If you are a retailer and don’t already have an online store, you’re missing out on a lot of potential business. Unlike a physical store, an online store never closes so customer can place orders whenever they want. And, with more and more shopping done online, that adds up to a lot of money you’re missing out on.
If you don’t yet have an online store, you’re not alone – even some major high-street names like Zara and H&M are only now moving online. But the good news is that setting up and running an online store can be relatively easy, and be a natural and simple extension to your existing business. Just because your store is open 24/7 doesn’t mean you have to be working too!
Planning your store
A lot of the success or failure of an online store depends on the planning you do beforehand. There are three key questions to ask yourself:
- How are you going to manage the store? Who will be responsible for updating it, and how often will this need to be done?
- How will you accept payment?
- What are the requirements for your store in terms of design and building? For example, does every piece of merchandise need a picture, and if so who is going to take or source them? And how many products are you going to sell?
Take some time to sit down and think through the answers to these questions before you commit to a particular ecommerce package. Once you’ve done this, you can move into the building phase.
Designing and building your store
In some ways, the requirements for an online store mirror those of a real-world one. The more products you’re selling the bigger and more complex the store will be and the more thought needs to be put into how you categorise and display them.
The good news is that you can buy off-the-shelf packages, like BT eShop, which are designed to make it easy for you to create, update and manage your online presence. eShop including “setup wizards” which will walk you through all the basics of creating a store, including uploading logos and branding to make it look uniquely-yours.
But, unless you only have a handful of products, the key to making your store easy for customers to use will be the categories you sort them into, and how you place products within categories.
Categories are like aisles in a supermarket or sections in a clothing store: placing products “next to each other” in categories helps customers to make purchasing decisions. For example, if you are selling clothing, you could group items together in “looks” which encourage customers to buy more than one item together. This kind of manual cross selling can be complimented by automatic cross selling systems which offer customers additional products based on factors like what other people who bought the same items also bought.
Finally, if you’re using images, it’s absolutely essential that they look as professional as possible. One of the things that makes an online store stand out is the quality of the images. All too many small business ecommerce sites have pictures on them that look like they were taken on the owner’s cameraphone. Good images will equal more sales – so don’t scrimp on the photography!
Accepting payments
There’s a huge range of methods of accepting payment online. The easiest, particularly if you’re not already accepting credit and debit cards face-to-face, is something like PayPal.
However, not everyone has a PayPal account or wants to use one, and the most important thing about your payment system should be that it gives your customers the maximum possible numbers of “ways to pay”. The last thing you want is for a customer to get to the checkout stage and find they can’t actually pay for the goods they want.
If you’re already accepting card payments, check with your bank to see what options they offer for online payment, and choose an ecommerce package that supports this. For example, if you’re using RBS Worldpay, taking your online payments through the same system will make your business account much easier to handle – and it may be a more cost-effective option than splitting payments between, say, PayPal and a bank credit card system.
Stock control and site monitoring
Just like a physical retail outlet, an online store needs ongoing care and attention if it’s to flourish. This involves monitoring your stock and looking at the statistics on your site. If your site expands and is successful, you may find that monitoring it becomes a full-time job for someone.
Keeping an eye on stock control is vital. Nothing is more frustrating to online customers than a product they ordered being out of stock, especially if there’s a significant delay in getting new stock in. Online customers expect to get their orders delivered fast – so ensure that if a product is nearly out of stock, you don’t give it a special promotional spot on the site!
When people talk about site monitoring, they often look at it solely in terms of page impressions, visitors, and products sold – but in fact, this is only half the story. Look at the journeys that people are taking through the site. Are there any category pages which have particularly high rates of customers exiting your site? If so, rethink that category because this is an indication that people are not finding what they expect to find on the page.
And finally…
Never forget that your store is not an island. There is a big, wide world online out there, and use any opportunity you can to either promote your site or sell elsewhere.
For example, some ecommerce packages allow you to automatically list goods on eBay as well as on your own site, giving you another outlet without major investment in time. So think big – go where the customers are, as well as having a destination for them.
Back to top