E-commerce is the process of selling products and/or services online through a website. Many people today have swapped going out shopping in the high street, to browsing and buying online. Online shopping is a convenient, accessible and quick way to shop, now more than ever before.
An e-commerce website works best when it is easy to use. This makes for a good user experience that will make people want to come back again and again. With Google’s constant updates to their algorithm along with the fact that UK smartphone owners are opt more for online purchases now, it is worth considering the amount of e-commerce activity that will take place on mobile devices.
We’ve put together some of the main things to consider when setting up your e-commerce site…
1. Product images
Image is important. Professional, high quality photos of your products are vital when it comes to online promotion as well as print advertising. Whether it’s a dress or a piece of machinery; unique, high quality photos will help you stand out from your competitors.
Multiple images that give different angles and variations of your product, such as different colours, will help your customers make a more informed choice when shopping online. The images should be high enough quality for customer to zoom in and inspect product detail.
2. Number of products
The more products you have, the more challenging it gets to manage them all. It is worth thinking about the categories or types of products you have and dividing them up into their own unique filtered pages where people can easily browse specific products. For example, shirts may be a category and formal shirts may be a subcategory.
Multiple manufacturer partnerships are important to manage as well when it comes to building trusted relationships with them and testing the product quality before including it in your product offering.
3. Currency
It is worth considering what currencies you want to handle and deal with as this can influence how you will set up your business bank account. Exchange rates are an important factor in how you price your products to suit your target market – whether it’s selling into the UK and Ireland or something more global.
Online merchant accounts and payment gateways for processing transactions online provide options for handling multiple currencies.
4. Shipping
Like the online payment systems, there are many options to consider for shipping your products. Being based in Northern Ireland, costs can often be higher than shipping from the UK mainland. There are alternative options such as drop shopping and order fulfilment that you could partner with to ship your products within certain countries that you are selling into.
5. Online marketplaces
Amazon and eBay are two of the most popular services for selling online. Using a service like this for selling your products can give you the benefit of an already huge online presence for your products to be listed. It’s unlikely that people will know to search for your store, but they may well discover your products.
eBay is a good for a beginner in selling online before you set up your e-commerce site. You can see what products might sell well before confirming what products you want to list on your e-commerce site. Amazon’s Marketplace comes with features to help integrate your e-commerce site into a seamless experience for customers shopping online.
6. Content
Images are definitely vital for e-commerce success, though test and video are 2 additional formats that can’t be ignored.
A lot of product descriptions online are sourced from the manufacturer’s description. However, when it comes to SEO and people being able to find your website, having duplicate content is not a good thing.
Writing unique product descriptions in your own unique style will be helpful for ranking in the search engines as well as giving customers something more interesting to find out about your product. Writing content can be tough as businesses are often challenged for time to do it. However, there are great content writing services available to help you manage this more effectively.
Video is seriously popular right now for content marketing, but it still hasn’t fully taken off in the e-commerce world. Video is ideal for getting customer attention, showing off product capabilities and even teaching customers how to use your product.
If your company requires a professional online presence please Contact Us to discuss how we can help you, on Dungannon 028 3754 9025 or Belfast 028 9002 5050.
