Are you an entrepreneur? Do you want to start an online store for your business?
If so, you’ve made the right decision!
In recent years, eCommerce has become very important for retailers’ success. In addition to owning a traditional store, retailers are practically forced to create an online e commerce to keep up with trends, satisfy the customer’s shopping experience and more.
Magento is known as the best option to start an online store. So the ultimate goal of this article is to give you some tips to build a Magento eCommerce site in a complete and professional way.
Start a Magento website
Today’s online commerce is becoming increasingly widespread and an e-commerce store is an indispensable tool.
So, after understanding the definition and benefits of Magento, it’s time to start a successful online store.
Step 1: Choose an exceptional domain name
Do you want to sell online and build a brand? Choosing a domain name is essential. It’s your web address as well as your brand and an important marketing tool.
- First of all, you should choose a short, catchy and easy to remember name. It should also be unique as the most obvious names have already been taken.
- A great domain name will give your online store:
- The mark is easily identifiable
- Create a professional contact email address associated with the domain
Supports SEO tools for marketing
Step 2: Get the Magento installation package and host the Magento files on your server
So the next step to starting an online store is to implement the Magento installation package and place Magento files on the server.
Step 3: Choose a Magento template and Customize your design
to match the colors and fonts of your brand
Next, it’s time to design your store.
Since your website is an e-commerce site, you should make it as simple and easy to use as possible to offer the best user experience possible.
Plus, saving time is a great way to sell more. Product information must be detailed, navigation is clear and the entire site must be designed to encourage users to purchase. Details like font, color and layout should be simple but attractive.
Step 4: import the products
This is generally considered as a simple step. However, to manage the warehouse in the most effective way, you should pay attention to this. The name, type, characteristics, quantity and price of the product must be accurate and detailed. This helps you in the sales process and helps users find and buy easily.
Step 5: Complete the store settings
A complete solution: Magento
A retail management system simplifies separate sales channels to offer seamless shopping experiences anytime, anywhere.
Manage your Magento eCommerce site
Having created a commercial eCommerce website, managing it is just as important.
Here are some suggestions for you:
Get a complete eCommerce CMS
With an ecommerce cms like Magento it will be easy to manage products and categories, add and edit pages or start a blog. In addition, it offers customers a choice of uninterrupted products, with SKUs, prices and their own images.
Accept payments from major suppliers
With the convenience of Magento support, it is possible to connect to various utilities without any interference. Whether it’s payment gateways, parameter calculator, shipping tool or link your eCommerce experience with eBay, Paypal, MailChimp, Google Shopping, QuickBooks and more.
If your eCommerce site supports leading providers like PayPal provided by Braintree, Stripe, Apple Pay, Pay with Amazon and dozens of others, this will be an asset to your business. Customers will have more choice and can easily buy.
Manage orders and inventory
Managing a retail business means you have to manage hundreds of orders every day. The high volume of sales orders and the messy inventory make dealers very worried.
Therefore, having software to manage all orders and inventory will be more necessary than ever. It will help you manage your processes and products to help you improve sales, solve problems and finalize your order as quickly as possible.
Configure shipping integrations
Shipping is an important value proposition for your store.
Because shipping options depend largely on the product, the business model, the target audience and the eCommerce solution. It has the power to attract customers, but it can also drive customers away. So, if you’re new to selling online, think about starting small. This means that you may want to keep the internal shipment and check it before entering the international shipment.
There are some tips to keep in mind when you start shipping online.
- Start searching for your competitors, you can discover some really interesting ideas on what works and what doesn’t in your catalog.
- Make your shipping policies very simple, this will avoid confusion or surprise, making your potential customer more likely to continue with your purchase.
- Finally, start searching for your competitors, you can discover some really interesting information about what works and what is not part of your catalog. Offer a variety of shipping options based on different shipping speeds or couriers. The speed with which a buyer gets his product can be as important as how much they pay for shipping.
Now, if you can offer free shipping on your products, do it!
Set taxes correctly
We are talking about taxes for your company at this point, not local sales taxes. So this step is rather short and “sweet” – you should talk to a tax expert.
They will help you do things like get your tax ID and understand the tax classes, rates and the structure of your area. All this can vary from place to place. Trust me, you will save money and headaches in the long term by consulting the expert.
Set up analysis to measure your success
You need data and benchmarks to cultivate your business. To start, check the analysis in your platform’s repository.
With Magento, it can help you with basic metrics like your visitors, conversion rates, the most popular products and average revenue per customer. Also, consider platform options such as in-store store search that can give you an idea of what your customers are looking for.
Furthermore, it is safe to say that, regardless of what you do, you should use Google Analytics for your online business. This will help you understand what the search giant sees happening both inside and outside your store
Google Analytics gives you the following information to help you expand and improve your business:
- Know your target audience
- Follow where the buyers come from, where they go and where they go
- Keep track of how visitors interact with your store
- Ability to record your efforts
Protect your website by installing the SSL certificate
SSL – Secure Sockets Layer – Certificates are small data files that digitally associate an encryption key with the details of an organization.
When installed on a Web server, it activates the padlock and the https protocol (on port 443), allows customers to verify the authenticity and reliability of the brand, ensure that all data and information exchanged between the website and the are encrypted, avoid the risk of interference and allow secure connections from a web server to a browser.
Generally, the SSL certificate is used to protect credit card transactions and is becoming the norm when protecting site browsing. SSL certificates bind together:
- A domain name, server name or host name.
- An organizational identity (ie the name of the company) and location.
Increase your sales through channels with Magento extensions
The cart is the most important part of the eCommerce store that decides your sales.
However, most eCommerce sites are abandoned by shopping carts due to a complicated or too long payment process.
By providing simple and easy checkout utilities, it allows users to complete the purchase process conveniently. You need to have a control page in one step that simplifies the complex step-by-step procedure that includes repeated fields for a one-step payment process. This reduces the number of customers leaving their trucks halfway.
The more customers complete the payment process, the more companies increase their revenue.
Sell on social media
There are many tips and tricks you can use to attract visitors to your online store. One of the best tips is to use social media.
Social media are low-cost tools used to combine technology with social interaction through the use of words.
The most commonly used tools are internet and other mobile devices. And you’ve probably heard of popular news channels like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Youtube, the market.
The media themselves have created a way for marketers to communicate with their customers and potential consumers. It also helps to personalize the brand and convey the message in a conversational and very comfortable style.
So, it’s a great way to promote your products for your target and new web clients.
List on global markets like Amazon, eBay … without managing separate inventories
Online marketplaces, where consumers can buy online from many merchants in one place, have become an integral part of many e-commerce companies.
Therefore, along with product information management, salespeople must have a strategy to manage their inventory in many markets.
Make sure customers come back with gift certificates, coupons, points of sale, points.
Keeping old customers continues to buy the product in your store more easily than finding new customers.
This is true for most companies, particularly in the online business world, where advertising costs frequently increase. The search for new customers is becoming more expensive.
Membership cards, gift vouchers, double discounts, reward points, store credits … are measures that are applied by many retail stores to attract customers.
Centralized channel management
Retailers need to do better in connecting the online and offline shopping channel.
In order to improve the situation, it is important to have a retail management system that streamlines separate sales channels to provide seamless shopping experiences anytime, anywhere. This allows companies to save time for easier customer management and savings.
Convert mobile buyers
- Today’s customers are always “online”
- 84% of them cannot live without a smartphone.
- 8-10 am: 66% will wake up with their smartphone
- 12-5: rush hours of smartphone use during the day
These figures demonstrate the enormous potential of mobile device buyers. Furthermore, consumers of mobile devices want an exceptional experience when they land on a particular website and 66% of them would like today’s retailers to offer the best shopping experience on the smartphone.
If the site is completely satisfied, it is likely that you will continue to browse the site.
However, if the site is not optimized for mobile devices, it will annoy the active user experience, thus determining a visitor who leaves the website completely.
To satisfy the growing customer demand, what you need to do is know how to take advantage of the technology to maximize the shopping experience for your users. With Magento, your e-commerce store will always be optimized for mobile phones.
Synchronize all your sales
Last but not least, retailers should integrate all sales in order to verify the number of products left in stock.
Perfectly integrate your online and offline experiences
In order to improve the shopping experience for your customers, we need a total solution that allows you to reduce the gap and perfectly integrate online and offline shopping experiences.
Here are some suggestions for you:
The integration of back-end systems is the most important step. Both your physical store and your e-commerce store must share data and work simultaneously. The warehouse stock is just one example of the many aspects of retail that need to be synchronized.
In general, the challenge of back-end unification is to synchronize your e-commerce content management system with your in-store point-of-sale (POS) system.
Enhance the in-store experience
If you are a retailer, in-store buyers are incredibly valuable. You just have to convince them to enter. This is achieved by improving online shopping experiences for in-store buyers, such as:
- Offer the possibility to withdraw an order online from a physical store.
- Allow customers to take orders online from the location of the shipment.
- Provide in-store availability and a webstore option for those who want to buy the product immediately and don’t want to wait.
- Accept mobile payments through the in-store POS system.
- Create an app that allows buyers to scan product barcodes to read reviews online.
- Offer in-store access to your online catalog.
- Provide the ability to return a product to a physical store.
- Create an easy-to-use online shopping list.
- Provide free Wi-Fi.
Combine online and offline marketing
Consumers have more requests than ever and expect personalized content. Successfully hacked growth requires overlapping online and offline tactics to stand out and give customers a lasting impression.
Here are some ways to combine online and offline strategies:
- Online coupons for the physical store can be offered as SMS, via e-mail marketing, as push notifications from applications or on Facebook.
- You can offer the opportunity to buy gift certificates online in stores and vice versa.
- SMS messages with discount codes can be perfect for some markets: try with your public arget!
- Promote social contests in your physical locations.
- Create Facebook event pages for events and in-store sales.
- Use of geolocation targeting to send mobile offers to nearby potential customers.
It takes commitment and long-term dedication to unify online and offline sales, but if you follow these basic guidelines – starting step by step with the right strategy and building from there – you will succeed.