Location isn’t everything when it comes to building an ecommerce business but there are ways to ensure that you bring traffic to your site with little trouble. With proper product branding and marketing (via social media, SEO and PPC) you can build your ecommerce business to be something quite successful.
Acquire Good Ecommerce Software
The best ecommerce sites use software which saves them plenty of time and money when it comes to building their web store. Finding the right software for your needs will take some research as different packages offer different features. For example, Big Commerce is a platform that is great for an eBay based business while Ability Commerce is more tied to including mobile-optimized versions of your store.Most will offer some additional features such as OMS (order management system) integration, content management, ecommerce SEO, design, hosting, and up to date automatic accounting as you sell products. Spend some time trying out demos and watching videos on each of the platforms to ensure you find the one that makes the most sense for your product and business plan.
Social Media is Your Highway to Loyalty
From simply setting up a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ account and letting your business slowly grow through grassroots, to creating viral campaigns such as outlandish videos for YouTube, reaching customers is key online. The more personable you can be the more they will trust you and your product.There are plenty of ecommerce marketing groups out there that can help you do this if you don’t know where to start but, outside of creating a viral campaign, all of it is fairly easy. Simply post thoughts, stories and reply to your followers. It doesn’t always have to be something related to your business, just something that will get people talking. Then they will look to see who you are and what you sell.
Ecommerce SEO and PPC
Those letters are generally terrifying to a new ecommerce owner as they seem to be extremely confusing and all but impossible to implement. Ecommerce SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) can be complex but it's not impossible. Unfortunately, SEO is not the easiest thing to learn if you haven’t studied or practiced what search engines look for. The good news is, plenty of sites, such as Elance or Upwork, offer freelance writers that specialize in ecommerce SEO services at affordable rates.
Ecommerce PPC, or Pay Per Click, is a bit easier to do on your own, but is less cost effective. You do just as it sounds – pay for visits to your side per click. Through Google AdWords, for example, you would set a budget and an ad that will be displayed on the sidebar of a search and each click will cost you a certain amount of money. If you are in desperate need of traffic right away, ecommerce PPC is the way to go, but SEO is more organic and feels more like you are just another business.
Build Your Ecommerce Brand
No matter what you sell you need to build your brand as something people support. Look at Etsy for example. It started off as a small community focused business that saw alarming growth. It focused on being fair and open with its customers and that lead to loyalty and word of mouth discussions which lead to more traffic.Toms Shoes is another fantastic example of natural ecommerce marketing that resulted in a powerful brand. With a strong focus on sharing their profits with those in need (providing a free pair of shoes for each pair sold) they created a brand that people not only respect, but are willing to spend the extra money because they are helping do something good.
