Running a brick and mortar business is a completely different ball game to developing a flourishing business in the ecommerce world. To sell online successfully, you need to consider some key factors before you get started.
Becoming available online has become somewhat of a necessity for businesses these days since the onset of Covid-19. Online shopping has become unavoidable for many consumers, so businesses must provide the option for people to buy digitally in order to boost sales in these tough times.
In this article, we cover three basics that business owners should consider before entering the ecommerce game.
3 Fundamentals for Selling Online
- Identify your winning product
- Provide a winning offer
- Drive traffic to your site
Key Fundamental #1: Identify Your Winning Product
To start with, you need to establish your best and most popular product or service. This will likely be the product or service that you customers return to you for, time and time again. It’s the essential product that helps to keep your business running. Remember the 80/20 rule? Put this into play when identifying your winning product.
When transitioning into ecommerce, you should focus your online store around your best product or service, ensuring the design and content emphasises the key benefits that a user will experience from that product or service. While you probably have multiple products to offer, we recommend starting off with your best selling product and optimising your website to drive visitors who are actively looking for a product like yours. Ultimately, your winning product has the best potential to make you money, so that should be your main focus.
Key Fundamental #2: Provide a Winning Offer
You may have noticed our continued use of the word ‘winning’ in this post. Well, of course a winning product requires a winning offer to go with it. You need to offer something that will entice your website visitors to come back to your site again, sign up to receive newsletters or your free offer, or buy your product.
The digital world is now full of competition from other businesses, so using Facebook ads, Google ads, or any other suitable marketing platform may help your business and your offer stand out.
The internet has become a thing of convenience. Many people tend to check trusted sites like Amazon, eBay and Aliexpress to find the products because they often offer competitive prices compared to small, more specialised, businesses.
With cheaper prices available and people tightening their belts due to the Covid-19 pandemic, creating a winning offer for your website visitors is your best chance of increasing sales. Some examples of offers are buy one, get one free promotions, percentage off discounts, and a month’s free subscription. It may seem like a sacrifice to offer these kinds of discounts, but the reward may be returning customers if they like your product.
You also have the opportunity to collect data from customers when they purchase from you. For example, you’ll likely want to ask for their email address to send their order confirmation to. If you enable buyers to opt-in to receive your newsletters in the future, this gives further opportunity to market your products and increase the chance of repeated orders from those customers.
Key Fundamental #3: Drive Traffic to Your Website
Now that you have your winning product and the winning offer that will appeal to your target audience, you need people to visit your online store. In other words, you need website traffic, which refers to the number of users that visit your website.
Traffic can come from a lot of different sources. It can flow organically from people searching Google. People could come across your business page on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and click through to your website. Traffic could also be generated via paid aids through Google or Bing.
One of the most effective ways to boost traffic to your store is through Facebook advertisement. Facebook interacts with people on a business level, as well as a personal level. They may not be specifically searching for your product or service, but if your ads are optimised to attract a particular target audience, you can attract those who will resonate with your business and product offering.