Creating an online store today can take you less than 10 minutes. But, to grow an online store and build a profitable online sales project in 2021, you’ll need to have a good eCommerce knowledge base and a thorough plan.
In this article, I’m going to tell you the four most important steps you need to know about in order to set up and operate a profitable, scalable, and sustainable online store over time. Taking a few minutes to read these paragraphs can save you a lot of mistakes and headaches in the future.
Must Read: Basic Rules on How to Start an Online Store
Let’s see them in detail.
1. Set Up Your Store: Ecommerce Platforms
In the market, there are many good platforms for eCommerce. But at this point, your choice should be based on which is the most suitable for you and your business.
If you are starting in eCommerce and you don’t have much technical knowledge, a simple and intuitive platform may be the most appropriate. Take a look at this review of Sarah Chrisp’s course in case you are interested in learning about eCommerce.
If that’s the case, Shopify is a good alternative that will allow you to start up, sell, and get paid quickly. Then there are platforms like Woocommerce, which is ideal if you have certain technical skills and would like to be in control and not depend on a rented solution. Along the same lines, there is the Prestashop technology, which allows you to set up your eCommerce, but you need more technical and development knowledge to be able to refine the details.
2. Build Your Customer Base
If you want to grow your store, you need visitors, right? So you should really pay attention to how to promote the online presence of your brand.
Now, attracting customers who buy from you is not enough. It’s necessary to turn them into fans or prescribers of your brand. Loyal customers will choose you as their first purchase option and will make recurring purchases.
Here are some marketing strategy-based ideas you can use for that:
- Generate original and quality content
- SEO is still key
- Combine SEO with SEM
- See where your users are: social networks
- Attract more customers with email campaigns
3. Repeat: Logistics Matter
Simply put, it’s crucial to know what are the factors that determine the cost of shipping online orders. But price shouldn’t be the only determining factor. Try to handle various rates from logistics operators. The ideal is to have 3 or 4 so you can compare and ask them to improve their offer.
In addition, this way your customer can choose the shipping option that best suits them. (There are a lot of people willing to pay more if they can get the delivery time shortened, don’t forget that)
4. Start Scaling Your Online Store
Now, there are three key areas you’ll have to work from now on if you want to grow your online store and turn it into a successful business:
- Profitability. It’s the ability that something has to generate sufficient profit or profit.
- Scalability. Business scalability is achieved when revenues increase rapidly while keeping fixed costs low, so the profit margin is always positive.
- Sustainability. Finally, being sustainable, in this context, refers to an ecommerce being able to remain current over time while remaining profitable.
To grow in these three areas, the key is not only to get more clients. Nor is it just working on the average order amount to make it grow. Nor is it caring for every existing customer, trying to get their loyalty so that they buy more often.
The key is to do it all at once to take advantage of math:
If you get NEW customers, while you improve the average value of ALL orders and also ensure that ALL customers (new and old) buy more frequently, you’ll have better results than improving these indicators independently.
Think about it this way:
- Imagine that you get 10% more customers with an acquisition marketing effort.
- At the same time, you increase the average amount of each order in your online store by 10%, of all orders, through crossell, upsell and sales funnel management techniques.
- And you also improve recurrence by 10% through customer loyalty actions and marketing automation.
The interesting fact is that the impact on accumulated sales is 33% (instead of the expected 30% that would arise from 10% + 10% + 10%).
That is, you already have 3% more sales than you have achieved without effort, simply by working on these three actions at the same time.
Conclusion
Ecommerce is a very good alternative to the problems that the physical channel is having these days, but it has its challenges, its difficulties, and its competition. You need to surround yourself with the best weapons to fight the battle of online sales.
I encourage you to consider e-commerce as a necessity. Analyze what’s going to be sold, how, to whom, for how much, and where. Knowing the sector is of vital importance to maximize the chances of success when selling online, so perhaps investing in good online e-commerce courses could be a wise move.
Good luck!
