The future of buying and selling goods are transitioning from in-store to online. Any commercial transactions that are conducted electronically over the internet are considered eCommerce websites.
From shops like Amazon, Etsy and eBay, many businesses are having to adjust to online pressures and build websites that will draw customers in and keep up with online demands.
Even though there are some pressures, there are so many opportunities and platforms that you can explore to help build your new startup eCommerce website, like WordPress, Squarespace and Shopify. The best SEO agencies in Hampshire use platforms like WordPress because the layout is clean, customisable, and scalable. Following in other businesses footsteps can be useful, so make sure you take notes and learn!
So, where do you begin?
Building a Foundation
The first question to consider is ‘which eCommerce model is right for your startup business?’. The reason this is significant is that your chosen model will be the main foundation that your website will be built. Once this is decided, you have the beginning idea of what your site is going to achieve.
- B2B (Business to Business). This is a model that allows businesses to sell goods and services to other businesses.
- B2C (Business to Consumer). This is the most common form of eCommerce, this is for sale from businesses to individuals such as Primark, ASOS and Boots.
- C2C (Consumer to Consumer). This involves transactions between consumers which is usually through things like Etsy, Paypal and eBay.
- C2B (Consumer to Business). Popularly used by freelancers, consumers can provide their services to businesses.
Explore Your Ideas
It’s time to do some research. Look at what your competitors and other businesses like yours are doing, this way, you can match the standard of your targeted industry when you start to build your startup site.
Think of your viewers and who you are targeting. What do they want your site to look like? Age range? Do you want your site need to be formal, chatty or image-based? Creating a personality will help you to build a brand and entice emotion. This will help you to create a reliable and loyal customer foundation. Consumers are demanding authenticity from their brands, so it’s becoming more and more important.
Once you have decided upon these two areas, you need to choose the items to supply on your eCommerce website. Choose products that your audience will be interested in. Once these three ideas have been settled, put your new ideas together on a platform.
Set Up Your eCommerce Website on a Solid Platform
Website building platforms are the easiest and quickest way to create a professional online business and to begin your eCommerce journey. There are various options to consider, but the most popular is WordPress due to its customisable features. Here is a list of some platforms to consider:
- WordPress: with the right plugins and developers, you can make WordPress do whatever you want! It’s scalable as your startup begins to grow. This has also become the most popular blogging software and is now the content management software of choice for non-blogging websites.
- Shopify: is a smaller and less customisable platform that can limit you in the long run, but it can be a quick and cheap option to get you started. Its software is built for shops that sell goods and services which needs a little amount of thought and design.
- Squarespace: a platform specifically built for smaller businesses and for online shopping. Although it’s considered user-friendly, it’s not easy to navigate around and lacks marketing tools that help to build your visibility on search engines.
Why Do SEO Agencies Use WordPress?
WordPress is a software that has been around since 2003 that has become more popular now than ever before. It’s easy to use and has an intuitive interface, this means that adding pages, blogs, images, etc is a rapid process compared to other platforms. Due to it being browser-based, it can be accessed from any internet-connected computer and spend time editing the back-end of your site, so when you are creating your startup eCommerce site, this is a benefit to help the process flow quicker and easier.
It will help to futureproof your eCommerce business with more options for plugins, (which is a type of software that you can plug into another software application), it’s customisable and scalable, so your options are endless. If you want to add any calendars, social media feeds, Facebook links etc, the WordPress plugins can also make this possible! WordPress has no HTML editing either which means that you can create content, produce category pages for your products to fall under, insert your products and their images without any additional HTML software.
You have the ultimate control over your site as the coding behind WordPress is simple – this makes it easier for any search engine to read and look into the content. What is more exciting is how the platform introduces precise SEO – provides meta tag, description and keyword layouts, so that you can correctly optimise your entire website, blogs and pages. If you have hundreds and hundreds of pages and content on your site, then the overall performance will not be affected – even with the option for multiple users editing the site at the same time.
Weigh Up Your Startup Options
It’s important to weigh up your options and look into as many ideas as possible. Build everything up together and create a holistic strategy to help scale your new startup eCommerce business. Once you have followed all these steps, your business will begin to see fast-growing results.