The challenge of creating an eCommerce website online shouldn’t feel unsurmountable for businesses, and there are plenty of ways to appeal to customers without having to pay out significant sums of money to developers and marketing professionals along the way.
Although the internet has become a sprawling space that’s cluttered with businesses trying to sell one thing or another, there’s also plenty of room for intelligent website owners to thrive and build successful online eCommerce stores.
(Image: CED Commerce)
As we can see, there are plenty of challenges that eCommerce stores face today, and for matters relating to security threats, converting buyer interest into intent, preventing cart abandonment, and competing against rivals, your website can play a significant role.
With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at 5 reasons why creating a successful and competitive eCommerce store doesn’t have to involve breaking the bank:
Pick Your eCommerce Platform Wisely
When looking after the pennies and choosing the right eCommerce platform to get you started, it’s important to assess your options carefully. At present, WooCommerce and Shopify are among the most popular choices when starting an eCommerce store, and both can help you save money in getting your venture off the ground.
Most notably, WooCommerce is a free platform to use and can be integrated into WordPress–meaning that you can create your eCommerce store wholly within WordPress.
If you have the time and knowledge, it’s possible to create your eCommerce site for free within WordPress, although WooCommerce does also have a selection of premium extension plugins that can cost between £50 and £100 to utilise over the course of a year–so bear this in mind when calculating your cash flow.
One of the best things about WooCommerce is that it’s wholly open-source, which means that there are hundreds of thousands of web teams to call who are specialists in the platform.
To set up an eCommerce store via Shopify, you’re required to create a premium account within the platform. The costs associated with Shopify are clearer, with monthly breakdowns based on the features you require. While Shopify includes core commerce functionality, many advanced capabilities, such as conversion optimisation tools for Shopify stores, are handled through third-party apps and may involve additional costs. WooCommerce, on the other hand, may involve additional open-source development costs.
Although both platforms offer their own individual perks, WooCommerce can be a great cost-effective solution if you have the skills to build a website via WordPress. If you’re not so confident in creating your own site, Shopify could be a safer solution.
Personalise Your Website with High-Quality Content
Because the internet is such a competitive place, it certainly pays to make your website stand out from the crowd with high-quality images and website graphics.
Although matters relating to copywriting can make it difficult to source visually engaging content for your eCommerce site for free, platforms like Powered Template can act as a great extensive library for free content to use on-site–boasting 10,000s of free images, illustrations, and graphics to download.
User experience is essential for any successful website, and by using impactful images and text that resonates with your audience, you can actively help to win new customers and inspire more visitors to keep returning to your pages.
However, pages also need to load fast. With web page abandonment rates climbing above 25% after a four-second delay, it’s important to avoid cluttering up pages with heavy images that won’t load fast enough.
Don’t Waste Money Targeting the Wrong Customers
In the world of eCommerce, time certainly means money. When it comes to marketing, both time and money can be lost in targeting the wrong customers.
Whether you’re running targeted ads or creating content to draw in new traffic, you’re simply wasting your time and resources if you don’t know who you’re actually looking for.
With this in mind, it’s essential that you take the time to research what your customer profile looks like, how old they are, where they’re based, and what they’re interested in. This will help to show you exactly where you should be looking to place your ads and how you should theme your on-site content.
Allocate Time Towards Updating and Spring Cleaning Pages
It can be tempting to hire an SEO agency or web developer to oversee your content and page functionality, but these could both be tasks that you can undertake yourself.
Depending on the scale of your venture, it may be a little tricky to juggle creating content and looking through your pages for errors or difficulties in usability, but it can really pay dividends in the long run as more traffic flows onto your site to consume the articles you’ve published on your blog.
This also calls for you to be ruthless from time to time. Take a look at what is and isn’t working on your site, and don’t be afraid to scrap the content within a page altogether to replace it with something fresher, more relevant, and more interesting.
Use Analytics to Make Measured Changes
You don’t need to pay through the nose for rich traffic insights into your eCommerce platform. Analytics platforms like Google Analytics and free tools from your website providers can do a good job of showing which of your pages are popular, which aren’t, and what visitors you’re attracting to your site.
With this information, you’ll be capable of making intelligent and measured changes to your pages to improve the user experience and appeal more directly to your target demographic.
Is one page causing abandonments in the checkout process? Take a look at it and analyse what can be changed. Is one of your blog posts gaining more traffic than the others? Look at what it is that’s causing your article to become more popular and take it into consideration for future content.
Fundamentally, it’s entirely possible to create a vibrant and successful eCommerce store without having to spend big on developers and marketers in order to win conversions. Although it calls for more introspection and research, the rewards can be lucrative for business owners and can provide a springboard for future growth.
- Custom web design
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- Full management training
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Article by Pankaj Shah: DCP WordPress Web Design
