8 Crucial Tips to Make a Successful Online Store

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8 Crucial Tips to Make a Successful Online Store

Starting a business is hard and not simple, every time. But with the help of technology today, it has been easier to start an online business. Now you can build an online store by yourself with e-commerce software and start selling.

The benefits of an online store for your business are can reduce overheads, lower marketing cost, higher people reached, flexibility and more. But, it isn’t just about creating an online shop. You have to make your online shop a successful one by doing these things:


1.  Web Design

Having an outstanding website design is same important as having good products. It is sad if your product is good but it can’t sell because of the bad impression of your business that comes from your website.

93% of buyers consider visual appearance to be the most important factor when making a purchase, according to Kissmetrics report.

Your website must be designed with a good quality picture, captivated copywriting and contains enough information for visitors to make decision comfortably. Here is the design example from TripleReady website:

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Pro Tips:

  • Make sure your site speed is good. You can check with Google Developers for free
  • Keep it simple with less visual complexity
  • Guide visitors with visual cues and call-to-action
  • Include reviews, ratings and more as social proof


2.  Online Support

Purchasing journey of a customer involves a lot of thinking and will come out with a lot of questions related to size, shipping, return order and more. It is important for the customer to feel secure, inclusive and supported. You might lose your potential customers if you don’t have proper customer support.

The most helpful type of support is a live-chat feature that can work 24/7. This tool can increase your site-wide conversion by more than 10%. Your website visitors get fast information and you also get beneficial feedback from them. Here is the live chat example used by Oxwhite:

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Pro Tips:

  • If you can’t offer 24/7 live chat service, you can let visitors know by setting your available hours on the chat feature.
  • Design and make your customer support features visible anywhere on your website so that visitors can use them whenever they need.


3.  SEO Friendly

Your website needs traffic. One of the efficient ways is by search engine optimization, SEO. Compared to other marketing channels, it could be less cost, better ROI and get more quality leads. The search leads proven to achieve 8.5 more conversions than outbound marketing.


4.  Mobile Friendly

Today, online shoppers that used smartphone estimated more than 38%. According to Business Insider, mobile shopping will account for 45% of all e-commerce shopping in 2020.

With the increasing smartphone users for online shopping, you have to ensure that their site design is mobile-friendly to make sure visitors can have a good shopping experience, no matter what device they’re using.

Pro Tips:

  • Examine your website’s mobile responsiveness by trying it with several types of device and operating system.
  • For mobile, design your website’s content vertically instead of horizontally for smoother scrolling and viewing your content on phone screens.


5.  Data Analytics

Without real data, online store owners cannot track marketing performance solely based on perception but must have data to prove it. You can use many tools available according to your need. For example, the Google Analytics tool to analyze website visitors behaviour so that you can optimize your website.

Now with the data, you can come out insights on how to get more traffic, why visitors leave the certain page before meeting your objective, how to improve user experience and more.

Pro Tips:

  • Try free or trial tools to try first before using your money to subscribing the tool.
  • Other than using an analytic tool, you can get people to test out your online store and get beneficial insight from them.


6.  Free Shipping

Based on a survey conducted by Deloitte, 88% of the respondents choose ‘Free shipping’ compared to just 12% who prefer ‘Fast shipping’.  Everyone does love free stuff, right?

If you can’t afford to cover the cost of shipping, you can make ‘Free shipping’ to push customers to spend more. Here is how Dcentral Wonder plays with it:

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Pro Tips:

  • Offer free shipping for shoppers who’ve abandoned their carts because one of the top reason for abandonment chart is an expensive shipping charge.
  • Your cost per customer acquisition, CAC can help you to measure the minimum purchase amount for the customer to get free shipping.


7.  Competition

The usual behaviour of online customers is comparing in different platforms to choose a product that has the best price, review/rating, brand, quality, return policy and any other factors.

You can’t stop them to compare but you can make them attracted more to your online store by giving the better features they need comparing to your competitors. Knowing what your competitors’ strength and weakness will help you determine what you need to change and highlight your offer to your business to stay competitive.

Pro Tips:

  • Identify your 10 competitors that have the most relevance and quite similar to your business features.
  • Analyze their website, content, brand positioning, marketing strategy, pricing, shipping, reviews and related information related to e-commerce.


8.  Return Policy

No matter how good our products and services, for some reasons, shoppers will return the products. 51% of shoppers prefer not to do business if the return policy seems inconvenient for them because they already feel they might return the product in the early order process.

Pro Tips:

  • Use customer feedback to regularly update your policy.
  • Cut down the returns rate by giving enough product information for them to make decision comfortably before buying a product, having good warehousing and fulfillment system to prevent the product from damage.

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