The e-commerce industry is booming at a fast pace. According to a report of Statista, in 2017, e-commerce was responsible for around $2.3 trillion in sales. Seeing the opportunity, businesses have started making an investment in e-commerce website development. And why not? It is one of the effective ways to generate more sales.
However, building an online store is not as easy as it seems. It has its own challenges. As a large number of web users will be visiting your store, it can be daunting for you to manage it. In this post, we have discussed 5 things that you should know before developing your eCommerce website.
Let’s have a look at them:
1. Choose Right eCommerce Platform and Hosting Partner
It is one of the most crucial factors to consider before you proceed with eCommerce website development. Go for eCommerce platform according to your needs. Determine your requirements and choose a platform that you find can fulfill the needs of your growing online store.
Magento is a well-known content management system that is designed specifically for eCommerce websites. If you accompany your Magento-based site with the right hosting service, this platform has the potential to take your online business to the next level. So, look for a reliable Magento hosting provider that offers configurations for running Magento smoothly.
In addition to Magento, WooCommerce, Drupal, Shopify, and Joomla are a few popular options that you can consider.
2. Choose a Perfect Theme for Your Store
Theme selection plays a crucial role in e-commerce website development. Poor choice of theme is one of the major reasons most eCommerce websites fail to perform.
Nowadays, most e-commerce websites combine the functionality of the blog and portfolio to increase user engagement. Moreover, experts also believe that Google and other search engines give preferences to the websites that contain blogs. Thus the ranking of your website improves too.
3. Search Engine Optimization
You can’t take search engine optimization back seat as it is your primary tool to increase the sales of your online store and stand high in the competitive world. In addition to this, a good search engine optimization helps your site show up at the top results in the searches.
So when your site is on top searches, more and more customers reach to you.
4. Responsive Design
The number of mobile users is growing day by day. According to statista.com, around 1.66 billion people worldwide bought goods online in 2017. Another study discloses that 2/4th sales of eCommerce website come from mobile devices. Therefore, it is important that you optimize your eCommerce store for mobile devices as well.
Responsive web design helps you make your e-commerce website functional on both desktop systems and mobile devices.
5. Build an app for your eCommerce platform
Reaching to all sort of customers — cross-platform shop — is an essential step you should consider first while setting up your online store.
Major part is the app development for Android and iOS, because smartphone users are the huge customer base for your online shop. Hire best Android and iOS developers to build a full-fledged user-friendly shopping app. Get ideas from popular general shopping apps like Amazon, Flipkart, and other niche-specific eCommerce stores like GoCheetah.com.
6. Find a tool to organize inventory information
To avoid overstocking of products and outages you should find a perfect tool like an online inventory management software to organize inventory information. With inventory management tool you can easily track inventory levels, sales processes, orders, deliveries and also handle exchanges and returns.
7. Make a Good Marketing Strategy
Once you’re done with your e-commerce website development. Don’t forget to use some great marketing strategy. Below are some tips to outrank competitors.
- Create an effective content marketing strategy.
- Generate an automated email marketing campaign.
- Automate your social networks.
- If you have a global audience, reach out to your customer in their native languages. (If possible)
Bottom Line
Finally, we have come to the end of this post. These are the top7 factors that are needed to be considered when developing an eCommerce website. Although it is true that e-commerce website development takes a lot of efforts, time and money if you follow these steps your site will be able to make more engagement and ultimately sales.
