Ecommerce Store Blueprint: How to Build and Grow A Profitable Online Store

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Ecommerce is certainly having its moment right now.

A land of opportunity for anyone looking to get into entrepreneurship or become an online business owner, eCommerce is certainly beneficial.

However, there are certain hurdles in the journey that discourage business owners from eCommerce.

But it shouldn’t be like that. Those hurdles are easy to cross if you do things correctly. With enough effort, you will experience significant growth and scalability.

But is there a recipe to eCommerce success? No there’s not. There are in fact, best practices that you can use to build your eCommerce business smartly.

The following post is a small blueprint for eCommerce success. Hopefully, these will suffice you to understand the essentials and help you break into the digital world with ease.

Let’s start, shall we;

Design a Customer-Friendly Website

If you’re looking to get started with eCommerce, you need to invest first and foremost in a well-designed website. The visual appeal and the functionality matter a lot.

Let’s first focus on the visual appeal. You need to create a website that’s attractive enough to not only make the users stay, but also convert as well. To that end, you need to invest in services that help you create websites that convert.

There are a lot of considerations that you need to take into account if you’re looking to create a visually appealing eCommerce store. How the user interacts, and his overall experience being the prime amongst those concerns.

Regardless of whether you design the eCommerce store yourself or incur the services of a development agency, you need to consider UI/UX as the main priority.

It’s a bother, we know. Planning a website rather than just jumping into the development process can seem like a chore for most business owners. After all, who doesn’t want to just get started?

Planning, while a slow process, does have its benefits.

What we would suggest is to invest in a website to avoid future complications in terms of the website layout and overall user experience.

Apart from emphasizing the user experience, we also want to highlight the importance of having a quick-loading website. You need to ensure that your website’s loading speed and images are optimized for speed. Tools like GTMetrix and Google PageSpeedInsights are your best friend in this matter. They help you test the speed of your website with ease.

Spend Time on Content

Now that we’re finished with the technicalities, it’s time to focus on the matter that goes inside.

Content matters a lot. It is because of this that you focus on optimizing your content for the best possible performance. When it comes to content, you can use blog articles, video content, and infographics for your website. The more value you add to your content, the more beneficial it will be for the conversion rate of your eCommerce store.

On the social media content end, you can come up with, and post content yourself. However, that is quite counterintuitive when you can also incur the services of a social media agency. Again, it depends on the type of budget you have and your requirements.

With your content, you need to go above and beyond. This means that you add serious value to your content. When you work hard enough, you’ll get rewarded for it with recurring customers and improved conversion rates.

Another result of such an effort is that you have a loyal customer base who will purchase from your store since they trust your brand more.

Pay Attention to the Little Things on the Site

When it comes to the user experience of an eCommerce website, you need to be aware of what the users are looking at in your store.

There are CTAs, buttons, forms, and other places that you should look out for. If you already have a good enough user-base, then you can play around with the CTAs and buttons to test which variation of them brings out the greatest number of conversions.

For example, you have a CTA with a certain color. You find out the users are hovering near the CTA, but not clicking on it. You then decide to change the positioning and color of the CTA. This leads to more people clicking on your CTAs and proceeding with the purchase.

See, the little things! Test them out for yourself and see where you stand.

This brings me to the next phase of this article.

Test Absolutely Everything

Even if you have tons of website visitors and a handsome level of conversions, you shouldn’t just sit back and relax. That’s where you need to test everything for maintenance purposes. Such a testing process also leads to new and improved strategies.

From GTMetrix to PageSpeedInsights and others, there are plenty of places where you can check the performance of your website. Apart from technical aspects, you should always keep in mind the best practices of ensuring that your content, among other things, is also working well.

A good tool to gauge website performance is Google Analytics. Handy from the outset, it gives you a 360-degree view of the performance of your website. If there are any discrepancies with the performance, you can edit your strategy and view the changes yourself. This helps you check the exact amount of users converting to your eCommerce store.

From the very small to the very large, you need to test out everything to ensure that your operations are as smooth as possible. When you put so much effort into your operations, you’re gaining a good reputation in the long run for your
brand. As such, you’re building brand loyalty in the process.

Whenever you feel like creating a website or an eCommerce store, think from the user’s perspective and whether or not you would buy from it. Looking inside from the outside, you can gain a better perspective that helps you improve the user experience to a significant degree.

Lastly, when you want to build a successful eCommerce store, it can become easy to get carried away. Keep it simple, and in time, you would be able to take your offerings to the next levels.