Shopping online is so easy that anyone can do it from the comfort of their bed, so it's not hard to understand why so many people are turning to e-commerce for their everyday shopping. Selling your products online is a great way to reach more people , but you obviously need to create an online store and take different actions to win over your customers.
To help you start your online store and sell more online , we share this guide where we cover everything you need to know: from the first steps to how to measure the success of your store when it is up and running.
Table of Contents
Research, observe and learn from your competition
Choose a niche market
Research the competition in the digital world
Choose the products you are going to sell (either from your catalog or from scratch)
Check the applicable legal requirements
Establish your business plan
Calculate the ideal price for your online products
Create your website to sell online
Create engaging content
Take captivating photos of your products
Optimize your texts, images and videos for search engines
Includes contact information and testimonials
Select the payment and shipping methods you will offer
Include links to your brand's social media
Promote your products everywhere!
Do Email Marketing
Use Google Analytics and heatmaps to measure results and adjust your strategy
Tips for starting to sell online
We begin with the fundamental steps to properly establish your business, on and off the Internet…
1. Research, observe and learn from your competition
You can't start an online business without knowing what audience you need to convince. And also what competition you'll face.
Having competition is not a bad thing, quite the opposite. There is a market in which saint kitts and nevis business email list you can place your products, but always providing something that makes you different from the rest.
Conducting market research will help you know how you want to position yourself (the best, the cheapest...), understand consumers' purchasing intentions, the purchasing life cycle, the growth of the market you want to enter, or the business opportunities to make the best decisions.
2. Choose a niche market
The best business ideas often come from hobbies and passions where an opportunity is discovered in a niche that no one is serving.
For example, pet products are always popular in the e-commerce space, but competition can be high. However, if you choose a niche like organic pet products, there are fewer sellers offering similar products and a greater opportunity to refine your catalog.
Look for keywords or phrases that your target market is likely to use to find your niche product or service, and consider whether the market is saturated.
If that's the case, it could cost you additional money and time to stand out in an already crowded market. Sometimes, it's better to start small in an underserved market.
3. Research the competition in the digital world
Once you have good feedback on your product, research your competitors and get an insight into the online market.
Start by searching and visiting popular product review sites, where you can find lists of the best online portals for specific categories, written by experts. Read what the experts rate and visit their sites to see how they are doing. Also, check out customer reviews to learn what they like and dislike about them.
You can also look for more information through social media. Are people happy with the company or are there complaints on their profiles? This exercise will give you an idea of how loyal these people are to competing brands. You should also check if these brands respond to customer questions and complaints, and note down what common problems might be.
Subscribing to your competitors’ email lists is another effective way to analyze how they communicate with your target audience. Take note of their pricing and promotion strategies, which we will detail later in this post.
Research keywords and difficulty to position yourself in the sector
Use a keyword planner tool like Moz, Semrush, or Google Keyword Planner. These tools will show you the search volumes for a specific keyword, as well as the level of competition there is to rank for it.
When researching keywords, it's important to strike a balance between search volume and competition: there's little point in targeting a keyword that no one is searching for, but it's also best to avoid highly competitive terms.
Check the search results (SERPs)
Once you start to know which keywords you want to target, add them to a search engine and review the results. See who is ranking at the top, visit their pages, and ask yourself some of their questions:
How are you including those keywords in the text of the website?
How do you use language at the brand level?
Are there any design elements that stand out?
