Are you looking to break away from selling on marketplaces? Do you wonder what it’s like to sell products from your own site?
While it might be helpful to sell your products on an online marketplace such as Amazon to start, it’s advantageous to one day branch out and start an eCommerce site on your own. There’s no better time to start doing that than right now!
Of course, if you’re looking to expand to your own site, you’ll want to follow a concrete plan. See below for how to expand to your own online store and reap the benefits for years to come!
What Are the Benefits of Starting an eCommerce Store?
Understandably, you’d be hesitant to take on an eCommerce site of your own, especially if you don’t have much experience. However, the benefits are too good to pass up.
The first benefit is that you have complete control of the site. You can create your website and build a brand around your company and products. The more your clients resonate with that brand, the more products they’ll buy.
Starting your own eCommerce website also gives you far more global reach than selling to the niche market on a marketplace. If you only sell on places like Amazon and Etsy, you only have their clients to sell to.
If you start your own eCommerce site, then you can use marketing tactics such as search engine optimization to reach your target audience across the world!
Lastly, you get a larger piece of the products you sell. There are no percentages that will be owed to the marketplace you sell on. No membership that you have to pay to sell on your site. You set the price points and you receive the revenue!
Steps to Create an eCommerce Website
Of course, if you’ve never created an eCommerce site, then your number one concern is probably learning how to build one successfully.
As long as you dedicate your time and energy to following each step, you’ll be successful. People less tech-savvy than yourself have done so! See below for several steps you’ll want to follow in building your webstore.
1. Choose an eCommerce Platform
If you’re building an eCommerce site, then your first step should be to find a reputable eCommerce site builder. This builder will be the platform that helps you create your site through easy drag-and-drop features.
However, you don’t just want to use any site builder. You want a builder that’s specifically made with eCommerce sites in mind. One that can help you boost your SEO presence to generate more leads and sell more.
Be sure to line yourself up with one of the best eCommerce platforms to render higher sales conversions early on!
2. Add Your Products
Now that you’ve decided which eCommerce platform that you’ll be using to build your website, it’s time to add all of your products to the site. For some of you, that will be many products, for others you’ll just be focusing on one or two.
Either way, you’ll want to use a web scraping tool to optimize your content and product descriptions.
The name of the eCommerce game is sales conversions. In other words, capitalizing on a higher percentage of sales for each person that visits your site.
Sites that don’t have high conversion rates typically suffer from a lack of knowledge on their competition. A web scraping tool helps buck that trend by offering data and statistics on things like product reviews, pricing, and products that were sold.
3. Select Shipping and Payment Methods
The shipping and payment methods that you choose for your site should be in the best interest of your business.
For example, you might consider using payment methods such as Square, Stripe, ProMerchant, Apple Pay, or PayPal. You’ll also want to offer methods of payment for all major credit card companies to avoid missing out on clients.
As far as shipping is concerned, you have more options available to you than you might’ve originally thought. This includes things like UPS, USPS, flat rate shipping, or FedEx.
Even after you pick your preferred shipping company, you need to choose which shipping methods you wish to fulfill. This could be methods like 3-day shipping, economy shipping, next day shipping, or first-class shipping.
Each shipping company has different terms for the same services. Be sure to inquire about what those are and why they might be advantageous for your store.
4. Send Offers to Marketplace Customers
Lastly, there’s the question of how you’ll convince your current marketplace customers to venture over to your new site. How can you entice them to break away from a marketplace they’re comfortable with to purchase your products?
One of the most successful ways will be to send offers to them. Include a discount off their first total order when they place one on your new site.
Customers love to embrace the brands they’re familiar with. They’ll be all for supporting your brand’s growth and success, but it never hurts to give them an extra incentive for doing so.
Send out this promotion via email, text, or attached to the next receipt when they purchase your product from the marketplace.
This process might take time to convince them, so you might want to have a period of transition for your clients before you take your products off the marketplace completely.
Build Your Own Online Store Today
Now that you’ve seen the benefits and steps to take when building your own online store, you must do so!
Take the time to read through this article to learn more about the things you need to know about eCommerce business.
