Imagup General Magazine 2024
Starting your own business is amazing. You finally have the freedom to do things on your own, without someone else telling you what needs to be done and when. ECommerce, by definition, is the process where people buy or sell things online throughout a website. Nowadays there are between 15 and 25 million stores like this online, and as you can see, this market is huge and you have a lot of competitors. Because of that, you need to be extremely careful when building your first BigCommerce store.
To help you out with this task, we created this article, and here we are going to give you some tips on the dos and don’ts. Know that every beginning is rough, so it is going to be trial and error. The main thing you should know is that you need to have patience and that it takes time for customers to get used to your new platform. Give yourself time, and give your users time. It is said that it takes between 3 and 15 months for these platforms to start getting regular consumers, so you should not give up if you are still not making real profits in the first few months.
1. Keep the website clean
The first thing you need to do is to make sure that your customers will like the design and they can easily find their way around your store. Even though adding everything on the front page seems like a good idea, chances are, they won’t be able to access the products they need if it is not organized. To learn how to organize everything, you first need to keep things clean.
With time, you will learn where to place all the items and how to sort them, but that is the second step in the organization process. The first and foremost is that when you are building a new site, everything needs to be nicely positioned. Focus on the main items, and on the things that are going to give you big profits. Don’t put images that are too large, and make sure you name all the categories correctly.
2. Let your customers reach you
The next thing we are going to talk about is customer support and how easy is for users to reach you. We know that sometimes we need help choosing the right item, color, or size, and when we are shopping online, we want to be able to reach the representative or the seller with ease.
If you put your email or the phone number at the bottom of the page, with the smallest letters possible, users will not be able to find it. They can also think that you are a scam website and that you are trying to trick them into buying faulty goods. Most experts suggest that you should put your contact information somewhere they can easily see it. If you want to make your life easier, you can also use a messenger bot that will answer most of the questions instead of you. Know that you should put your working hours so that people know when you are going to reply to them.
3. Optimization
When you open a website, what is the most important thing for you? The answers most users have is that they want the page to load quickly, and when do their shopping, they want to have everything neatly shown, so they can choose the product without too much fuss.
When creating your store, you need to know which things are going to slow down your page, and what is going to help it load faster. If your page needs 10 seconds to load, no one will wait, especially if they want to see several products at the same time. Cut down on widgets and put only things that are crucial.
Know that when it comes to products, filters are a must, and Optimum 7 suggests that this function helps users choose the items they are interested in with ease. Make it easier for people to shop on your site, and give them all the tools they need to choose what they want and buy it before they have the time to think if they need it.
4. Search and Review
The last two things we are going to mention are the search bar and the review options. When we want to purchase something, we open a BigCommerce website. These stores can contain hundreds and even thousands of items, and we definitely don’t have time to browse each category separately or to check hundreds of pages until we find what we are looking for. Because of that, you need to let your users search for their desired items. One thing that has been proven to work is letting users search products by image. They can easily take a picture of the item they want to buy or something they’ve seen online, and they can search your store only by image.
When it comes to reviews, this is both extremely smart and extremely risky. Not everyone is going to love your products, but know that people are more likely to purchase something if they know someone else bought it. Use this to your advantage, and when you start, check and follow all the reviews people leave. Make sure you respond to negative ratings and learn what you can do to make things better and users more satisfied. That way, even if they are not too happy with the item you sell, they are going to be amazed by your interest and chances are, you will get a lot of returning customers.
Simplify all the processes you can, and don’t make people wait too long to check out. Give them the option to save their data and to use it every time they shop at your store. Use high-quality images and if needed, use videos as well. Spend time advertising your website and know that, as long as you work hard, things will pay off and people are going to start using your site daily.
