The events of 2020and 2021 have had a profound impact on shopping behavior and the retail industry. Many businesses moved online for the first time or expanded their online presence. In fact, ecommerce share of the retail market increased as much in the first half of 2020 as in the last five years.
And it isn’t just small businesses undergoing a digital transformation. Survey data from McKinsey indicates that businesses globally have accelerated the digitization of customer interaction by about three years.
Even when physical retail stores are back to business as usual, the lasting effects of COVID-19 on retail sales still loom large. If you have a physical store (or several), it may be time to bring your brick-and-mortar store into the world of online shopping. If you have an existing ecommerce store that hasn’t received enough love, now is a great time to make sure it’s a robust channel that can complement your offline brand as part of an omnichannel strategy.
You’ve probably noticed that there are dozens of SaaS products in the market claiming to ease your transition into ecommerce. But how do you navigate this experience and maximize your resources? How do you find the right tools and deploy them for maximum efficiency?
There are two major pieces to this approach:
- Lay the groundwork with pre-launch preparation.
- Optimize and market your online store.
This article will delve into the step in detail, and you’ll learn how to build an online shop that can work together with your offline store perfectly as part of your overall retail strategy. To optimize and market your online store you would visit our sister site: Go Meta Marketing
Lay the groundwork with pre-launch preparation
1. Determine your primary customers.
There’s a lot of planning that goes into building a successful ecommerce website, which is why you shouldn’t rush into building your virtual storefront without first doing some strategic planning.
Before anything else, you need to answer the following questions:
Who are your primary customers?
How will they find your website?
For one of our clients, identifying and servicing their primary market was especially easy.
“Being in a holiday town, we have a lot of transient customers who go home after the summers and holidays,” she said.
“The primary objective of launching the online store was to give these customers a chance to buy our clothing while they were away from school for the summer.” Our client had to quickly pivot to add an online channel for the first time when COVID-19 caused their 2 brick-and-mortar locations to close. While initially concerned how their existing customer base would respond to the change, they were pleasantly surprised to find their audience was receptive to the new channel.
Generally speaking, primary customers are going to be the ones who’ve already been consistently shopping at a brand’s brick-and-mortar store. This existing customer base is a major advantage, as businesses can get a running start with an audience that’s already interested in the brand.
Your ecommerce store will be able to have a larger reach than your physical presence, but it will likely appeal to much of the same customer base you’re used to serving in person. This is another reason, it’s important for your online and offline stores to work together as one clear integrated brand.
This year, over 2 billion people will be shopping online (Statista)
2. Choose your Platform.
It’s always scary stepping into the great digital unknown, but remember, you’re never doing it alone.
E-commerce platforms have been helping millions of traditional merchants bring their brick and mortar online since the mid ‘00s.
Now, thanks to the stratospheric growth of online shopping, there are a wide variety of platforms to choose from:
Option 1: Shopify
The big dog of e-commerce. Shopify’s massive popularity is down to the flexibility of its plans and the variety of its apps.
- Cost – 5 plans ranging from $9 per month (Shopify Lite) to $2000 per month (Shopify Plus). Every size of store is catered for.
- Apps – Almost 6,000 apps that let you do pretty much anything you can imagine. If it’s not in-built on Shopify, you can find it in the Shopify App Store.
Option 2: Magneto
Magneto is another huge e-commerce solution. It operates differently to Shopify, and might best be reserved for experienced merchants.
- Cost – 2 plans, the first one is free to set up, but merchants pay for everything that they use on their store. The second plan is for large-scale businesses that require specialised assistance, with no set price (but be prepared to open your wallet big time!)
- Apps – Magneto boasts an impressive 5,000 apps that help merchants improve their operations and conversions.
Option 3: Your Own Website
Setting up a store by yourself is very different to doing it on an established e-commerce platform. This should only be reserved for merchants with extensive design, coding and problem-solving skills.
- Cost – Very minimal costs to start with, especially if you have the aforementioned skills. Still, costs of maintenance, repair, hosting and hiring of experts can build quickly.
- Apps – You don’t need apps if you know how to code! It goes without saying that creating everything you want for your store can be incredibly complicated. We definitely don’t recommend this if you’re looking to move your brick and mortar store to e-commerce in a hassle-free manner.
Protip  There are a lot more options out there! Take your time researching which is right for you. |
3. Choose your domain name.
The next challenge is determining how to redirect focus to your online presence — and to do this, you need to pick a domain name where people can find you in the digital environment.
There are two ways you can go about picking your domain name:
Choose a catchy, SEO-friendly name that will resonate with your audience. Stick with your current brand name.
Both approaches have their advantages. An SEO-driven domain name gives you a chance to:
Extend your physical store brand in a new way.
Create an online marketplace that’s optimized for organic ranking and traffic.
The downside of choosing a new domain name is that you won’t be able to capitalize on the brand awareness you’ve developed with your brick-and-mortar business. With that said, choosing the right SEO-friendly domain name can make it easier for your company to reach a larger audience — especially when combined with a site that’s been optimized for text and voice search.
Tony our 2000th client had this to say “We are in the car industry and already established a solid word-of-mouth business. To go online we ended up with an SEO-friendly version: Georgia Car Mechanics. We’ve owned the family name website since 1998, but that site is purely informational. The decision to go with a more SEO-friendly domain was to find something more universal across our selling area (U.S. state Georgia target audience).”
Ultimately, if your online marketplace depends on organic traffic, you might want to drop your brick-and-mortar name in exchange for something more SEO-friendly.
While it can be more work in the beginning stages as you create more awareness around your digital brand, it can help your brand in the long run as your organic SEO ranking increases more quickly.
3. Select initial products to place online.
Ideally, your inventory or services should be strategically chosen to appeal to a broader audience — especially when you’re just starting out.
If you’ve got a wide selection of products to choose from in your brick-and-mortar store, we recommend narrowing your inventory down to approximately 100 of the best-selling items for your online marketplace.
“We started with offering tops, bottoms, shoes, dresses, and rompers,” said Tahnee.
“Of course, we added more as needed and reorganized so our list of categories and subcategories evolved based on demand and trends.”
When choosing products to carry online, make sure to choose items which are:
- Top sellers in your brick-and-mortar store.
- Items you receive special requests or calls for 2-3x per month.
Another great way to optimize your online inventory is by stocking it with products that are nationally popular. That way, you’re able to start out with an appeal to a wider audience (rather than only targeting specific segments of the market).
4. Write custom page titles and meta descriptions.
If you have a large catalog that you’re hoping to get launched or expanded quickly, you won’t have time to write product descriptions for potentially 100 plus items.
Besides, full-length descriptions aren’t something you exactly want to rush through.
Fortunately, you can quickly come up with a collection of meta descriptions and page titles to get your online marketplace operational in the meantime.
Here’s how:
Compile all your products and product data into a CSV file.
Use the following format for titles and meta descriptions:{Product Name} is a {type of product or category} used in/for {primary uses}.
If your product happens to come in various sizes and colors, or if it’s important that your buyer knows its dimensions, add those details in the meta description.
Remember: Your page titles and meta descriptions aren’t supposed to be in-depth.
You just want to get something custom on the page that highlights what you’re retailing.
As you expand your site and make it a stronger sales channel, you can always revisit and refine your descriptions over time, expanding them after the site is up and running.
5. Take pictures of your inventory.
Using original photos rather than stock pictures can give you a much-needed SEO boost.
If you have a basic camera or smartphone, you can take professional-grade product photography for your store. All you need is a piece of white paper to use as a background.
“Taking original images and having original image descriptions helps you rank far above other retailers using stock photos. Having alt tags on all images is important,” Jhett, D/CEO of Go Digital Creators commented.
“Simply having the product name and perhaps other features would help such as side, front or back.”
If you’re working in an industry like fashion or design, you’ll need to schedule extra time to take quality product pictures — especially if your website involves models.
For one client, who works in an aesthetically-based field, taking pictures of inventory was one of the more time-consuming processes. However, she outsourced all the editing work to us to handle this at a fraction of the cost she would pay elsewhere.
Having a good quality camera combined with cheap quality editing skills makes for creating attention-grabbing, stunning images that help your website stand out.
6. Determine your shipping costs.
The last thing your customers want is to watch their total cost skyrocket at the end of checkout. Consumers don’t like unexpected fees, which is something you want to be mindful of when setting your shipping costs and other fees.
We recommend going with a flat rate on shipping, as well as offering free or discounted shipping for customers who spend a certain amount of money.
In the case of our automotive client they offered free shipping on orders over $100.
“This helps our conversion rate by setting up total cost expectations right away and removing surprise costs during checkout.
It also helps with organic advertising as a quick callout to “Free Shipping.” Consider a meta description that says ‘Free Shipping over $100’ at the end of it.”
Research shows online shoppers are often deterred by additional costs that pop up during checkout.
This method helped boost sales by giving the customer a clear idea of how much they’ll pay throughout the entire purchasing journey.
Here are some ways you can use shipping costs to drive sales on your website:
- Display shipping fees (as well as other expenses like taxes and processing fees) in a table on your website and/or item pages where customers can see.
- Offer free or discounted shipping for customers who spend above a certain amount.
- Add a line into your metadata to include the following in your item description: Free/DiscountedShipping on orders over ___ to encourage customers to spend more, and increase your Average Order Value.
- Offer local customers options for click and collect, so they can save on shipping costs. This also encourages them to potentially buy more when they come into your physical store.
7. Choose your payment methods.
There are two things you should keep in mind when choosing your payment methods:
What’s the easiest payment method to set up?
How can you accommodate a wider audience?
Your ecommerce platform will usually offer connections to a number of popular payment gateways. For example, Go Digital Creators provides 30 payment gateways integrations out-of-the-box serving more than 65 countries, as well as integrations for the most popular digital and mobile wallets.
Additionally, you will want your POS system to integrate easily with your online store. When it comes to maximizing convenience, there are a number of great options for POS systems for ecommerce including Vend, Heartland Retail, ConnectPOS and Square. These can be integrated into your digital marketplace in a couple of minutes and sync with your brick-and-mortar inventory and checkout.
Moreover, connecting your POS with your store allows you to see all of your sales metrics in a single dashboard. Keep track of sales performance, inventory and more across your online and offline channels without having to manage multiple tabs.
8. Take care of your security and tax details.
Taxes and security are two things you want to make sure you have sorted before launching your store. Otherwise, you’ll run into issues later that could inhibit your growth and revenue.
The good news is that tax compliance has never been easier with the help of programs like:
- Avalara: Designed to help ecommerce businesses of all sizes, Avalara automates calculations, exemptions and filings to ensure that your company is tax compliant from day one. Also, its platform comes ready to integrate with more than 600 ecommerce and ERP applications.
- TaxJar: Like Avalara, TaxJar automates filings, reporting and sales tax calculations to ensure that your business doesn’t make any unnecessary compliance slip-ups. Moreover, TaxJar is trusted by more than 10,000 organizations, including Coca-Cola, Dell and the American Cancer Society.
You also want to make sure that your customers’ information is protected from data breaches. This can be done by adding an SSL certificate to your website. Go Digital Creators offers free SSL certificates to all digital stores regardless of service plan and can easily walk you through the process of securing your digital marketplace.
9. Come up with an ironclad shipping and refund policy.
Unless your brick-and-mortar store is already a nationally recognized brand, you’re going to need to spend time building relationships with your customers.
One way to build trust between you and your shoppers is by being upfront about your shipping and refund policies.
- Create a webpage highlighting your shipping and return policies, as well as any other important information the customer should know.
- Provide links to frequently asked questions (FAQs) in your emails to customers.
Linking shipping and refund-related FAQs in emails is a good way to improve customer service and work more efficiently.
By providing links in emails, you are able to prevent additional contacts through your customer support channels.
Typical questions are ‘What does this status mean’ or ‘When is my order going to ship’ or ‘I need to return this,’ so making sure that those things are right up front in their emails they receive helps to deflect that stuff. It saves us time and cuts service costs in the long-run.”
Make it easy for customers to return their products. Give shoppers a generous timeframe to return their items — we recommend a 20-day return window.
- For many customers, returning online purchases can feel like a hassle.
Coming up with a refund policy that makes returns more efficient is an important step towards building customer loyalty and increasing conversion rates.
Another way to make shipping more convenient is to use reusable boxes.
Good shipping starts with inventory management.
For most retail products, warehouses are best organized with stacks of picking bins that can be numbered and labeled, so you know what’s where when fulfilling orders.
I’d recommend adopting these principles early, even if your ‘warehouse’ is a cupboard under the stairs.
Final: Cost Comparison for Offline vs Online
How much does a brick and mortar store cost you right now? Chances are, even the most efficient physical stores spend more money on upkeep than online stores do.
Here are a few things you can save on:
Brick and Mortar
Online
Rent
A physical building with bills including water, gas, electricity and others.
A $20 annual domain name and a $79 per month plan on Shopify.
Storage
1 square foot of storage space in a warehouse costs $0.85 per month on average, not including bills. Rental usually reaches into thousands of dollars per month.
E-commerce allows you to automate your storage and re-ordering workflow, which helps you save on staffing and operation costs. You can also take advantage of warehouse services such as the Shopify Fulfillment Network.
Marketing
Traditional advertising is nowhere near as effective as it used to be, and it costs way more than the online alternative.
Self-written blog posts, social media posts and user-generated content are the way to sell your products in 2021. They take a while to gain traction, but can be incredibly expensive to set up!
in Fort Launderdale.