Apparently, one of the biggest benefits the Internet has brought into the world (and even our lives) today is the ease of shopping online. You can see stuff you like online today, buy it and have it delivered to your doorstep — without you having to step out of your house.
In the same vein, you can also decide to start an e-commerce business and sell to people — regardless of where they are. If starting an e-commerce business is something you’re looking into, here are five important things you need to do:
E-commerce is in its boom years – millions upon millions of transaction are now processed online every day, and our web windows to the world allow us to reach thousands of more customers than a physical presence on the high street ever would. The ease of making a purchase on a well-structured website enables purchasing behavior – you see an item you like, purchase easily and without even having to reach for your credit card in a lot of cases, and it shows up on your doorstep shortly afterward. It’s the ultimate in convenience. The majority of smaller transactions are now processed via a mobile phone or tablet, from the comfort of our own homes.
Entrepreneurialism has also been opened up in a major way – setting up a small online business has never been easier or lower-cost. Making a success of it, however, is another matter. There are some basics that you need to get right in order to draw customers in and maximize your sales.
Understand SEO
If you want to succeed, you are going to have to understand Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. And prioritizing this is the key to success. You need to be visible in the vast landscape of the web, and if you don’t have the budget for large digital ad campaigns, the answer lies in targeting the right keywords for your customer, and climbing the organic page rankings so that you appear top in search results for relevant products. A large percentage of the traffic to any e-commerce site will be channeled through the major search engines. Create an SEO strategy to gain backlinks from highly-ranked sites, improve your Domain Authority and build your site around targeted, well-researched keywords.
Get Involved With PayPal
With a huge amount of daily users, PayPal is the leading payment solutions platform providing that sales-clincher – and easy transaction. Users log in once, choose a payment method, and don’t even have to reach for their wallets – and this ease can result in a huge boost in sales. People don’t want to fill in lengthy forms and disclose a lot of personal data in order to check out – if you raise this barrier, you are likely to see a significant drop in the rates of the completed purchase and a lot of abandoned baskets. Making it easy for customers to purchase should be the primary concern. Even something as simple as creating an account can act as a deterrent – but there’s time further down the sales funnel for these actions. For now, offering them the option to check out quickly via PayPal, and allowing this to be their identity and document verification is likely to secure more sales.
