There was a time, not too long ago, when a quite common business move for commercial businesses (especially retail outlets) was to open an online shop, to start trading online and shipping products further afield. Given that many brick-and-mortar outlets had some form of delivery services for years, this was simply a digitization of that.
Other entitiesthat previously had never done business beyond their physical store were eager to get in on the vast economic opportunities that ecommerce had brought along. Some of these businesses even closed their physical stores and went entirely online.
That isn’t really how it works any more. There are now considerably more online ecommerce sites than there are physical retail outlets. Furthermore, nearly every business big enough to operate a franchise of stores now does business online too. The main difference between now and then though is that most ecommerce ventures are being set up, online, from scratch instead of being brick-and-mortar stores that are converted to ecommerce ones.
Indeed, ecommerce has its own culture, closely related to internet culture in general, and so the brand identities of these sites are often distinctly “online”. This naturally influences the marketing, with such phenomena as portrait-oriented smartphone videos being used for viral marketing or social media-tailored ad campaigns becoming a common – perhaps the most common – form of commercial marketing today.
The Center of Ecommerce Success – The Website
But of course, if you are going to do anything onlinethen you need a website, and this is indeed the key to ecommerce success. With the website comes all the other elements of ecommerce marketing that revolve around it.
When you have a website, SEO becomes a crucial undertaking, so too does website design (of course) and lead generation – the creation of click throughs to your website – becomes a key element of ecommerce marketing. After that, the bounce rate needs to be tackled, with a “bounce” representing a user who has visited your site but then clicked away without taking any further action.
All of this has become so important to ecommerce marketing that you can now hire professionals for each one of these tasks. All elements, however, come back to website. Without a good website, visitors are likely to bounce, which renders all SEO, web design, and lead generation efforts in vain. In other words, the website is where you should start.
But how do you set up a website for an ecommerce site? As you might expect this is going to be a combination of general advice (which applies in all cases) and other things that are specific to the type of product or service you are selling. The latter of these is specific to you, but we can certainly advise on the former.
What Makes a Good Ecommerce Site?
We mentioned above that the website should be the first thing you attend to, but perhaps this isn’t technically true. Preceding even the website is a brand identity and a solid idea of who that brand is intended to attract. Once you have this, you can ensure that the aesthetics of the website are in line with your brand,which will also inform your later marketing efforts.
Azola Creative, a company offering lead generation services, say that most lead generation techniques would be in vain if the brand and the website are not attractive in the first place.
After this, it is important to prioritize a clear website that is easy to navigate and aesthetically consistent. You can only begin on SEO, lead generation, and marketing campaigns once you have this down.
