With the ease of setting up a website and getting products, setting up your own e-commerce shop might be an attractive option for you. The ability to work remotely from home and make income on a semi-passive basis is what makes having your own e-commerce website completely different from any other “normal” job.
Now I said it is easy to set up your e-commerce website, the difficult part is actually getting visitors and then getting those visitors to buy things. That’s where most people fail, if your website is just a poor Amazon knockoff people are just going to go with Amazon. E-commerce is built on trust and having a website that delivers valuable products in a valuable way that users trust is essential to having people actually click through and purchase your items. Many people fall prey to some very simple mistakes when it comes to setting up their shop.
Here are the things you should keep in mind when making your own e-commerce shop:
1. Keep Your Site Mobile Friendly
Everybody has a smartphone in their pocket these days and few are afraid of making a few purchases online while they go about their busy days. If you don’t make your site mobile-friendly, you could be alienating 50% or more of your potential customers. The sheer amount of traffic on the internet that comes through mobile phones should be enough to keep most people on their toes with mobile-friendliness, but you’d be surprised how many e-commerce sites are dead in the water when it comes to getting sales from mobile users. You might have to hire a developer to help your site have a functioning mobile equivalent, but it will pay for itself in the long run.
2. Make Your Site Unique
Since e-commerce shops are now a dime a dozen, you need to stand out from the crowd. It isn’t sufficient to just copy and paste exactly what’s been given to you from the manufacturers and call it a day. Adam White, founder of Jasper Holland Co, explains that a common mistake e-commerce businesses make is they don’t create their own unique product descriptions for each product they sell. It is essential that you rewrite as much as you can in your own words to provide value and explain the product differently than how people are used to seeing it. There’s a good chance people have already looked up the products in question before deciding to look at your site, if you have the exact same description of all of your products then there’s nothing new there as a deciding factor. Even if you say the exact same things, how you frame it can mean all the difference.
3. Test Everything
Even though you might think your site is completely functional and useable, how do you know for sure unless you’ve tested everything? You should go through your site and use all of its functions to make sure things work how they should. Does the search bar actually bring back all of the relevant products a certain keyword brings? Does your cart and checkout system actually function how it should? By testing your site, you’re able to find vulnerabilities to fix and help keep your user experience as stress-free as possible. If your site doesn’t work how it should, people will go to a site that does.
4. Don’t Neglect Social Media
In our increasingly interconnected world, many people make purchases based on what they’ve seen on social media. Have a social media profile for your site so users can ask questions and give feedback. Also, if you manage to get influencers with lots of followers to promote your site, that’s going to directly correlate with a traffic bump as their followers trust whatever that specific influencer has to say. You need to be proactive and as involved as possible with social media to leverage it to your advantage. Not only that, a website with an active and well-maintained social media presence is more trustworthy as there’s less of a chance it is a fly-by-night operation meant to get a few bucks and then disappear forever.
Conclusion
The world of e-commerce can seem daunting and complex to navigate when it comes to achieving big time success, but all of the building blocks are already there and it is just a matter of you putting them together in a way that works for you. Always be researching online as to what your competitors do and how to improve your site. What might seem like a minor problem could be what’s stopping you from making thousands of dollars overnight. Best of luck to all of you digital entrepreneurs!
