Guest Post by Kenneth Evans
Kenneth Evans is a Content Marketing Strategist for Top App Development Companies, a research platform for app development companies in USA, UK, India, UAE, Australia and around the world. He has been contributing to various blogging platforms and Forums. Connect with him on Twitter and Facebook.
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To create a successful online store, you need more than just a great idea. You need a strategy, the right infrastructure, and good tools to get started.
How to create an online store with a shopping cart? How to sell products on the internet? These are some of the many questions that business owners who already have their products online or who are thinking of selling them with the help of the internet always ask. Although today there are many facilities to install a virtual store, we need to take into account several technical and strategic aspects to be successful with our project.
We know that it is not enough to have a stunning, well-designed web page in which they have invested a lot of money and spend days, months and even years whereas you aren’t making sales. Everything has to do with your planning.
Business owners now realize that having an online store is not as easy as it seems.
Before Creating an Online Store
Before creating an online store, it must be taken into account that it is a myth that it is very much easier to sell on the internet than in person. However, once there is a defined plan and strategy, and your audience becomes bigger, you can have a lot more scope, and then you will realize that the potential is infinite.
• Avoid making the mistake of pretending that only by the fact of having an online store, sales will come in bulk and by themselves without doing anything else.
• Have a strategy to attract your customers. Once you enter the internet, you become like a grain of sand in a desert, nobody knows you, and it is more difficult to establish a relationship of trust online than in person.
Strategy to attract customers to your online store
To contribute value, have a good image and be professional, be transparent and honest. This is what generates consumer’s confidence towards your business.
You can’t sell your product by its name or characteristics. You should be able to convince the potential customers to purchase your product. You have to tell them how the product or service can benefit them.
You should have a blog. It will give you more interaction with your audience, and you can works 24 hours thereby attracting visitors and transmitting confidence which will generate sales more easily.
Given that at first, nobody knows you, you are recommended to network with other people who already have some visibility in the sector. Seeing you work with someone they already trust will make them have some trust in you. Take into account that networking and working together in a project should be with a win-win objective, that is, that they promote each other to accelerate the growth process.
Recommendations To Create Your Online Store
Installing an online store depends on the person and situation of each business, budget, the time you have to devote to the project and the need or urgency you have to make that business profitable.
1. If you have a small budget, but you have time, do it yourself. With WordPress and Woocommerce you can easily make a basic online store without spending so much time, and you’re ready to start selling.
Keep this in mind: if there is no budget and you want to sell you have to make the time to do it yourself, so you have to sacrifice some things.
2. If you do not have time and you have money, hire someone to do it for you. You simply forget to dedicate time to all the technical part, and that person you hire is responsible for the installation of ecommerce. You only have to provide the product information.
3. Another viable option to start is to make use of platforms like Shopify. Once you open your account, you will have to add your products, and after some moments, you have everything ready to be able to sell your products on the Internet.
Once you are growing and you have the need to own your online store, you do it yourself using one of the first two options.
Tools that we will need to create a successful online store
So for the assembly of your online store, you will need these tools:
1. Buy a domain: the first thing you have to do is choose the domain, that is, a name for your website, with an extension, which may be .com, .net, .org. among others. Normally, when you hire the hosting service, it will be included in the first year. There are other platforms where you can buy it and then add it to the server you have.
2. Hire a good managed WordPress hosting service: This is the most important thing when creating an online project, so take care of having a quality hosting that solves any problem when it occurs.
3. Choose a good template for your WordPress: It is essential that you have a theme in your online store that is clean in code to promote SEO, easy to customize and have good support.
4. Use a visual layout for the creation of pages: If you make add an amazing plugin to a good template, you will have an excellent visual layout. With such combo, you are going to create a fast, efficient and comfortable online store to personalize.
5. Plugin to integrate the online store: the last essential element in the creation is the WooCommerce WordPress plugin. With this free tool, you will be able to transform your website into a virtual store quickly.
For a long time, WooCommerce is the reference tool to create online stores. However, one of the most criticized points of this plugin is its complexity when it comes to customize our e-commerce freely. Normally WooCommerce adds the functionalities, while the template on which we work is the one that manages the visual section.
This is a limitation that in other types of websites is already overcome thanks to the visual layout, with these editors we can do almost what we want regardless of the template we are using.
It would be nice to have that freedom also in virtual stores, right?
Create your online store and use the strategy that suits your business.
