5 Top Tips to Run an E-Commerce and Brick-and-Mortar Store Together

In 2020, not many retailers only have a brick-and-mortar store, with many businesses opting to combine e-commerce avenues with more traditional methods of selling. However, managing both your physical location and your e-commerce store can be difficult, and this guide shows you how you may be able to ensure that both are as successful as possible.

Combine Digital and Physical Marketing Methods

Although you might now believe that the only way you can market your products is online, this is not the case. Real-world marketing methods are just as important and can even be more effective for businesses that are operating from a physical location. One of the best physical marketing methods that you can rely on is direct mail marketing, as this allows you to share information about both your online and brick-and-mortar locations with customers within their own homes.

Create a Strong Brand Image

The most important step that you can take to make both your online and real-world stores successful is to create a cohesive image for your company that can be recognized no matter what platform your customers choose to engage with you on. For instance, you should use the same logo and color scheme, as well as an accurate domain name. You might also consider giving them the same experience online as they would get in-store by providing a chatbot function where they can interact with you and ask questions, as well as an easy navigation system that will allow them to browse at will.

Manage Your Inventory

One of the most difficult aspects of juggling an e-commerce store with a physical location is being able to manage your inventory. To do this effectively, you should download an inventory management app that can prevent any double or conflicting orders. It will also ensure that you have the stock you think you do in order to fulfill requests. You should also consider outsourcing your order processing to a fulfillment center, as this will allow online and brick-and-mortar stock to be separated and can ensure that each operation runs parallel to the other.

Give a Click and Collect Option

If you believe that your retail location is becoming redundant, you should consider introducing a click and collect service to your store. This can allow customers to use both your online platform and your real-world location by selecting their order on their laptop and then heading to their nearest shop to collect this. This can take some of the strain away from your online store and can also encourage customers to make spontaneous purchases while they are picking up their order.

Track Your Expenditure

It is hard to keep track of your physical store’s finances and your online store all at once. To do this, you need to download finance tracking software and use the same platform to enter the details of each venture. This will allow you to view your financial situation as a whole on a single page.

Key Security Factors to Consider When Starting an eCommerce Store

Today, eCommerce has easily become one of the most popular business models. Almost everybody shops online and starting your own online shop has never been easier. But whatever you want to sell online, if you want to open an eCommerce store, your first priority should be ensuring that you have strong security. Cybercrime is a real problem today and the online nature of eCommerce means that these businesses are particularly vulnerable to hackers. So, what are the main things that you should do?

Get Help from an IT Professional

First of all, it pays to outsource your IT and cybersecurity to experienced professionals who can provide you with access to support, technology, services, and expertise that you would not have been able to access otherwise. IT experts like HLB System Solutions can help you with putting together a strong defense against hackers, ensuring that your eCommerce customer data is protected, and creating a strong business continuity and disaster recovery plan to follow should the worst happen.

Make Sure Your Site is SSL Encrypted

HTTPS has become the basic standard for websites today, particularly when it comes to eCommerce. Not only does HTTPS encrypt and protect customer information, but it can also have an impact on your SEO, reputation, and trust with your customers. Failing to get SSL encryption and using the old HTTP protocol can have much more than simply security implications for your online store. It can cause you to lose credibility with customers who may not feel safe to enter their payment details and cause you to drop down the Google rankings.

Use Strong Login Credentials

Using strong passwords for your admin login to the backend of your website is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to make it more difficult for hackers to find their way in. Many eCommerce platforms provide a generated username and password; continuing to use this makes you an easy target for hackers as they are not always difficult to guess. Using strong passwords that are not easily guessable is a must, and consider changing your password at least once every couple of months. Don’t use any words that could be associated with you in your passwords like your child’s name or pet’s name. Make sure that every password you use is unique; don’t recycle them.

Choose the Right eCommerce Platform

Many eCommerce business owners take the DIY route with an eCommerce platform like Shopify or Magento. But when choosing an eCommerce platform, don’t forget to take security features into account along with other important factors like functionality, design options, and speed. Opt for an eCommerce platform that makes security a top priority and are on top of keeping their security measures up to date to keep your online store and your customers safe.

eCommerce is one of the easiest businesses to get started with today, but this model is also a particular target of cybercriminals. To keep your business secure and ensure strong trust with your customers, it’s important to keep these key security factors in mind.

How to tailor your content to improve your Google ranking

SEO. It can be an intimidating term for many people, especially if you’re more creatively minded than tech-savvy. Yet it’s also a necessary aspect of doing business in the digital sphere. It can be particularly important for SaaS companies, who offer purely digital services in often niche and highly competitive environments. Luckily there are plenty of steps that you can take to boost your Google rankings, even if you have little technical know-how. This is true when it comes to the content of your website. Here are some tips to help you best utilize the SEO potential of your content.

Use keywords

Keywords are very important in any SEO SaaS strategy. Start by doing some research into the words and phrases that your target customers might type into Google. This could include the variety of product or service you offer, the features it has, or the solutions it provides. You can then create content based around these keywords. It’s important to do so naturally, though. Don’t just stick them in awkwardly, as this can be off-putting to readers on your site.

Keywords can be used in all sorts of content on your website, for example, descriptions of your product or service, information about your company, or news items and blog posts. Just make sure that you are choosing relevant keywords. If people click through to your site via Google then immediately leave, this will have a negative impact on your ranking in the future.

Focus on your users

It’s easy to get carried away when thinking about SEO and forget about user experience. With every piece of content on your site, you should be thinking about who you are writing it for. What kind of content will be useful to people visiting your site? How easy is it for them to navigate through and understand the content you’ve created? Are you answering the type of questions they will have?

Try and be as specific and descriptive as possible when it comes to writing about your product or service, too. This helps readers to differentiate you from your competitors and enables you to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Quality is key

This point can’t be stressed enough. The quality of the content that you produce will affect both your ranking on Google, and the impression visitors to your website get of your company. Take your time to craft well-written and informative pieces of content and include a few well-chosen links to credible and reputable external websites – making sure that the anchor text is descriptive and relevant.

Don’t be afraid to write longer articles that cover a topic more deeply, either. These comprehensive pieces are likely to do better than superficial ones and show readers that your website is authoritative and trustworthy. A top-quality blog post or another piece of content is also more likely to be shared on social media, which also helps your page to rank more highly on Google.

How to Enhance Your E-commerce Store

Is your e-commerce business ready to smash through the proverbial glass ceiling? If you want to grow your online store and ultimately propel it right to the very pinnacle of its market, it’s imperative that you put the advice laid out below into practice.

There are two things you must do if you’re serious about taking your e-commerce store to the next level.

Appeal to new audiences

Your current consumer base might provide you with your bread-and-butter profit, but this isn’t the be-all and end-all of your cashflow. You’ll never truly be able to grow and scale your store if you continue to put all of your eggs into one consumer basket, which is why you should seriously consider branching out. Once you start appealing to new, fresh audiences, you will instantly widen your scope with regard to the number of consumers that you are capable of reaching. This will enhance your content engagement levels and, in turn, draw more customers to your product range.

There are a whole host of audiences out there for you to hone in on, the Spanish-speaking market being one of the most profitable. Some 7.5% of all Internet users speak Spanish as their first language, and this percentage is only expected to increase over the coming decade. This is why Spanish SEO cannot be ignored. If you are going to get ahead of the curve in this instance, you should now be doing all you can to appeal to the burgeoning Hispanic/Latino audience.

Worried that your lack of knowledge regarding this audience will hold you back from being able to produce content that actively resonates with them? If so, fear not as help is at hand. A company specializing in Spanish-language SEO will be capable of helping you tailor content around a Spanish-speaking consumer base.

Set up a loyalty program

Serious about taking your e-commerce store to the next level? If so, you’re going to need to lay strong foundations for your future growth by cultivating a core consumer base. Setting up a loyalty program is one of the best things that you can do to achieve this all-important goal. Once people are aware of the fact that they will be rewarded for sticking with your business, your clientele will return to your store time and time again whenever they are in need of the products/services that you provide. Furthermore, loyalty programs are popular across the world, so no matter what market you are targeting, this approach will likely prove effective.

If you want to set up a loyalty program that actively draws clientele back to your store time and time again, you must:

  • Reward your customers when they take a variety of actions on your site
  • Incorporate gamification into your rewards program
  • Integrate a multi-channel customer service system into your transaction process
  • Cultivate credibility through the way you interact with your customers
  • Always go above and beyond to deliver additional value

Share positive experiences regarding your loyalty program

Top Tips for Service-Based Businesses

If you run a service-based business or plan on launching one, you must know how to succeed with this type of company. It is very different from providing a product for a consumer, yet most of the information you find will target product-based businesses. So, how can you find success as a service-based business? No matter what type of service you provide, there are a few handy tips that should help your business to stand out from the crowd, impress your target customer and ensure that you are providing the best possible service.

Have A High-Quality Website

There is a misconception that if you are not selling a product, then the website is less important, but this is not true in the slightest. People will still search online when looking for a service, so you need to have a high-quality website that contains detailed information about the service(s) that you provide, including customer reviews. In addition to this, you should be using digital marketing and social media to increase your visibility online and show your expertise by creating content for your target demographic, you will still need to use a clear and consistent voice across all of your marketing and content to keep your business strong and professional. 

Use Work Order Software

As a service-based business, you will need to stay on top of work orders so that every work order is properly carried out and to satisfy your customers. This can be challenging, but with work order software, it is simple; you can streamline the operation and manage all aspects of orders. This includes creating orders, assigning projects, billing, scheduling, communication, smart lists, and more. This allows you to improve results at every stage of the work order lifecycle, which will benefit both the business and your customers.

Know Your Customer 

The key to success in service-based industries is knowing your customer. Client relationships are critical to success, so you always need to take the time to get to know each customer, understand what their expectations are, and forge a friendly relationship while also maintaining professionalism at all times. You might also find it helpful to keep a record of their wants and needs – if you can remember these, it will reflect on your business well and encourage customer loyalty. 

Be Dependable

As a service-based business, there is nothing more important than being dependable. You do not want to let your customers down as this will cause you to lose customers and will negatively affect your business, which means that dependability and reliability need to be prioritized. This will also mean only accepting what you are realistically able to achieve so that your customers are never disappointed.

Running a service-based business is vastly different from a company that sells products but most of the information that you find online is targeted to the latter groups. Hopefully, these tips will be useful to any service-based business and help you excel, build solid relationships, improve your reputation, and take your service-based business to the next level.

How to Streamline Your eCommerce Store

Once your eCommerce store is open and running, you’re constantly looking for ways of streamlining it and improving its performance. If you’re looking to take your store to the next level, then take a look at these simple streamlining ideas.

Make Sure Your Pages Load Quickly

People don’t want to be waiting ages for your pages to load. Every second a page takes to load its bounce rate increases, and these are potential customers you are missing out on.

Use these tips from blackbeltcommerce.com to find the right Shopify developer, and work on your load speeds. People want things fast, and if your store takes too long to load, then they’re going to go elsewhere for their online shopping.  

Streamline Your Copy

They may seem like words on a page, but your copy is actually very important.

In a brick and mortar business, we recognize the ability of a great salesman to make upsells and boost revenues, but what about on an online store? Your copy is the salesman, and to get the desired effect, it needs to be focused on your goals (to make sales.)

If you recognize that your copy is an essential part of the sales process, and work on crafting the right messages, then you’re going to find your conversions go up.

Use High-Quality Media

One of the advantages a physical store has over an online store is that people get to see the goods with their own eyes and feel them in their hands. We can’t offer that experience with an online store, but we can get as close as possible to it by having high-quality images and video.

People want to see exactly what they’re getting, and the only way to do this is by giving them an accurate picture.

Make sure you’re optimizing all your images and videos, so the files aren’t too large, and give your potential customers the closest thing to feeling the product in their hands.

Build Touchpoints Through Automated Emails

People don’t tend to purchase on their first visit to your store. This means you’ve got to build touchpoints and keep people coming back to your site. One of the ways you can do this is by getting people’s email addresses.

Once you’ve got people’s contact details, then you can create a series of automated emails that are designed to turn them into customers. The important thing is that you’re offering people value in your emails, so think about what they want, not just what you want from this interaction.

The right email series can have a big impact on your sales and help streamline the work you do with your eCommerce store.

Make Payments Easy

Don’t make it difficult for people to pay!

Once people have made that decision to buy from you, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. This means removing barriers such as lengthy forms and minimizing the number of clicks it takes to complete payment.

Think about how simple it is to buy something on Amazon and replicate this as best you can with your store.

Managing Startups: How to Set Your Budding Business Up for Success

While starting a company and getting it off the ground requires plenty of capital and dedication to get the job done, things take a different turn when you have to keep it afloat during its first two or so years. There will be plenty of challenges ahead, as not only do you have to compete with other startups vying for the limelight, but you also have to deal with veterans that overshadow your business before you can even begin.

There is no denying that running a startup is tricky, and even experienced business owners will tell you that it can be more challenging than keeping a large company afloat. Fortunately, trial and error are not necessary to push your startup ahead of the competition. Here are just a few ways to set your budding business for long-lasting success.

On the topic of marketing your startup

There are plenty of ways to market a business, but not a lot of them are ideal for a young business. After all, traditional marketing can be quite expensive while providing no guarantee that people will connect with your company. A few tips to cementing success include:

  • Building a quality website. Keep in mind that most people will only give your site less than ten seconds to figure out whether or not it is worth their time. Ensuring that your website is easy to navigate and sends a clear message within the first ten seconds can do much to get the job done. You can make things even easier by outsourcing the task to quality services such as Expre.
  • Letting family and friends know. Before you even get your startup off the ground, it would be a good idea to ask your friends and family for help, specifically with spreading the word. Their chosen platform will undoubtedly help your business, which brings us to the next step:
  • Pushing social media as far as you can. If there is one platform your business will undoubtedly benefit from, it is social media. A social media platform of your choice provides you with the necessary foundation for marketing success while being entirely free.

The potential of business software

Aside from the tips above to help you market your business, the next step includes making things easier for your staff to get the job done. For example, a startup restaurant might not need too much to get things started, but a lack of business software in the form of a POS system makes things unnecessarily difficult. The same thing goes for many other industries that can benefit from the use of business software. The best part is that there are plenty of variations that can fit your chosen scenario like a glove!

While the tips above are more than enough to set your business up for success, it would also be a good idea to keep a close eye on how your employees operate. Acknowledge the hard work of your staff whenever you can; the results just might surprise you.

How to Start Selling on Amazon

Amazon is a platform that attracts millions of users every day. It is one of the biggest e-commerce companies out there, and with this reputation; it’s changed the way we shop.

Understandably, there’s a lot of stuff to experiment with when it comes to Amazon, and you might even think that you want to get your hands on a slice of the pie. It’s completely understandable, and that’s why we’ll be taking a look at how you can start selling on Amazon today.

The basics

Okay, let’s take a look at the basics and work out what is that you need to know about Amazon Marketplace. Amazon Marketplace allows people to tap into the power of Amazon’s infrastructure to sell their products under the Amazon flag.

If you’re someone who is selling products under the flag of Amazon, you’ll be split up into two different categories. On the one hand, you’ve got casual sellers and professional ones. The casual sellers are defined as people who sell at a maximum of 35 items a month or less. They don’t have to pay a fee in the conventional sense; instead, one for each completed item and referral fees.

On the other end of the scale, you’ve got those professional sellers, who are categorized by the fact that they sell at least 35 items a month. They can sell their products at a far greater clip than the casual crowd, and they have tools for bulk listing. Don’t be fooled though – there’s a monthly subscription fee for these people, as well as the completion and referral charges that are paid by casual sellers.

It is the official recommendation of Amazon themselves that if you want to try and sell more than 35 items with the Marketplace, you become what they refer to as a “pro-merchant seller”. This level of membership, as it’s often described, gives you access to 5 different EU marketplaces, at the cost of around $25.

Amazon benefits e-commerce startups searching for international audiences

It’s probably important to mention that for an e-commerce startup that is looking for an international audience to sell products, Amazon has made some leeway in this field.

Amazon has created a European marketplace which effectively combines five different locations: Amazon.de (Germany), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.es (Spain), Amazon.it (Italy) and Amazon.co.uk for British sales.

When we combine this with a reported 40% increase in the number of US-based sellers exporting to European countries as far back as 2016, you can see why this method may well be tempting for you.

Of course, you don’t just transition to other countries for the revenue, oh no. It’s a great way to test a product fit in a safe place without compromising your primary distribution area.

It is important to deliver a stark warning to anyone who is considering this particular route. There is considerable admin for foreign sales, like taxes and currency payments. Banks are particularly scathing with businesses, and will often give them bad exchange rates, making the business unviable in extreme situations. It is vital to shop around and see what is on offer before you begin.

The benefits of using Amazon to sell

Naturally, there are considerable benefits to selling on Amazon, which makes the company a superb choice for little investment. Here are some of them below:

1. Simplicity

Simplicity is going to be one of the biggest determining factors for picking an online marketplace to work in. Amazon has a very easy way of putting products up for sale, which means that you can get things going quite soon after you sign up. You enter the product that you want to sell, put a price on it, record the condition of it, and that’s it.

2. Exposure

As you’re probably aware, Amazon has one of the biggest customer bases on the planet, being perhaps the largest e-commerce platform available. There are thousands of users who visit the site every hour, which means that the chance of your product selling is incredibly high.

3. Cost efficiency

One of the big advantages to something like Amazon is that you can list as many products as you want with no fee to pay. It means you can pick out a sales strategy that will work for your needs as a business. Plus, there are no fixed costs for handling or shipping of your products across the different countries.

4. Trust

It is also important to remember that as a company, Amazon is trusted and respected by the customers that it works with every day. A recent survey conducted in the US gave Amazon an 86% rating in regard to customer satisfaction.

It’s certainly not difficult to recognize that Amazon is a brand name, which has generated a very positive reputation over the years. The trust and loyalty which are applied automatically to Amazon will also be shown to you by proxy so that you can market your products quite easily.

5. Market awareness

One thing the Amazon Marketplace does offer is the ability to look at the products being sold by competitors and gain some crucial market awareness. You must understand how the rest of the industry is performing in relation to you because this will help you to identify whether you are one of the leading forces in your market, or whether you need to make some improvements to your business.

Selling on Amazon

So, it is probably time that we talk about the main reason why you are here. Do you want to learn how to get started selling products on Amazon?

The first thing that you need to do is to work out which type of seller you want to be. As we previously mentioned, if you’re going to be selling less than 35 items, being a casual Amazon user is probably the best option. However, if you’re going to start selling in bulk from the beginning, you should probably look for the professional classification system.

If you want to register as a seller on Amazon, then you will need to make sure that you have the following information available.

  • An email address.
  • A phone number for use during the registration process.
  • Information to register your bank account to your account.
  • A US or internationally chargeable credit or debit card which has a valid billing address.
  • If your business is VAT registered, you need to provide your VAT number.

If you need help getting started, you can also use the services of Amazon marketing specialists such as Nuanced Media. By utilizing expertise, you save the hassle of doing the hard work yourself!

Registering products to sell on Amazon

Okay, now that you have classified yourself with Amazon’s system, it is now time to take a look at registering products on the website to sell. Thankfully, this is pretty easy.

If you are a casual seller, then you will find that every Amazon product page has a blue box on it which is titled “more buying choices“. This is usually located on the right-hand side of the page, and if you click on the “sell yours here“ button, then you will be able to start the registration process. The condition and age of the product, and any other additional comments you feel are necessary will be registered here.

However, if you have registered for professional status or an experienced seller title, you can use Amazon’s web-based interface to list products or, alternatively, utilize the bulk listing tools.

Extra tips

It’s probably pretty important to note that Amazon does have a few restrictions when it comes to what you can and cannot sell on their website.

Mobile phones, tobacco and alcohol, magazines and newspaper subscriptions, gift certificates and gift cards, prescription medication, firearms and ammunition, as well as photo processing services cannot be sold on the main website. Merchants are fully priced to sell in any of the other categories, however.

It is essential to note that Amazon has their own pricing tools available for anybody who is struggling to work out how much to sell products for, although you are free to create your own price if you desire. It is recommended to use the tools of Amazon themselves, as this will mean that you should have a better chance of selling, but it is entirely up to you.

Selling products on Amazon is a rewarding thing to look into. There are numerous benefits to selling your products with Amazon themselves, as the company has one of the largest platforms in the world, and controls a significant number of different audiences. Naturally, it is important to make sure that you look into all of Amazon’s selling practices if you’re going to get the best possible results, as otherwise, you may run the risk of not having your products properly advertised, or simply filling in violation of the seller guidelines.

Despite having said this, however, there is no doubt that selling with Amazon is one of the most effective ways to get reach and promotion in a way that is not possible in other places. With the only serious competitor to Amazon being something like eBay, it’s clear to see why this is a good place to set up shop.

Ryan Flannagan is the Founder & CEO of NuancedMedia,
an international eCommerce marketing agency specializing in Amazon. Nuanced has sold $100s of Millions online and Ryan has built a client base representing a total revenue of over 1.5 billion dollars. Ryan is a published author and has been quoted by a number
of media sources such as BuzzFeed and Modern Retail. To connect with Ryan, check out @Ryanflannagan on Twitter or via Linkedin

Integrating Cybersecurity with Web Development: Ensure Security Even Before Your Business Comes Online

There are a few foundational truths on which all our future business-oriented steps should be focused on from 2020 onwards. One of them would be ensuring cybersecurity from all possible angles and doing so irrespective of the concerned business’s size, volume or segment. Today, we are going to focus on that very aspect, but with particular concentration on integrating cybersecurity with web designing. It is a fundamental step that builds a reliable, secured foundation for layering the subsequent measures of cybersecurity.

Collaboration is Desirable but Not Mandatory

In order to build a safe and secured website for any online business, there should ideally be collaboration between the company’s web designing team and cybersecurity team. It is absolutely essential for the two type of professionals to work in perfect harmony with each other if they wish to build a secured website.

However, this might be difficult to achieve, as two different teams/individuals from completely different professional backgrounds will find it hard to accommodate each other without significant delays and even possible conflicts. Thanks to companies like Zen Den Web Design, that is not a mandatory requirement anymore.

You can find comprehensive web designing and SEO services online, which also integrate military-grade cyber security within their client’s web architecture from day one. By eliminating the need to hire cybersecurity experts and web designers separately, they also eliminate the chances of internal conflicts and delays.

An Overview of the Process in General

Even if you are the business owner and do not have sufficient technical expertise to go into the details, at least a basic understanding of the processes necessary for integrating cybersecurity with web design will help you understand what’s going on. The processes can be divided into the following primary disciplines:

Preventative Measures

With data security in focus, the website should be designed to be secured against breaches from the ground up. Understand that various additional measures will also be needed to maintain the data integrity of your business site, but the more gapless your web design security is, the better those future steps will be at preventing data beaches.

Data Management: 3 Points of Cybersecurity

On account of both legal and moral bindings, any business website that collects data from their clients, customers and users, should be able to provide protection on three primary aspects:

  1. Protection of data during collection
  2. Protected storage for the collected data
  3. Destruction of the collected data on being breached to prevent misuse and blackmail

User Awareness and Transparency

If users know about the level of security that your site is capable of offering, then they should also be able to make a conscious decision regarding whether they can or should share the data with the website. This level of transparency can be achieved by simplifying and integrating legal and technical information into every key step, so that it becomes more accessible to the common user.

From a business’s point of view, this should be integrated into the web architecture itself, so that the warnings, notices and declarations can keep the website from facing ruinous, future litigations from their users due to an unfortunate data breach.

Things to Consider When Setting up an E-Commerce Business

Lots of people who aren’t too experienced in the e-commerce industry can easily romanticize the idea, thinking that all you have to do is put some products online and wait for the money to flow in. The reality, unfortunately, involves a lot more dedication, time and effort. There are so many different things that need to be considered that it can be difficult to really understand which are most important. This list below will show you some of the most valuable things to do before setting up your e-commerce business.

Choose the Right E-Commerce Platform

An e-commerce platform is going to provide the foundation of your business; however, it can offer much more than simply being a platform to display product listings. The right e-commerce platform will be able to offer you flexibility, allowing you to scale up as your business grows. It will also offer you versatility in design, so you are able to create a site that most accurately represents your brand’s image and core values.

Choosing the right platform should allow you the option to easily engage and interact with your customers. Many people use WooCommerce, as it’s one of the most scalable and flexible options on the market — built for WordPress — making it the perfect choice for your e-commerce business. Just remember that WooCommerce allows you to put in many features that might slow down your site in exchange for functionality. Either approach your website with a lean philosophy or get some help making WooCommerce websites faster so your technical SEO doesn’t suffer. 

Who is Your Target Market?

Having a deep and clear understanding of your target market should inform all your business practices, from product development to digital marketing. Your knowledge of your target market should be based on more than basic market segmentation, such as age, gender, or education levels. Having some awareness of what it is that your customers value, what they enjoy and how they spend some of their time can be vital, allowing you to make deeper, more meaningful and long lasting connections.

Know Your Competition  

Taking the time to conduct market research before you set off on creating your e-commerce business can often provide valuable information. Analysis of your competitors will help you understand what works in the industry and what doesn’t. This information can give you a bit of a head start. Instead of trying new techniques and learning from failures as your competition had to, you can go straight into using practices that have proven reward.

Choose Your Product Carefully  

It is likely that the idea for your e-commerce business was first inspired by a product or range of products. However, when it comes to actually choosing the items you are to sell, it is important that this is an informed decision. Before you order your stock, you need to check your product against your analysis of your target market and competition. You need to be sure that what you are selling is something that your target market will want to buy.

It is also important to make sure that your product is unique, unlike anything that your competition is selling. Once you are secure in the concept of your product, you can then move onto the practicalities of where you will source it, where it will be stocked, and how it will be shipped to your customers.