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The evolvement of technologies has catalysed the paradigm shift from offline to online marketing. With the change in people’s preferences, this is the best time for businesses to explore the eCommerce arena. Every facet of running a smooth eCommerce business starting from inventory, sales to CRM is easily manageable with the cloud technologies and software.
The ease with which you can establish your eCommerce business today is the result of its continuous evolvement over a span of around three decades. A large number of online stores are being created every day.
The trend of shifting towards online shopping was a gradual process, but Covid-19 pushed online sales to a new height. There is a tremendous rise in people’s inclination to shop online now than in the pre-Covid-19 phase.
With the advent of a new decade, the eCommerce businesses are expected to flourish like never before.
As more people are shopping online, and new e-stores been established every day, the competition in the sector is snowballing. Every established business is trying to retain their market share and the new entrants are looking for opportunities to capture the share. In such a landscape, businesses need to have an in-depth understanding of the secrets that can help them to be successful.
Let us explore different factors that will help you to gain a clear perspective of how you can establish a successful eCommerce business in 2021.
Have you decided to choose eCommerce as your business model? That’s great news but do you have any idea what next you ought to do? You have to select the right product niche for your business. This is the most critical part to get started with. People find it extremely difficult to decide on the product niche that they should be dealing with. Many people spend months deciding on what niche is suitable for them but fail to get to any result.
It can be challenging to pick up the right niche, but you don’t want to de-motivate yourself by overthinking about the niche all the time. Let us help you with some strategies that will equip you with exceptional ideas about selecting your niche.
But first, let’s take a look at and understand the eCommerce business niche.
Ecommerce business niche is a distinct segment into which your products fall. When you look at this market, you will be able to find areas and sections that you can do your business in. Your brand will revolve around the e-commerce niche that you select.
Ecommerce entrepreneurs need to narrow down their business niche while targeting a large audience and expanding their business reach. You need to narrow down your niche to tap the market potential and enhance their visibility among the prospective audience.
You might wonder, why to spend your time searching for a niche when you can start your business with a particular set of products or a variety of different products like Amazon or eBay. You may find yourself thinking that success is the synonym of a wide range of services that you may offer to your clients. While this might sound really convincing to you and may even feel achievable, but it rarely translates into business success.
When you plan to start your eCommerce business, your main aim is to achieve success and profit. However, cogitating won’t get you any of these. You have to think realistically. You have to come up as an expert in front of your customers; otherwise, your business will be a failure. In such a scenario, it is important to vouch for one particular niche, establish your identity and hole in the segment and add value to your customer’s life.
Finding a niche will help you to:
So by now, you know why you need a specific business niche to operate in the eCommerce world. Let’s explore the various strategies that will help you to find a suitable niche and kick start your dream project
If you are passionate about sports, then you should select sports items as your niche. Passion in your niche is the key to success. Does that sound too easy to be a strategy? Reality check, it is simple but the most essential strategy. It’s difficult to run a business if you are not interested in the products or services you sells.
What does being passionate about means? It doesn’t merely mean you are interested in it, it also proves that you have an in-depth understanding of it. You possess detailed and specific knowledge about the sector, which gives you an upper-hand over your competitors. It will encourage you to devote more time and energy to the business.
Find out what interests your customers in the particular field that you are passionate about. You will never be able to build an empire if you don’t have an idea of your people’s needs and interests. Take your buyer’s intent into account and educate yourself about the market need and scenario.
You don’t want to just set up the online store and wait for the customers to pour in. You have to attract them. And this can only be done if you know them and their interests.
It’s now time to dig into some reliable data regarding keyword searches. For example, if you have decided to sell sports items, you need to know the key terms that your target audience are using to search for the same. It may be “game kit”, or “football” or as simple as “badminton racket”. Now, you need to know the competition on that particular product.
You are not the first one to sell any sports products online, there are plenty of businesses.
You can use Google Ads Keyword Planner to gain necessary help about selecting the right keywords for your business and gain in-depth data and insight about a particular keyword’s market competition.
Keep a constant watch on what people have been searching for. You can use Google Trends to gain compelling data to research the options available to you and to act upon. You can narrow down or expand your database, based on your requirements and can also view a trend about a particular topic based on the geographical location you aim to target. This is great information that helps you to make informed decisions on your eCommerce niche.
Another thing that you have to take into account is competitive analysis. You have to know the competition that you are getting into and hence knowledge of your competitors and their market position is essential for you. It is recommended that you thoroughly evaluate your competition and to outrank them in the market.
Take a look at your niche products and find out the pain points for each of them. Consider the opinion of your patrons. Think from their perspective, and look for the pain point that creates problems for them and help them solve it through your products. You have to solve their problems to make them believe in you and your brand.
Finding a good product for selling online is a daunting task for any entrepreneur who is starting to venture the eCommerce business sector. Even when you have decided your niche, you will see yourself amidst great confusion when it comes to selecting the right product to sell from the countless options available to you.
Even after you finalise the product that you want to sell, you will be consumed with the stress that the following factors create:
Although these are extremely powerful factors, being a store owner, you should not restrict yourself for any of this. It’s useless to worry about it; rather you should adopt smart strategies that will help you find winning products to sell online.
The basic strategy is to research the products that you want to sell. It is one of the essential factors that determine your future success. Following are the various ways that you can undertake to research about particular products for your business:
Now, it’s time for you to ask yourself the following questions to consider the right product that you would want to sell online:
Once, you have decided the right product for your business, you have to know its market size and target audience. A large market size would mean an increased business with lots of competition, whereas, a small market size would mean you have a good opportunity to explore and maximise your earnings.
The market size of the product is not enough, you ought to know if the market for your product is steady or not. If it is on a rise, that’s a plus point for you, but if you see a decline in the growth of the product’s market, abandon your idea and look for something else.
Having competition is always good, you always aim to improve. However, too many competitors may hinder your growth opportunities. Hence, you have to find out a USP of your business that will help you to survive in the competitive landscape.
This is an important point to consider. If the product is rare in the specific area of your business but is trending in the global market, it is a golden opportunity for your business. Locals will search for the product and will order it from your store.
Being able to successfully build a sustainable product-based online business, requires you to do some thorough and in-depth research and market analysis. It should be a part and parcel of your strategy to establish a successful eCommerce store.
Shopping online has become a trend and is a matter of luxury for many people now. The eCommerce business is booming like never before. In such a scenario, novice players need to build their online presence in the form of an eCommerce store. It is wise to set up an eCommerce store to sell your products, attract customers and to generate good revenue for your business.
The businesses with brick-and-mortar stores are also creating their online counterparts, ensuring that they don’t miss out in grabbing this exclusive opportunity available in today’s market. The foremost thing that a business owner needs to consider while deciding to build an eCommerce store is the selection of the eCommerce platform.
Now, that you selected your niche and the product that you want to sell, it is time for you to choose the right eCommerce platform for your business. Building an eCommerce store is more than just putting your product listings on the internet. It requires a smooth platform that can be updated in future, that have good functionalities for the users and whose back-end is easy to maintain.
Let’s explore the three best eCommerce platforms that are ruling the industry with their exclusive features and extraordinary functionalities:
Magento eCommerce platform is dominating the eCommerce landscape with many merchants operating and using it for their business. With Magento eCommerce development, a business gets a customised online store with user-friendly and convenient features. It is a scalable platform that allows the online retailers to expand their business in future with no hassles involved.
Magento platform is developed to resolve all issues related to eCommerce stores and to give the users a smooth shopping experience.
“We’ve been very frustrated with the state of open-source eCommerce, we knew it could be done better.”- Roy Rubin, Co-Founder/CEO, Magento
The on-demand Magento extensions amplify the functionality of the stores and add value to the business. It is a great platform for businesses that believe in laying out an effective and impressive store packed with great features.
Magento offers exclusive benefits to its users and gives them a wonderful experience to operate in the market. The pros of the Magento platform are:
For online merchants, who wish to expand their business, Magento is an ideal platform. It offers the feature of scalability that allows the merchants to add a huge number of products to their site without affecting its performance.
Magento allows you to customise everything in your store according to your choice. It offers numerous plugins that help you to customise the appearance, the functionality and other features of your stores.
It offers great scope for experimentation. Expert Magento developers hold a grip and authority over various functions, which enables them to carve unique experiences for users. With the immense flexibility in the next-generation architecture of the platform, Magento allows good scope for innovation
One of the most highlighted points of the Magento platform is its SEO-friendly nature. It leads to better visibility for your products on the search engines and encourages organic traffic for your store. The platform also ensures that your store is mobile-friendly, hence expanding your customer base. It is also packed with various other features such as SEO-friendly URL, Meta description, site maps and tags that help your store to rank high in the search engine result.
Integrating any third-party services is quick and smooth with the Magento platform. It allows businesses to add various tools required for gaining insight into their business, payment gateways, data applications, logistics, shipping, order tracking and others. The ease of integration offered by this platform equips businesses to work smoothly.
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress websites. It allows users to add to transform their website into a full-fledged online store. It is one of the most-preferable platforms for building an exclusive online store. Building a modern webshop with the help of this plugin has become a trend, as more than 4,414,537 live websites are using WooCommerce platform.
This open-source eCommerce business is free to use and is backed by a global community. It is considered as the best platform to take your brick-and-mortar store online. A large number of themes and various customising option makes it a suitable choice for any business vertical.
With several built-in tools and efficient integration system, WooCommerce makes it easy for the businesses to blend content with commerce. It keeps a tap on the performance of the business and also adds fresh features, making the store a unique one in the market.
WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that provides the businesses full control over their web-shop. It allows them to meet their unique business requirements by customising it accordingly.
Being a free plugin, WooCommerce is cost-efficient and perfectly fits in the pocket of business of any size- large, medium and small business. It gives the businesses an extra edge and equips them with efficient functionality without any extra cost.
Dedicated WooCommerce developers guarantee you excellent personalization options that this platform offers. An expert developer explores the various possibilities that the platform has in store and helps the businesses to leverage the best one, which suits their online store. Appearance, navigation and usability-everything can be changed in WooCommerce platform.
Although, WooCommerce itself is a plugin, the store built with it can be expanded. There are numerous plugins available that allow the businesses to enrich their store and add various functionalities like shipping, marketing and the likes. The extensions are also available to make it the platform more unique and user-friendly.
WooCommerce is the best platform for SEO and it also has built-in analytics. With WooCommerce, it is easy-to-optimise your store and ranks high in the search engine result pages. It also helps in providing insightful data about your eCommerce store along with detailed information regarding your sales, order value, shipping stats, etc.
Shopify is a great platform for building your online stores. It is a prominent eCommerce platform that contains everything that you need for your webshop. It is a complete package for all entrepreneurs who want to give their users a smooth and excellent experience.
It is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that cover around 20% global market share. It plays a significant role in enhancing your ROI and boosting your business revenue. The efficiency, quality and simplicity of Shopify have made it a favourite eCommerce platform for many businesses.
Shopify helps entrepreneurs to completely change their business scenario and explore the varied opportunities available in the online market. It offers a perfect combination of aesthetics with functionality, hence is a popular eCommerce platform. Below are the benefits of the Shopify eCommerce platform:
The platform is packed with a variety of professional and visually-appealing templates that promotes the creation of unique online stores. A professional Shopify development company will work with the bare minimum theme available in the platform. They will help you to get a wonderful store with rich UI and remarkable UX.
Shopify is equipped with reliable infrastructure and optimised hardware and software that provides it with the efficiency of excellent loading speed. The eCommerce store developed on it will load within seconds. This is an extraordinary feature that the platform provides.
Being a comprehensive platform, Shopify offers excellent marketing edge too. It offers excellent SEO features and advanced analytics for your store. Along with these features, the platform also offers more marketing tools such as gift cards, coupons and more, which the businesses can use to market the store.
Webskitters Shopify Development experts offerstechnical assistance for the store-owners and ensures that you can reach them 24/7. Their technical assistance is laudable. They aim to resolve all the glitches faced by their customers, hence they provide excellent telephonic communication or will guide you on live chats.
The advanced and modern functionalities of Shopify is yet another benefit that attracts millions of business owners to this platform. It offers out-of-the-box features such as inventory management, business accounting and others that support your business and places you in the driver’s seat.
Building an eCommerce store gives you a chance to develop your brand, connect with your customers, sell your products and earn good revenue. But, all of this can only be done if you can attract the attention of your users/customers. It requires an appealing website design.
In this era of high-speed race, your eCommerce store will do no good to you with its marathon performance. A slight compromise with the User-Interface and User-Experience might compel the visitors to leave your store without buying anything. If you want to outrun your competitors, you have to be prepared with wonderful design and experience to welcome your visitors.
A right design coupled with extraordinary user experience compels the visitors to move around the store and it also convinces them to make a purchase.
Businesses should focus on creating a feel-good website for their users to explore and drive their sales. Here are a few tips that allow businesses to help businesses take their online store to the next level:
The famous design process “KISS” (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is the basic rule that is followed when designing an eCommerce store for any business. The more elements you add in your store, the more difficult it will be for you to close a sale. It is always advisable to keep the design simple, clear and elegant.
People always prefer brands, when it comes to shopping. People trust brands. Hence, every business should aim to establish their business as a brand. You have to put in some mind-boggling sessions for branding your business. Branding should be infused with the website design to create the necessary impact on the visitor’s mind.
Another important factor that you should consider while designing your store is to add functionalities and design features which will be appealing to the visitors. Some of the common features that visitors look for is easy navigation, hassle-free scrolling around the store, well-designed, easy-checkout and the like. To give them a good experience, you ought to think like a visitor and add the features that they will love to explore
Colour of a website plays a significant role in bringing business to a store. Give yourself some time to study and understand the psychology behind colours and use them. Different colour serves a different purpose, you have to make the right choice to gain the desired result. An expert and experienced UI/UX designer will prove to be of immense help to you in this regard. Being a professional, the designer will know the inside-out of the colour psychology and the performance record of each colour and hence will leverage its use accordingly.
The use of relevant and high-quality images possess the capability of increasing the website conversion rate for eCommerce business owners. Getting professional images for all of your products ensure superior-quality images, which in return builds confidence and trust in your visitors.
If you develop a clumsy product page, you are bound to lose your customers 10 times more quickly than ever. Categorise your products and make it easy for the visitors to navigate and find the right product. The easier you categorise the products, the more time the customers will spend on your store, which eventually results in a purchase.
The main objective behind you developing an online store is to enhance your sales. You want people to buy from your store. To make this possible, you have to ensure that the checkout process in your store is crystal-clear and easy.
This is a great and ideal design concept that every eCommerce store should adopt. Give your customers comfort to surf your store through different devices.
Adopt a continuous approach to design to achieve a perfect eCommerce store design. You have to keep a track of the latest design trends and evolve your UI/UX design accordingly to enhance your conversion rate and tap the market potential.
The power of the internet has enhanced the possibility for businesses to reach out to their customers anytime, through any device. With your eCommerce business, you have to leverage this opportunity. And the best way to do this is – mobile eCommerce app.
Smartphone users covers maximum of the global population, which leads to a significant rise in mobile commerce. Thanks to this modern technology, the business landscape has changed drastically. People now prefer to check out the latest products or services, through their mobile phone. A business with a mobile app holds an edge over its competitors.
While launching your eCommerce store, you have to recognize the importance of mobile application and adopt it, to expand your business. It is expected that around 72.9% of all eCommerce sales will generate through mobile in 2021.
Matching the pace of the eCommerce trends, you have to adapt the mobile app trend to explore the full potential of the market. Currently, a major portion of eCommerce sales come from mobile devices, globally. That’s a huge base of customer that you do not want to miss for your business.
With the continuous penetration of smartphones to the different segments of society, around the world, it can be considered as the most effective medium for promotion and sales. Having a mobile application for your eCommerce business will add value to your business as it:
When it comes to shopping, customers today mostly turn to mobile apps. It is handy for them and it provides them with a wonderful shopping experience. The eCommerce stores that are currently operating in the market and wish to expand their business in future have already accepted the fact and own a highly-intuitive mobile application.
If you are still looking for a reason to build a mobile application for your eCommerce store, then here is a list of many:
Users prefer using mobile application than accessing an online store through a browser, as it is more convenient for them. The security, speed and convenience that a mobile application offers, is lacking in website or mobile browser.
People who install a mobile app mostly does so with the intention of purchasing. While, on the other hand, people visiting a store through a mobile browser, generally want to check details or look for the contact information. Customers are more likely to return to the app than the browsers and they even spend more time on apps.
With enhanced user-experience that customers get in a mobile application, businesses can establish a unique impression on their mind. As is mentioned earlier, the importance of UI/UX design for attracting your customers is essential when it comes to marketing your product in the online world.
A proficient mobile app developer would help you to develop a stunning User-Experience, which will grab the attention of the customers. Easy-to-navigate, easy-checkout and satisfying user experience, is what a customer is looking for. Modern-day customers prefer personalized experiences and they are attracted to the business that guarantees the same.
With Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and other powerful technologies emerging, the expert mobile developers leverage the power of the same and provides a wonderful experience to the customers, which results in enhanced sales.
With satisfying and appealing UI/UX design, an app can convert visitors into customers, three times more than mobile browsers. Consumers who use mobile applications are more likely to complete the desired actions. They even tend to view more products than mobile browsers. The commendable conversion rates that the mobile application guarantees you, make it a must for your business.
Customers are always at the heart of the eCommerce business. Market your business, keeping your customers in mind and you will find a fruitful result that facilitates your online sale. Adopting a customer-centric approach in marketing enables eCommerce businesses to drive awareness towards their store while boosting conversions.
The term customer-centric marketing is much used in today’s times and businesses are exploring it to develop excellent prospects. It focuses on creating a positive and impactful customer experience and build loyalty among customers, thus boosting repeat businesses. It is often considered as the practice to drive the top-of-the-funnel traffic to convert into sales.
The eCommerce marketers use various platforms such as social media, digital content, search engines and other campaigns to create awareness of a business, establish brand reputation and most importantly facilitating the purchase.
Some of the best and low-cost eCommerce marketing strategies that guarantee high-yielding result include the following:
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Search Engine Optimization or SEO has to be included in your marketing strategy. It ensures that your store appears in the search result when the customers look for specific keywords or products. It also ensures good traffic to your marketplace. The SEO practices guarantee a high return on investment for eCommerce businesses.
Businesses must rank high than their competitors on Search Engine result pages. The advanced your rank, the further your traffic will increase. If you miss out on the clicks from SERP, then there are probable chances that you are missing out on great sales. The most important thing in SEO is research- keyword and competitor. Keyword research helps you to brand your products and services on search engine and rank high. The competitor research gives you the understanding to know your competitors and the keywords that they are using.
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Social Media has emerged as a strong and powerful platform for businesses to launch their products or market it. The platform is also an extraordinary network for businesses to connect with their customers and post content that the audience is interested in. Ecommerce websites are rich in visuals, yet the need to show off the products on social media remains extremely high.
The eCommerce business does not require to spread their attention to various social media platforms. Instead, they should focus on the channels that are mostly used by their customers. Expert social media marketers can help you in gauging the impact of each platform on your customers and will also identify the group of people that will be attracted towards your products and services.
Content marketing is used to improve the ranking of a website in search engines. When you are selling a product online, you require articles and videos that transform it into a business. Blog, infographics, videos and product descriptions, everything falls under the umbrella term ‘Content Marketing’. Companies around the world are leveraging the practice of content marketing and using it to their best for driving traffic through search engines. Implementing this marketing strategy generate your buzz around their product, and boost sales.
To make it more clear, precise and interesting, businesses add visuals, such as charts and videos. This medium is working specifically for eCommerce brands and generating exclusive opportunities for their business to establish a different identity from competitors.
Experienced content marketers develop innovative contents to reach more customers and attract exclusive ROI. Making the best use of different platforms, content marketers create compelling stories that align with the values and objectives of the business. The content captivates a niche audience and boosts loyalty among current and prospective customers.
One of the most essential and exclusive marketing strategies for eCommerce business is Pay Per Click advertising. PPC includes various advertisements including paid search, display and shopping campaigns. It is most relevant to marketing success for a business. It is a kind of marketing strategy where the businesses pay for every click on their ad. It is a type of search engine advertising that create ads to appear on different search engines and their networks including Google and Bing.
It guarantees the businesses that potential buyers will across a link of their page when they look for search terms that match with the terms used in the campaign. The popularity of the content also lies in the factor that the campaign puts your products right in front of the buyers, while the businesses get paid for every click that they receive. With the help of expert PPC marketers, you can explore the various advantages offered by the Ad platforms and it also provides you great opportunity to create brand awareness and generate exclusive conversions.
Customers today are extremely aware of what they buy and who they are buying from. But when you are running an eCommerce store, it becomes mandatory for you to manage your online reputation to build customers’ trust.
A large chunk of online customers read reviews before visiting a store. It’s the reviews that decide whether the customers will visit your stores or not. For 79% of customers, the reviews serve the purpose of personal recommendations by the people who have used a business before. Hence, it can be said that product reviews work for your business only when it is positive. Negative reviews can create contrary results for your business.
Online reputation management is a practice that is adopted by many businesses to create a comfortable and trustworthy environment for customers. The online reviews have real value for the customers. It also has excellent benefits for businesses, such as:
The best benefit of online reviews is that it helps in building trust between your brand and your customers. If you deliver good quality, good products and reliability, then your customers will definitely love you and leave wonderful reviews for you. Positive reviews encourage the customers to look at you as a brand that they can trust upon. It creates a wonderful experience for them and compels them to associate with your business, once and again.
Online reviews can deliver excellent and unprejudiced insight among customers. Written by another customer, sharing their experience about the quality of the product, makes the review highly-valuable. Such reviews encourage people to use the products and gain the first-hand experience about the same.
With online reputation management services, businesses may also experience improved search engine ranking result for their online stores. It’s the best way to enhance your brand’s reach among customers, while Google appreciates your good value and great service through an improved ranking. It is a great advantage that most businesses are still not aware of. Many businesses are still hesitant in using online reputation management services as they consider it as an extra expense their business has to incur. However, the reality is ORM should definitely find its place in your marketing strategies. It encourages people to share their experiences with others.
If the experience is good, it adds to the value of the company, if it’s bad, it needs to be considered and requires prompt action. In both of the conditions, the business should deliver a quick response to each of them. This is a great opportunity that also helps businesses to enhance their store’s Google ranking, which results in great visibility and excellent traffic.
If you are looking for all-in-solution for your eCommerce business, consult our eCommerce experts today and grab a good insight about the market and opportunities available for you. Endless prospects are obtainable for you to tap the market potential and it helps people to achieve the efficacy that they desire for and it increases the revenue of the business. Our eCommerce experts make it feasible for you to explore the unearthed avenues that present you with smart prospects to thrive upon.
Featured Image Courtesy: mohamed hassan/ pxhere
Ayan Sarkar is one of the youngest entrepreneurs of India. Possessing the talent of creative designing and development, Ayan is also interested in innovative technologies and believes in compiling them together to build unique digital solutions. He has worked as a consultant for various companies and has proved to be a value-added asset for each of them. With years of experience in web development, product managing and building domains for customers, he currently holds the position of the CTO in Webskitters Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
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