5 Things To Consider Before Setting Up
An E-commerce Business
So you’ve decided to set up your own e-commerce business, but have you crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s? Read below to find out the 5 things NI Parcels think you consider before setting up an e-commerce business.
- What are you selling?
Okay, so this may seem like an obvious one, but before you set up your online shopping business model you need to know exactly what you plan to sell. You’d be surprised to learn how many e-commerce businesses try to set up a business prior to knowing this and have little knowledge as to how they’re going to get their stock.
- Who Is Your Competition?
Once you have your idea and you know how to access your product it’s best to do some competitive research and find out who else is providing this product or service. You can do this research by looking online and by checking out social media to see which brands are popular and are engaging with their customers.
- Who Is Your Target Audience?
Once you know who your competition is, both direct and indirect, your next consideration is to find out who you target audience are. This is why knowing your competition is so helpful as you will be able to see what they have done with their marketing strategies, what has worked, what hasn’t and what people you should be targeting.
Your target audience will be more inclined to buy your products and will be receptive to your marketing. Create an audience profile that includes their gender, marital status, education status and current income. Once you know who you are targeting you can tailor your marketing to convey a message that connects with them.
- Where Are You Shipping?
Another important thing to consider is that once you have found your target audience it’s vital that you decide which countries you will be shipping your products to. If you’re based in the UK, you might want to keep things local, especially before the whole Brexit agreement gets finalised. Knowing where you will be doing business from the start of your journey can be a great advantage further down the line. You’ll have a better idea from the start about who your audience is and who you can target, what they want to hear and what products would suit their aims. With this information you can create a tailor-made marketing strategy.
- What Is Your Strategy?
The last thing you need to consider is to create a strategy for your business. Your strategy needs to plan for the unexpected, such as times of hardship or financial growth. You need to be able to anticipate what to do if a competitor starts stealing your business or you are selling more products that you had accounted for. It’s these situations that you have to learn how to navigate through if you want to create a successful e-commerce business model that can succeed even in the harshest of economic environments.
Some Extra Tips
There are also a couple other things you can do to improve your chances of success, including:
Properly describe and showcase your products: In order to sell products, you need to describe them as best you can, highlighting their best qualities and providing extra information such as dimensions, materials etc. Also use high-quality images that will show them off in the best way possible.
Pay close attention to your shopping cart design: You need to ensure that your shopping cart design is user friendly. Include the ability to remove or add multiple items, revise an order if needed, insert promotional codes etc.
Offer guest checkout functionality: This is a good option to include as many consumers don’t complete a purchase and leave their cart as they don’t want to include too much personal information. To counteract this, offer the ability for them to check out as guests.
Highlight bestselling products: Highlighting bestselling products is a wonderful way you can increase conversions. This is because each highlighted product serves as proof that the item is a popular one that is bought by many other consumers.
