A complete guide: Building a startup into a successful ecommerce business?

Building an e-commerce business is not that simple. At the same time, understanding the market is not that hectic. All you need is to know how it goes in the long run. To help e-commerce startups, we have come up with this guide. It will reveal the processes required to run a successful e-commerce business.

ecommerce-business

Would you be interested to know how it works in getting them down on track?

Let us get started!

We have tracked a few processes to know how it goes on. Hoping this helps you better.

1. How to conduct market research for your e-commerce business?

It is always good to do initial research rather than regretting later. Investing your time in e-commerce business ideas is essential. We have provided a few tactics to identify the target market.

Keyword Research:

Are you trying to find a free and simple way to know the demand for your product or business? Google keyword planner would be the best solution for your requirements. It will help you visualize how many people search for your product or business during a particular period. Also, the tool will give you an idea of similar keywords that can help you generate ideas for blog posts and website content.

keyword-planner

Google Trends:

It provides an easy way to find what is trending around. Google Trends allows you to search for products or ideas. You will be able to understand the demands throughout a week, month and even a year. Now, compare the volume of searches for terms and geographic locales and find how certain events affect search popularity.

Google Trends

Explore Social Media:

The best way to explore the volume of conversions is through social media exploration. It helps to discover the aspects of your target market and find ideas for marketing efforts later.

It also helps you to learn and leverage it through your product description, ads, blogs and social media promotions. Using the language of your audience can drive traffic to your website. Through that, you can build a customer base and improve conversions.

  1. You can probably use Twitter to find the hashtag that is trending
  2. Make use of Instagram tools just as you use Google trends
  3. Enter your product name to find how many are using the same hashtag and popular images.

To understand all this stuff, you need to make use of similar keywords and images on your social media accounts so that you may engage with the existing social community.

Search on Google:

It may sound cliched. But many fail to perform this check. By performing a quick search, you will end up with a big picture of the market opportunity for your idea, by which you could make a perfect decision whether to proceed with your idea.

Find the list of e-commerce and retail industry publications on which you could perform the search.,

  • Inc
  • WWD
  • Entrepreneur
  • Business insider
  • First round review
  • Harvard business review

Once you have completed your intense research on finding the perfect market space and your idea of what your target audience expects from you, you need to choose an excellent domain through which you directly pull in your customers to purchase your product.

Now, let us look at how to choose a product-defining domain name.

2. Finding a better solution in choosing a perfect domain name for your product

As the domain name speaks to what the product is, you need to choose the one that describes your product and the one that attracts your audience. Let us walk through the steps while choosing a domain name.

Make it simple:

When you choose a domain name with multiple words and hard-to-type texts, people will find it harder to search your website. So, choose simple domain names that are easy to search.

Short is better:

It will make sense when you make it short. Popular e-commerce websites like Flipkart and Amazon use short domain names that are catchy for people to remember them.

Use Keywords:

Hoping you found relevant keywords for your business in your research. Now, it is time to use those keywords on your domain name. When you choose a domain name with a relevant keyword your audience searches for, it would be easy enough for your domain to appear on most searches.

Make use of appropriate extension:

Extensions are suffixes. Each extension has a specific use, so it is necessary to make sure that you use the appropriate one. Let us have a look at the different types of extensions,

  • .Net: Technical, internet infrastructure sites.
  • .co: An abbreviation for company, commerce, and community.
  • .me: Blogs, resumes or personal sites.
  • .biz: Business or commercial use, like e-commerce sites.
  • .org: Non-commercial organizations and nonprofits.
  • .info: Informational sites.

Now, this gives you a better idea of how to choose your domain name for an e-commerce business. Try to find a domain name that meets these statistics.

The next step is to build an SEO-friendly website. Let us walk you through the steps in which you will learn to build an SEO-friendly e-commerce website.

3. Steps to build SEO-friendly e-commerce website

Step 1: Plan your site structure

Your site structure should generally look like the following diagram. The most search ranking page should rank at the top and filter down to the following pages. There can be exceptional pages, and those pages can be unavoidable. Thus, navigation through your site becomes clear.

website-structure

The above example clearly explains how a simple and neat structure of an e-commerce website looks. The structure begins with the home page at the top and can be the only page you can navigate back to.

It is crucial to plan your site structure before you proceed any further. By doing this, you can prevent your site from getting messed up.

Step 2: Your URL and site structure should be relevant

Make sure that your website URL and your site structure match. In case you are selling tan leather shoes, then your URL structure should be as follows,

www.leathershoes.com/shoes/leather-shoes/tan-leather-shoe

The URL structure is category –> sub-category –> product. It makes it simple for the crawlers to crawl down and your audience to navigate through pages.

Step 3: Develop low-depth website

The site should be accessible within a few clicks. A good SEO makes sure the website is 3-clicks deep or less. It makes it easier for website crawlability. When the site is easily crawlable, Google can identify and rank it faster.

On the other hand, when your website is short, it builds up a good user experience. When the user can find the information in an instance, they will stay on the page for a long time, reducing the bounce rate.

Step 4: Effective Internal Linking

The internal links are an internal connection between two pages of the same website. Internal linking is a good sign of SEO. The foremost benefit of internal links is that it provides a better way to navigate your website. Thus, you could reduce the number of clicks required to reach the destination page.

On the other hand, it makes it simple for crawlers to crawl pages and for users to navigate.

Step 5: Add SEO weight to site navigation

Site navigation is often considered a tool to navigate pages. But it adds value to SEO. Internal links are similar to external links. More external links to a page increase its value by passing link juice. The same happens when several internal links pass to a single page.

Every website will have a domain authority. If you have a single page on your navigation, the website authority will pass to that page. It adds value to the page you wanted to pass the link juice.

By following all these five steps, you could build an SEO friendly website that could rank easily on search engines. Make sure that you never miss any of these steps.

Once you are all set to sell your product on your freshly developed website, you need to showcase your products with certain specific features that automatically grab the attention of your target audience. Now, let us look at ways to improve audience interaction.

4. Provide Offers

What is the first thing that comes to your mind about an e-commerce website? E-commerce websites are well-known for special offers. Providing your customers with the best deals ever could make them more interactive towards your website.

offers-discounts

Before you can announce those offers, you need to analyze the products that are similar to your product and compare their prices in the competitive market. On obtaining the complete data of those products, you could furnish a better competitive price for your product and showcase it to your audience. You could also give away offers and discounts that value your products. By this, you gain the attention of your audience.

5. Compatibility

The crucial factor of any website is compatibility. People have switched to smart devices. Smart devices are the best mode of reaching your target audience. If your website fails the compatibility test, all the above efforts will be in vain.

compatibility

So, make sure your website is compatible with all devices. If not, you will fail to bring in your target audience. Never fail the compatibility test for your website at any cost.

6. 3-Step Payment Completion Authority

The 3-step payment completion authority is the most valuable and deserving process that most crowds expect on e-commerce websites. But most e-commerce websites fail this. That is the biggest reason people leave websites instead of making payments.

How payment processes proceed?

Every e-commerce website should learn this 3-step payment completion authority process. It winds up the checkout process in just 3-steps. It consists of the following steps;

  • Select a product
  • Proceed to check out
  • Make payment

When people find buying any product in just three simple steps, they automatically start to prefer your website over any other website.

7. Social Media Sharing & Marketing

Social media is one big platform that can carry anything to the peak. People also spend most of their time on social media platforms. Businesses have decided to influence them for their growth after understanding the advantages of these platforms. Once you have launched your e-commerce website, make sure that you promote your website and your business on social media platforms and its relevant groups. It could help your business reach a big crowd.

social-networking-icons

Social media platforms are big anchors for marketing. They hold businesses tight to the track. So, find the perfect time to promote your business on these platforms and engage with your target audience.

8. Reviews and Recommendations

Reviews are the best builders of a business. Always be open to reviews. They could help you recover from mistakes and achieve customer satisfaction. Try to respond to all the reviews you receive, no matter what they are. Responding to them could build trust among your customers.

feedback-reviews

9. Customer reviews through chat

Providing a personal customer support option to your customers is one essential thing that you need to have on your e-commerce website. It allows your customers to reach out to you in case of discrepancies. You will gain more trust from them when you fix their issue as soon as possible.

10. Need for FAQs

Do you know the actual purpose of an FAQ on an e-commerce website?

It is to answer frequently asked questions. Adding up an FAQ on your website is an essential addition to your website. It could serve the following functions,

  • Builds up purchasing anxieties
  • Relieves from common doubts by publicly answering common questions
  • Improve SEO and site navigation
  • Earns trust
  • Delights customers with practical answers.

The above features would have explained the need for FAQs on your website. If you have no idea or haven’t planned to design a page for FAQ, you should process it immediately.

Wrap up:

Are you planning to work on your e-commerce startup business? Launching an e-commerce website alone does not pave the way to success. Implementing all the strategies is crucial.

The above guide would get your e-commerce website on track. But never miss one. These are strategies that are filtered to obtain a successful outcome. Get them on the go, and let us know your success stories.