by What is the strongest reason that keeps you in the offline business? along with the times, many successful entrepreneurs have switched to online shop businesses. If your company sells items in physical stores but not online, you could be missing out on a tremendous income-generating opportunity
Is your business ready to be successful like other entrepreneurs? Transforming to an online business can be challenging for small businesses, which are often short on time, budget and staff. A team of ecommerce providers can help you design and maintain a relatively simple and affordable online store.
If you lack the capital to rent a place of business, you can start an online shop that can be done at home. Starting an online store also has methods and knowledge, there are at least 10 questions that you need to know when opening an online store for the first time.
How to start an online shop?
If at the beginning you started your online shop you couldn’t recruit employees due to limited costs, there’s no need to worry. Because joining e commerce, you will be helped by the obstacles you feel.
You can upload your product catalog, manage customer shopping carts, receive payments securely and handle order fulfillment. There are already stipulations determined by the e-commerce party, so sellers and buyers just need to follow. As a buyer, you can also add additional information if needed.
In addition, you can link to your online shop on the social media that you use. So that it is possible for more and more people to know about your online store.
What’s the best way to customize the appearance of an online store?
As much as possible, determine the logo of your product that will be remembered by consumers. For design, usually e commerce providers have provided a default appearance.
It’s different if you have your own website, you can customize it to your liking which really describes the character of your product, it could be like choosing a color or something else.
What type of payment system should be used?
There are many types of payment systems that you can use, especially from the e-commerce side that also provides its own payment services. There are debits, credits, bank transfers, e-wallet transfers, e-commerce balances that will be withdrawn directly if you make a purchase.
Now, e-commerce parties also provide loan services. So, each user is given a maximum loan limit which will be paid every month. Buyers can buy goods and pay for them later.
Because each buyer uses a different payment system, you can start slowly and if you think you have to add, then you can add a payment system to make it easier for consumers.
How to handle customer service?
Consumers like something fast, which means they like fast service. So, when you have plunged into the online store as much as possible, you can be a responsive seller, be quick to provide answers or follow up on every order that comes in.
Activate notifications on your smartphone or other device, so you can find out about any new activities that occur in your online store.
How do I determine shipping costs?
You can coordinate with the courier service that you use for the calculation of shipping costs to make it more accurate.
The major carriers will calculate shipping costs for you free of charge, and most of the major e-commerce vendors allow you to integrate these fees into your store’s payment section.
Sometimes there are free postage events held by e-commerce and that is an option for you whether you want to participate or not. If so, you should think about how to cover the free shipping costs. Because usually events like this are in great demand by consumers.
How do I create the best product image and description?
You don’t need to have a professional camera when starting an online shop, this will be enough if you have a smartphone with good quality and basic photography so that it can produce good pictures.
Good image quality can also captivate consumers to buy your product. Over time, if you have sufficient capital, you can buy a camera, lighting or other support.
You don’t have to use a long product description, as long as the message is conveyed. The description that you create is interesting and detailed enough to make consumers interested.
Are customer reviews required?
Providing space for customers to provide testimonials or reviews can increase trust in your store. In addition, the habit of customers before buying via e-commerce is to see the reviews of every review in your store. Is recommended to buy in your shop.
When a given review is positive, it will certainly build a good image for your store. But it is different if the reviews given are negative reviews that can be a risk to your business. Some e-commerce services offer a customer review option that allows you to respond to or want to remove unwanted reviews.
The other side that you can take from negative reviews is as a lesson for you to be more careful, to improve service, reduce things like that so they don’t happen again.
How do you start attracting buyers?
Once your store is up and running, spread the word both online and offline. Link your online store link on social media or conduct an email newsletter campaign.
How will people know your online shop if you don’t make a move. You can also create separate business accounts for online shops on social media so that they don’t mix with your personal accounts.
It’s also recommended that you choose an e commerce vendor that automatically uses search engine optimization (SEO) for your store’s content. this makes it easier for your shop to appear in everyone’s search.
How to deal with returns?
It cannot be denied that there will be returns or returns of goods. This happens if the item received by the buyer is damaged, not in accordance with the order without confirmation from the seller.
You need to know how the e-commerce system is in the event of a return of goods. Or if you open an online store not through e-commerce, you have to determine the process, how long it will take from the information received to return the goods sent back.
How do you know whether this online shop has been successful or not?
Try choosing an e-commerce that offers free self-service analytics. From this analysis can tell you how many people visit your store and how often they do it. You can also find out where your customers are from and how they found you.
Some e commerce also give the nickname star seller, but this can decrease if your sales performance also decreases. It can show that your product is a best seller, making it easier to find when consumers search for keywords that have something to do with your product.
Prepare everything related to the online business world. If you feel that you already understand how an online business works, you can start to open an online store on social media or e commerce. Don’t do it half-heartedly, but do it seriously so that your business can continue to grow and develop.
