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Tips to Creating a Successful Ecommerce Store

posted by Danny on August 9th, 2009, in Business | 4 Comments

Ecommerce is the buying and selling of goods through the internet. It has seen an incredible growth over the past years, with new ecommerce stores popping up every day. With so much competition you will need to know what makes a successful ecommerce store and the essential tips required to create one. Below is a list of necessary steps you may need to take to create a successful ecommerce store.

1. Choose your Niche & be focused

Probably the most important part of your entire ecommerce store will be what you decide to focus on. Nowadays with so many ecommerce stores selling every item under the sun, it’s important that you focus on a specific topic. If you tried selling many different kinds of products you will be selling to a mass market, which opens yourself up to high levels of competition. The only way to survive in such a market would be with a huge marketing budget and cheaper products than rivals.

A much better approach is to specify in a particular niche such as jigsaw puzzles. This allows you to focus on a range of high quality jigsaw puzzles, targeting a small community of enthusiastic people interested in jigsaws. By doing this you vastly narrow your competition, allowing you to become this best in your niche. Once you have conquered the jigsaw niche you are able to expand into other niches which are relevant to jigsaws, such as other kinds of puzzles or board games.

2. Branding & Domain name

Another important factor you need to address when setting up your ecommerce is the brand name/image. This involves your ecommerce store name & domain name. There are two approaches you can take when choosing your store/domain name. The first is a relevant name telling the customer exactly what you do. For example a jigsaw company called, “Quality Jigsaws”, www.qualityjigsaws.com. This is the best approach as long as you have no interest in selling a variety of products or expanding in the future.

If you are interested in the future expansion of your store then a short catchy name that has a more general meaning is appropriate. For example “Amazon.com” & “Topshop.com”.
Managing to obtain a good .com domain name is becoming extremely difficult. I suggest using Godaddy’s bulk domain search. This allows you to try up to 500 different domains at the same time, then register the free ones. Another method of obtaining a good domain name is by registering expiring domain names. A good website designed specifically for this is pool.com.

3. Customer Experience & Service

When a potential customer visits your ecommerce website they need to be drawn into it and your products. This is accomplished by having a nicely designed website with clear navigation and functionality. Make sure your website is friendly in its design, sometimes the simplest designs are the best. However you will need to find a balance because you will need a lot of functionality to compete with most modern ecommerce stores, as explained later in this post.

Customer service is also critical to ensure future success. Unhappy customers aren’t likely to purchase your products, they are also likely never to return. The key is to have a good customer experience, which in turn will lead to sales and repeat customers. This can easily be achieved by simply responding to customers enquiries promptly and politely. Also when a products been purchased make sure to stick to delivery dates, as well as offering refunds when necessary.

4. Functionality – Choosing your software

Nowadays ecommerce stores have become incredibly technical with massive amounts of functionality. Your online shop should be equipped with such features as advanced product management, customer accounts, order management (with multiple payment types), shipping and tax options, data security and integrity, search engine options (custom meta keywords & URLs) and advanced visitor and sales tracking/analytics.
There are many different types of shopping cart available. Some are free and others cost. I don’t think this should factor into your decision, as choosing the right software could prove critical. When deciding also take into account how easily customisable the front-end of your store is. If it’s incredibly difficult to design then you’re likely to stick with their basic template.
For free ecommerce software I recommend using Magento. It has more functionality in its admin panel than any other free software I’ve seen. It also has a multitude of templates that can be used for the front end, eliminating the design aspect.

If you are willing to spend money on software then I strongly recommend Avactis. This is what I’m using. It has all the functionality you could possibly want, plus the front-end is very easily customisable. They use a system whereby they turning every front-end feature into a PHP function. All you have to do is call the function. For example, show_ categories(); will display the categories you’ve added in the admin panel. It’s quite similar to WordPress in this respect, making it very easy to create beautiful designs with all required functionality built around it.

5. Adwords vs Organic – Methods of Obtaining Traffic

Once your ecommerce store is ready to go the next challenge is obtaining substantial levels of traffic, making your efforts worthwhile. However it’s not all about traffic, you can buy traffic cheaply, although I don’t recommend it as it’s not quality traffic. If you were to have 10,000 people visiting your site via sources non-related to your niche then you’re likely to make no sales. If you were to have 100 visitors to your site, that are specifically looking for products your selling, then you are likely to make at least a few sales.

Therefore it’s important to target your niche. I find the best two ways of gaining quality visitors is ranking high for targeted keywords in Google (organic) or using Adwords.

Adwords

Adwords is a tool created by Google (pay per click advertising in their search results). When starting your store it’s unlikely you will rank highly for any keywords in Google, this will take time, content and links. However by using Adwords you can target specific key terms to appear in the search results. Although you must beware, by using Adwords it costs you every time someone visits your website. So it’s important that you have a high conversion rate. This way you will be making enough sales to pay for Adwords and make a profit. For example you have 100 visitors via Adwords. Each click costs you 25 cents. Therefore 100 visitors costs $25. Let’s say you make $20 profit per item sold. With an average conversion rate of around 3.4% you will make 3.4 sales which equals $68. Now subtract the Adwords cost and you have made a profit of $46.

Usually the more specialised your niche the higher the conversion rate. Average is around 6%. This is why it’s so important that the design entices your visitors to make a purchase. Imagine a 6% conversion rate and paying $200 a month for Adwords. You will be making a profit of $960! However this doesn’t work for all Adwords campaigns. It depends on the cost of being at the top for a high traffic keyword. It’s best to run some initial experiments to see how it plays out.

Organic

Organic traffic from Google will be a lot harder to get. This will require hard work and patience. Below are a few tips on how you can improve your organic traffic:

• SEO Friendly URLs (productname_001.html)
• Link building (Buying links or naturally obtaining them)
• Landing pages with lots of content about specific keywords your targeting
• Page title, Meta keywords & description filled with the key terms your targeting

I’m not going to divulge into SEO to much as there are hundreds of eBooks and articles out there. But the above list is a good start. The trick to being successful in Google consists of 3 words; content, relevance and links.

Conclusion

To conclude this article I would like to remind you that it’s most likely going to take you time and a lot of work to make a success out of any online business. But keep in mind the above tips and I hope it helps you in becoming an online success!