Research and target setting
1. Competitors – The first thing you need to do is research your competitors. Take a look at other websites selling the same or similar products to yours. Gather as much information as you can, including their marketing strategies, technical solutions, and operating models. Then take an objective look at your business and ask yourself if you can compete with them. Determine your place in the ecosystem. Can you compete on price? Or win with quality? Or could marketing be done better? Or do you have better technology? Or will your ads generate a higher ROI? If you have nothing to compete with your competitors, your online store is a waste of money. Therefore, this is the most important step in setting up an online store; the conclusions drawn from your research will guide you in the right direction. After passing this step, you can continue with the following steps.
2. SEO research – Contrary to mainstream belief, SEO is not something you build into your website and then add it to your website. SEO keywords and competitor analysis are things you need to do when you start thinking about building a website framework, before you choose a website name, and before you decide which product you want to operate. Based on previous competitor research, make a list of products you can sell online. Hire an SEO consultant and let him do proper keyword research for you. You first need to get the list of keywords that actually need to be ranked in the report he gives. Then, you need to know how realistic it is for building a new website. You need to spend some time and make cost estimates for your final rankings for your main keywords. Compared with your budget, can you afford the expenses? Can you still be competitive? When will these investments pay off? One year? Five years?
3. SEM research - After doing SEO research, for most industries, you can conclude that there are some keywords that you can compete for, but it will take a long time for you to achieve the desired effect, so we Think of it as a long-term job (make a long-term budget for this part and continue SEO optimization). Your budget is now a little smaller, and you feel like you should make some money from your website as quickly as possible instead of just relying on the benefits of organic SEO. At this point, you need to start SEM research. Calculate how much each click on your most important keywords costs. Now compare that cost to your desired average conversion rate to see if that gives you a positive ROI. If you can, great, you can now sell your products as quickly as possible after your website is up and running.
4. Set goals – You’ve done your research, now start setting some goals. Basically, what you need to do at this stage is calculate how many sales you need to generate each month when your overhead is zero. Then, you need to set a monthly sales growth percentage goal and, with those goals in mind, proceed with the following practices.
content
5. Product Pictures - Have pictures of all products sold ready. If a photo needs to be retaken, you should ensure that the image is clear and accurate.
6. Product description – don’t think this is unimportant. People often don't know how many words they need to write. Be sure to include a certain amount of information in your product descriptions, as they will affect your conversion rate. These descriptions are your sellers. On the Internet, you can't have a sales representative to answer consumer questions, which need to be answered in the product description; the product description needs to be well organized so that consumers can easily find it.
7. Static page content – Don’t forget that usually every website has some static page content. These typically include "About Us," "Contact Us," "Disclaimer," "FAQ," "Return Policy," and more.
8. News/Articles/Blogs – You need to decide whether to use these marketing tools as it will impact your technology solutions, general marketing and time management plans. You need to invest certain resources (time and money) into continuously updating this content. My personal suggestion is to at least have a blog system.
Payment and shipping
9. Choose payment options – You need to take a look at what payment options are required for your target country. Take a look at different payment gateways, compare prices, and do ROI calculations. Are you still competitive? Don't make hasty decisions. Choosing the best gateway for you is very important and will impact your ROI, especially if you are selling a cheap product.
10. Shipping - Which countries do you want to ship to? Are you offering free shipping to consumers? How much does that cost? Are you still competitive? Take a look at the technology solutions available and make sure you have the necessary APIs to calculate shipping times and cost estimates; these will be displayed to consumers on the checkout page. The biggest pet peeve of online shoppers is not knowing shipping times and costs. If you are shipping overseas, be sure to check the laws and regulations imposed by each country. You may need to hire a consultant who understands foreign situations.
layout
11. Home page layout - The home page layout should contain elements that you consider important in your SEO research. You might want to consider a staple here. Think about which products deserve links on the homepage and which parts of the website are less important. Don’t put everything on the home page. People often do this because they don't have a plan, they don't know which products are important, and they don't know what their goals are. Once you show a designer your homepage layout, the designer doesn’t even need to hear your business plans and goals. In the layout, everything is obvious.
12. Main Navigation – When planning the main navigation layout, again use the data obtained from SEO research to determine what is worthy of displaying in the main navigation and what is not worthy of doing so. In most cases, you will have more than one navigation, especially large e-commerce sites with multiple products, multiple categories, and multiple filtering and sorting methods. Consider the appropriate distribution of these elements on your website.
13. Other pages - Before starting to build technical solutions for the website, there are many other pages that also require layout planning. You need to plan the layout of product pages, category pages, blog/article/news pages, static content pages, checkout pages, search, account pages, etc.
If you have established all of these plans and documents, you are ready to form a web development company and start building your website. This article is just a guide, and there are definitely many aspects that I haven’t mentioned; but these are the most important if you want to build a profitable online store.
English source: http://inchoo.net/online-marketing/13-things-to-do-before-you-start-building-an-online-store/
Translation source: http://www.bizark.cn/articles/1069_2.html
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