You’ve taken the first step to expanding your business, opening up an online store to let your customers know that they can buy from you online. There’s a lot more to just having an online presence to accelerate your growth.
Using the services of E-commerce solutions providers, like Shopify, is only the first step to helping you get a valid online presence that can benefit your business. Depending on what kind of products and services you offer, you’ll have to tailor them so that they’re suited to your offerings and the customers you will be serving.
What Should You Do When Building An Online Store?
When you start online store creation, you’ll be hit with a plethora of options that you can use in your website. All of them will seem beneficial to your business. But overloading your website with information can also be a bad thing, since that can confuse and ultimately, drive away the customer.
First of all, you should be able to understand how a customer shops when they’re online.
Let Customers Choose Which Device They Can Access It From
Your website should look and function well across a wide range of devices, from desktop computers, to smartphones and tablets. Unless it works seamlessly across all of these, then you won’t be able to properly reach the customer.
According to a survey, nearly 29% of people who shop online will use multiple devices to scope out the product that they want to buy. They’re prone to sifting through the product details on their smartphone or tablet, and finally going on to their desktops and laptops to finalise the purchase.
This habit makes it important to have the website look and scale properly so that it can fit a wide range of devices and screen sizes.
A single bad experience is all it takes for a customer to look elsewhere for what they want.
Give Them A Wide Variety Of Payment Options
It can be a huge blunder to restrict your customer as to how they can pay for their products. Customers want their options. They’ll demand options.
You’ll find some customers who prefer to have the option to pay for their purchases through online payment options. There are some others who prefer paying through cash at the time of delivery.
Catering to the biggest range of customers that you can is imperative when you aim to grow your business.
In fact, a whopping 64% of the millennial generation have said that they prefer using gift cards when purchasing online more than any other method, since they believe it’s safer.
Accommodating all of these customers will be important, in order to get the largest customer base as you possibly can.
Build An App For Your Website
When you’re thinking of making an online store, one thing you should think about is to have an app for your store.
It’s not just for the bragging rights of having an app. When you create online store apps, customers tend to be attracted to you. According to a survey, nearly 85% of customers prefer using a native app to using a website when they shop.
Have A Review System For Your Website
Even if customers are buying things online, they rarely buy out of impulse. They want to make sure that what they’re buying is a good product, and they want to hear the experience that others buyers have had.
When you build online store features, it’s important to have this in place, since customers can directly see how many other people have bought the product, and how many people are actually enjoying their products.
Even if a particular product receives negative reviews, that’s not something to worry about, since the system itself will build a lot more confidence with customers in your store.
What Does All Of This Translate Into You As A Business Owner?
You might be thinking that a lot of this seems hassling and unnecessary. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Although these features will take time to implement, they translate into benefits that you can physically count through sales and profits.
You’re aiming to make the customer experience as pleasant as possible. When your customer is happy to buy off your store, you can bet they’ll recommend your store to their friends and family. That equates to more customers, which is more sales for you.
All of these are important when you’re building your online store. Services like Shopify, apart from offering a powerful tool to help you create a website, will also offer guides, such as finding out whether or not you can expand your business abroad, or what you can learn from multi-million dollar businesses to improve your own online business model. With all of this information, you’re ready to take on the bigger players and rake in the big bucks.