When you will kickoff your eCommerce store, the success of your store depends on some crucial decision of yours. Some say that the market for online businesses is becoming over-saturated, and kick-starting a successful internet-based company is impossible.

eCommerce is more dependent on marketing than a traditional business, and your success will certainly be compared with your online traffic. However, though the upside of eCommerce is attractive it’s crucial to remember that eCommerce isn’t as easy as only making sales, generating revenue and shipping out orders.

Hard work and a little bit of creativity is all you need to turn your online store into a success.

Checklists to Optimize Modern Ecommerce Store

Before setting up an eCommerce business, there are several things to consider:

1. eCommerce Platform to Make Your Store Live

With the advanced technologies, today there are many eCommerce platforms available. If your website is not running on a modern eCommerce platform, it’s the right time to consider changing. If you are struggling with the payment processing, SEO, or site reliability, it is the time to consider changing the platform and make your store different. You could check some off great platforms like Shopify, Dokan, Magento, BigCommerce etc.

2. eCommerce Store Branding

If you’re running your online store for years, you need to make sure that all of your branding are perfect and updated including all your product images being high quality. According to Hubspot, people remember 80% of what they see, but only 20% of what they read, which actually stands true for eCommerce business.

Please keep in mind that all your product images along with overall branding will help people to recognize your eCommerce store.

3. Live Chat Option

If you want to make some quick sale, live chat is a useful tool. 44% of online customers say that having questions answered by a live person is one of the most important features an eCommerce website can offer. Most of the times people don’t like to make a call or send an email. They might simply leave your site. The main appeal of live chat is that it allows a business company/brand to answer the visitor’s questions quickly.

4. Onpage SEO Optimization

Nowadays, on-page SEO is crucial and important for every webmaster to realize the true meaning of SEO beside the potential it coins for every eCommerce business. Your eCommerce store must be responsive to fit in all screen size.

Product description, images and meta description to page titles must be kept updated.

5. Blog to Add Value to the Site

Having an updated blog will be indeed a core strategy for enticing more search traffic to your eCommerce store. If your eCommerce store doesn’t have a blog, it can be quite difficult time to attract inbound links with high-quality and original content. These will logically attract more links and make your site rank for high-intent, long-tail search queries.

6. Analyze Customer Engagement 

If you want to improve Customer engagement, surveys are the best option to use. Organize a survey, asking them questions about their experiences with your eCommerce site. Add a survey to your website or the emails of your customers to know things about your business. With surveys your visitors will tell you what’s exactly wrong, problems they faced, and what they expect to see in your store the next time.

7. eCommerce Re-marketing

Google re-marketing is all about reaching left visitors of your eCommerce store or site anonymously, flaunting them a personalized message after they leave your website. Your message will appear to those visitors when they browse other websites.

8. Keyword-Rich Product Descriptions

Google hates duplicate content, and many eCommerce sites are notorious for having duplicate content, mostly on product pages. 

Crafting product quality and unique descriptions boost site traffic and offers, a better chance of selling. Customer feedback, reviews and ratings are the fruits attained from precisely describing products, but avoid keyword stuffing. Instead, use keyword-rich product descriptions to better ranking.

9. Search Box for Easier Browsing

Search box let your visitors easily search for what they’re looking for. It is a great way to build a good relationship with them. It save their time in scrolling down to numbers of product pages to get their desired product.

10. High Quality Content to Engage Customers

SEO-friendly and relevant content is a crucial part of any eCommerce SEO strategy. The content you put on your site not only works as your sales pitch, but also how you set yourself apart from others. With informative and quality content you can keep your potential customers engaged with your brands, it is great because search engine algorithms measure the time people spend on your website and further use it as a ranking factor.

11. Featured Products

You can display featured products on the side columns or on your home page of your website which will notify your visitors and returning customers about the latest sales offers or top selling products of your store.

12. Related Products

In related products section, you can show your visitors what other products they can buy along with the products they’re currently viewing.

Just place with simple heading like “frequently bought together” or “related products” or “customers who bought this also bought”. It can encourage your visitors to buy more products.

13. Site Speed

The speed of the home page is a rising ranking factor, so it’s extremely crucial that your site loads quickly on all device. Having great and smooth navigation has a significant impact on the user’s browsing experience. It also crucial to improve SEO.

14. Mobile Optimization

A key factor that Google considers while ranking websites is mobile optimization. The main reason behind this is the fact that today mobile is one of the strongest traffic sources for eCommerce site.

15. Simple Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is an application that lets an online store to safely request payments from customers. With the right payment gateway, you’ll ease the path for customers to pay.

16. Easy Customer Registration & Login

Customers want simple signup & login process. Give that option for visitors to register on your website, so that whenever they return on your site they don’t need to enter all their billing address and payment details again & again.

17. Social Media Presence

Make your customers know that you are available on social networking sites, by adding the logos and links of Social Media on your site.

Tips for eCommerce Kickoff Success

If you are serious to start an eCommerce business, ensure to consider the following things first.

Analyze The Market Opportunity And Choose Product Accordingly

The foremost thing is to analyze the market and find out the potential product with a good demand in the market.

Here are the ways to find out the size of the eCommerce market and its success:

Use Keyword Planner Tool: Use Keyword Planner tool to know the search volume of your product keywords on Google. Higher search volume means higher demand and a bigger potential market.

Use Facebook ads manager: It can be used to know the actual prospective audience size of the related to specific products and services.

Google Trends: Using this tool you can know how the average search volume for product and service keywords has changed over time. With the help of this data, you can analyze if your potential market is decreasing, growing or staying steady.

Industry reports: Industry reports can help you to know which products have more demand and also you can get an idea of how to sustain yourself in the market.

Check your competitor: Check out the competition of the products you’re planning to sell on the new eCommerce store.

Once you analyze the market opportunity and find out right, profitable niche for your online store, it’s time to place your brand.

Today, there are lots of similar products available on the internet. It’s your ultimate duty to make your products and services stand out from the crowd.

It’s better to build your eCommerce store in a new niche category, so that you can easily get into the mind of the target audience, rather than competing with other companies.

There are numerous things to consider to position your brand, like— what kind of products you want to sell, weight and size, the fragility of products, availability, restrictions and regulations, shipping costs and others.

eCommerce Business Model 

You have to know what types of eCommerce businesses, product options, and business classifications exist, you’re ready to get started. The right thing to do is to analyze your eCommerce business plan and then pick the right model.

Read More: eCommerce Business Model Types That Work Right Now

Customer Service

Customers look for an immediate answer to a query, and there are some who don’t even want to browse through your FAQ list.

Live chat, on desktop, tablet or mobile, gives customers with the human and personal touch which is mostly lacking on digital channels these days. The data collected through live chat can assist your business in understanding the customer behavior and purchase decisions.

Before launching your eCommerce store make sure to answer these common questions –

Do you have an efficient live chat option on your eCommerce website?

Are you regularly responding to comments on your social media profiles and pages?

People like to speak with human at your company, so offer them the attention they look for.

Plan Your Logistics

An eCommerce store is your storefront. But, where is your warehouse location? How you are going to fulfill and store the inventory? Who will be managing the overall system? Inventory control has the full power to make or break your business.

Shipping is the other logistical challenges that make a huge impact on the success of your eCommerce business. It’s very important to choose the right shipping carrier. According to the product type and your target market, shipping charges must be determined.

Sometimes, based on the products, shipping charges may cost more than the actual cost of product. Most of the customers cannot accept this. The last crucial part of your logistical triangle is accounting for everything. An effective accounting system can significantly reduce the labor hours and efforts by eliminating the duplicate data entry and reducing the chances of human errors.

Plan Your Order Contentment

Proper Inventory management and order fulfillment are usually the common problems faced by most of the new eCommerce owners.

There are many questions that may surround when opening a new eCommerce store. For instance – which products need to be stock, how much quantities to stock, the size of boxes required, the best shipping courier, shipping cost and others.

Order fulfillment is another crucial part of your customers’ experience. When a customer receives a parcel on time and in good condition with good packing, they’re more likely to order more from your website. However, too late delivery, and poorly packed parcels won’t encourage your buyers to make purchase.

Eventually, a proper planning for order fulfillment before kicking off your online store can help you get to start with better footing.

Price Your Products

Pricing your products properly is one the tough things to learn success in any eCommerce business. If you keep your prices too low, you’ll make low profits, and if you keep it too high, you’ll in the end lose revenues and customers as well.

Follow these simple steps to pricing your products for successful eCommerce business-

Calculate what the product actually costs you (buying product, acquiring customers, delivering the product, business expense).

Check out the prices of your competitors to offer better deals for your targets audience.

A/B test your product’s pricing to find out which price attracts more buyers to buy it.

Leverage The Right Technologies For Your Business

If you want to get success in eCommerce business, you have to be technically perfect. Cloud computing has made it affordable for small businesses to easily launch an eCommerce business.

Using the right technologies like ERP, inventory management system etc. can let you easily start new eCommerce business without having to invest huge oppose in systems. Today there are more opportunities for people to kick-off their eCommerce business because the innovations and technologies have torn down the traditional barriers to entry.

Final Words of eCommerce Kickoff Success

Starting a successful eCommerce business might look like rocket science for many, but actually not. Consider the above-mentioned tips, research lots of ideas and pick a niche you think will have the maximum potential customers. In the end, it doesn’t have to be perfect, only good enough to get you on right track.