The difference between building a successful e-commerce store and one that does not serve the defined purpose zeroes down to just a few minor details. For instance, your e-commerce business may have a great product, but if you miss out on any of the important steps of the e-commerce website building process, you may be running a risky venture. It may even result in business failure.
In this article, we will take you through all the important things you need to know for building a functional and successful e-commerce website.
Steps to Build a Successful Online Store and Outperform Your Competitors
To get you started on the path to build an online store, we’ve listed 9 steps that you need to follow:
- Pick a Website Builder Which Specializes in E-commerce
A website builder allows you to create a website without any coding experience. It’s a convenient solution for small business owners, freelancers, or anyone who wants to have their website up and running quickly without investing too much time or money. E-commerce website builders use drag-and-drop interface that offers plenty of flexibility and customization and is intuitive to use. You can get help from Bluehost’s feature-rich e-commerce website builder. It has a multitude of impressive features such as unmetered SSD storage, domain for 1 year, 300+ free WordPress themes, abandoned cart recovery, custom transactional emails, SSL Certificate Protection, Speed Boosting CDN and more.
- Buy Your Domain from a Reputable Domain Name Registrar
It is essential to get your domain name registered with a reliable domain registrar. Simply put, a domain name registrar is a business that sells and handles domain names’ reservation. Domain names are a website’s main address that it uses on the web – they usually start with www. and end with .com or any other domain extension or TLD.
While building an e-commerce store, ensure that your domain includes your e-commerce store’s name – this might sound obvious to you, but there are various businesses that use different names for their domain, which does not really help with SEO optimization.
- Choose the Right Ecommerce Template for Yourself
Often, e-commerce website builders provide a broad range of templates to pick from. What is even better is – most services allow you to remove and add features on the drag-and-drop templates, enabling you to make customized e-commerce stores.
- Customize Your E–commerce Template
This may go without saying, but it is important to iron out every detail of your website and add the unique touches that make your website stand out and outperform your competitors. This is the time to check out your competition – if you find something that your competitors have missed on their website, take inspiration from them, and add it to yours.
- Add Products to Your Website
Take high-quality and vibrant pictures of your products and include the videos if needed. In the e-commerce world, one of the most significant trends is – the increasing use of mobile devices. So, ensure that all your videos and product images are mobile-friendly. As product descriptions are essential to your website, it is important to include as much information as possible.
- Set Up the Payment Options
Selecting the right payment solution is essential for closing maximum sales. If your customer does not trust the payment method you have selected, they may not complete the purchase. A few payment solutions like Razorpay are highly reliable and secure to use.
- Get Your Shipping Settings Right
The key here is to be thorough and transparent. For instance, if you are charging for shipping, be clear about it and mention it explicitly. If your shipping will take a couple of days, do mention it. Usually, customers take into consideration the shipping cost as well as the time it will take to receive the product to determine whether they want to proceed with the purchase or not.
- Prioritize SEO
Leveraging the best SEO tools is imperative for building a successful e-commerce website. Where do you want to place yourself amongst your competitors? How do you want to be ranked above the competitors when your keywords are searched by the potential customers? Besides making your brand coherent and memorable, investing in devising the best SEO strategies for your e-commerce website is the key to success.
- Preview and Publish Your E-commerce Website
Preview your online store to ensure it looks just like it should when it goes live. Now, test your website to ensure that all the buttons are working fine and direct customers to the designated place – hit the publish button and start promoting.
So, if you want to launch an e-commerce business and outperform your competitors, build your online store with Bluehost’s website builder, and get your e-commerce running in no time!
