Anyone who is considering starting their own business from home should certainly weigh up the relatively low level of initial investment that is needed to kickstart an e-commerce enterprise. You don’t even need to have a stockroom or pre-purchase products to send to customers if you find the right suppliers and make use of the drop-shipping method of order fulfillment. Nevertheless, there is more to running an e-commerce platform than simply waiting for orders to start flowing in. What should you be doing from the outset?
Choose a Suitable Website Name
Your e-commerce platform’s brand and your website name should go hand in hand. You don’t want would-be customers to be put off placing orders because your URL doesn’t exactly match your brand identity. For this reason, check the available domain names for your brand and make sure you pick one that fits. Register multiple domain names, whenever possible, so you have backup brands you can use as well as to prevent competitors from registering similar-sounding website names to your brand down the line. Choosing a suitable domain and brand identity may sound like a detail in the scheme of things but it is crucial to get right from the get-go if your online store is to succeed.
Leverage Existing Transaction Providers
One of the most important aspects of any e-commerce business is the way it takes transactions. If the process is too slow or looks as though it is amateurish, then customers can be put off, worried that they might be being scammed into entering their credit or debit card details. Instead, you should invest in a suitable provider that has the necessary widget for you to be able to take payments quickly and efficiently. Online transactions need to be able to handle privacy issues so that your site doesn’t store any personal information that is not necessary. Equally, you will want a transaction service provider which can handle multi-factor authentication because many banks insist on this before they’ll release funds for an online purchase to be made.
Update Stock Descriptions
Many e-commerce platforms fail to make any difference to buyers because they only publish standard text about individual products. This can make a site very ‘me too’ and customers may think that there is no added value to them from buying from you compared to a more established online store. However, if you rewrite product descriptions, then you will necessarily offer them something unique. This can be even more effective if you tailor your descriptions to the target audience or niche in the market you want to fulfill. Equally, having unique text on your site will help to make the entire enterprise succeed because this is a Google-friendly thing to do. In short, it will assist your site no end with respect to its presence on search engine results pages, or SERPs.
Conclusion
In the end, starting an e-commerce enterprise takes just as much determination as any other type of business. That said, it is a good move because it requires less initial investment than other sorts of enterprise, thereby lowering your exposure to financial risk if you go about it the right way.
