especially for your homepage. The best option that I would recommend is to check out the stores that have been prebuilt complete with templates & attractive fonts rather than building your online store from scratch.

There is one point that I would like to make clear. In the past, when I have share the same advice listed above, people have told me that despite using attractive colors & building an aesthetically pleasing website, they are not having much success with regard to traffic.

The solution to this is the amount of text that you put in. Make sure you put a lot of content in the different pages of your web store. Yes, I told you before not to put a lot of text & to only put images. But I was talking about the homepage of your web store. In the other pages of your online store, spread out all the content that you create.

Do not put all the written stuff that you have created in a single webpage on your website. Spread it out. Put a little information over here, a little information over there & build on those little pieces of information.

Don’t make the customer think twice about whether to trust your store or not. You have to help him make up his/her mind by sharing your expertise. In order to achieve this you will need a lot of text. So text does play an extremely important role in the success of your online store. Just don’t overdo it.

Another important thing that most beginners have with their websites is that they are unable to drive targeted traffic to their stores. The trick to achieve this is to research the market properly. Use keyword research software like SEO elite for this.

Summarizing what I said above, the homepage is the most important page of your website. Dress it up properly & your ecommerce store will be a big winner.