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How to perfect Ecommerce for your Business

In the past few years, online retail has grown at a rapid pace. From the biggest multinationals to the smallest local retailers, it’s become pretty difficult to find a company that doesn’t use ecommerce in some form. Despite that, there are a few businesses that have yet to tap into this growing market, which is puzzling.

Missed opportunity

A decade or so ago, when ecommerce began to take off, it might have been impossible for many smaller businesses to do. Fortunately, the cost of setting up an online shop has fallen significantly, which, in tandem with sites such as eBay and Amazon, has enabled companies of all sizes to sell their wares through their websites.

If you run a business but haven’t got round to setting up an online shop yet, there’s nothing to stop you. In order to get it up and running, you have to consider the following:

• The products you want to sell – this dictates how much space you need on your site and how many extra pages you need
• Who you want to sell to – for different countries, you will need to sort out shipping
• Whether you want to restrict sales to your site – it’s possible to set up accounts on sites such as eBay as well as Google and social media sites

Ecommerce checklist

As with your company’s website, you’ll need a few things in order to set up your online shop. Here are the essentials:

• A domain name and business e-mail address
• A website complete with a shopping cart facility
• An SSL certificate – for use of credit/debit cards
• A secure payment gateway/provider
• An online merchant bank account
• A shipping company
• Web analytics – this helps to track sales and web traffic to your online shop
• Someone to oversee the online shop within your business

All that should be enough to help get your online shop up and running, but once you’re ready to go, how do you make the most of your online commerce operation?

Ringing tills

Publicising your online shop might seem like the most difficult thing of all, but if you’ve only just set it up, you should do everything possible to announce to the world that you’re open for business. As it says on the daily.co.uk blog about making a success of ecommerce:

“Use social and cross-selling features to generate improved conversion rates and higher sales. Use a blog to keep your customers in the loop and position yourself as an expert in your field; add a forum to allow you to interact with your customers – and your customers to interact with each other; win the confidence of potential buyers by collecting positive reviews. You can even recommend products to complement the one a customer is already buying…”

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