If you are planning to take your small business online, you will need to build a high-performing and well-designed website. You can’t just rely on social media for building your customer base; having an e-commerce platform allows you to nurture your customers and widens your business’s online reach.
However, there are technicalities you need to master to end up with a website that suits the goals of your small business as it migrates online. If that’s the case, then check out the guide below for practical tips on building an e-commerce website and start gaining more income from online sales.
1. Do your homework
Setting up an e-commerce website requires extensive research. Analyzing your market or niche and knowing what your competitors are doing can help you figure out how you are going to shape your website. For this, you need to look for samples of e-commerce websites and evaluate their features. Does the checkout process involve too many steps? Is there adequate information about the services or products? Do these websites use a common theme or design motif? Asking these questions should help you adopt certain elements or features that will benefit your small business.
2. Choose a hosting service
While you can always use basic e-commerce website builders to launch your online store, there is still a big difference if you use a hosting service. Simply put, a hosting service helps you attain greater online visibility and data privacy and security. A hosting service can also help with maintaining your website, making sure that it loads faster, and customizing your e-commerce store. You just need to shop for a hosting service with plans that fit your budget and features that can benefit your website.
3. Opt for a content management system
A hosting service only serves as the foundation of your e-commerce platform. In order to structure your website, you need a content management system to put media files like photos and videos, text content, and graphics together. A good example of a content management system is WordPress. The platform is highly customizable, allowing you to add and modify features and themes through user-friendly plugins. Moreover, you can download WordPress across all operating systems, including Linux distributions like Ubuntu. If you are using Linux to develop your e-commerce website, give SpinupWP’s Install WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04 guide a read.
4. Promote your website
Once you are done with setting up your website, you need to make sure it’s easily visible to potential customers. Through your social media pages, you can publish content that links back to the website so people can start shopping there. In addition, your website should also be visible every time someone enters a search query on Google. This would require optimizing your web pages using high-value keywords. Search engine optimization can be complicated to small business owners like yourself, but if you can’t hire an SEO consultant to help you out, you can always figure it out by yourself.
5. Think About Customer’s Security
An e-commerce website is a sure fire way to generate and convert customers. Though it might take some time before it becomes fully operational, it’s still an investment that has the potential to generate high returns.
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