Five Tips For Your eCommerce Marketing
There are many things to think about as you start looking around for e-commerce site solutions, tips, and services that can help you. It’s also important to prepare yourself with plenty of research and data. The more time you invest into the research and planning, the more likely you will end up with an e-commerce site that will make sales and grow along with your business. Here are some tips and questions you should ask about your eCommerce marketing plans.
1. Will the eCommerce platform I have allow rapid and scalable growth?
Your site should be built on a platform/CMS that will allow you to add more products, create and manage product categories, and other features. What if you decide to start shipping internationally? What if you want to bundle products or run promotions? Even if these aren’t your top concerns right now, you may want to do them in the future—and you definitely won’t want to discover that you need to start from scratch and rebuild on a new platform when you need to add a feature.
2. Which payment and shipping options will my site support?
A comprehensive e-commerce solution like Shopify or Magento will allow for a wide variety of payment options. Magento supports credit cards, PayPal, checks, money orders, and more.
For shipping, you’ll want to decide what shipping provider you want to use, and be sure that it will integrate with your e-commerce site. Depending on what platform the site is built on, most e-commerce solutions support just about any shipping options, including shipping to multiple addresses and flat rating shipping, and should support UPS, UPS XML (account rates), FedEx, USPS and others.
3. What analytics are being monitored and integrated into the site?
You should already know that analytics are essential to your website, and they become even more important when you start selling products on the web. In an e-commerce store, the entire decision-making process—from discovery to research to checkout—happens online. This means you should be calibrating every step to push customers towards making a purchase. But you can’t do this if you aren’t armed with a thorough analytical picture of how people are using your website, so make sure that Google Analytics is integrated into your new e-commerce site from day one.
4. Will you be able to make updates yourself, without the help of a third party?
If you want the ability to make updates to your site content and product information without having to call your web developer every time, discuss this with your team at the beginning of your e-commerce site build process. Your developer should suggest an e-commerce solution such as OpenCart or WordPress that has a user-friendly backend that you can easily learn to update yourself. This will save you time and money in the long run!
5. How many different products does the site need to support?
Even if you think you’re only going to be selling a few products on your new e-commerce site, it’s important to take into account any product options. If you only have five products but there are 10 customizable options for each product, that will add layers of complexity to your content management and eCommerce platform. Additionally, you’ll want to think about how your products will be structured into categories and subcategories. These can be added later, but starting your site with a clear category structure will save you lots time, cost, and headaches later on.
We hope this post helped you get started on planning your business’ new e-commerce site. If you would like to talk to us about your e-commerce needs, get in touch with us here.
