5 Tips for Starting an Ecommerce Business

Starting an Ecommerce Business? Read Our Top 5 Tips for Ensuring That It Gets off to the Best Start

Over the last decade how we interact with brands and how we shop has changed at a faster pace than any other time in history, and 2020 accelerated this exponentially. Ecommerce and online stores became much more the norm than ever before. Starting an eCommerce business can be daunting and not always as easy as you might think it is.

Here at Morgan Branding, we have helped 100s of new customers get online with a new eCommerce website, and we have learned a few things along the way that we are going to share with you in this blog, to share the knowledge and offer our top 5 tips for stating an eCommerce business.

#1 Choosing The Right Platform To Work From

With so many website builders, content management systems and website design platforms to choose from, which is the best? How do you know the claims being made are the right and best choices for your business? It can be very hard, more so if you are not clued up on the lingo to know exactly what you are letting yourself in for. Research is the key element of choosing an eCommerce specialist to work with to ensure that your getting the right advice that fits your business.

Our advice is to always think in the longer term, working with a platform that allows you to scale without much fuss and expense. Some platforms also sell themselves on the addons or “bells and whistles”, which are not always to your benefit and can just end up bamboozling you and confusing matters for you.

The two main systems in this area that we would recommend would be Shopify and WordPress combined with WooCommerce. Why? We like them as they offer everything you need to get your eCommerce business off the ground, they can be upscaled without much fuss or expense and are user friendly being the main ones. Other things like integration with social media, simple to use systems that can be updated and used by almost anyone and cost-effectiveness.

#2 Secure Your Brand Name & Assets

As soon as you have decided to start an eCommerce business and have decided what you are going to sell, secure your brand identity – such as domain names. Believe it or not, this is not as easy as it may sound. Often you will find that your chosen domain name that is short and catchy has been taken either by another business or so-called “domain resellers” who buy what they think will be an in-demand domain to profit from it. As this can then determine the rest of your branding such as business name etc secure this as soon as possible.

#3 Always Keep Your Target Audience In Mind

One of the major downsides to selling products online is that the customer cannot touch, smell or get a feel for the product as you can in a physical store. Make the process as easy as you can for the customer, such as detailed product descriptions and options for the product itself.

Other little things such as offering a gift-wrapping service and free postage have even been shown to boost online sales, so factoring this into your costings and prices ongoing is worth considering.

#4 Don’t Just Sell Anything

As tempting as it might sound to just start selling anything we would advise that when you are first starting out to choose an area where you have a personal interest. Why? Well, experience has shown that brands that are selling from a personal interest perspective tend to do better when starting as a small business. Yes, there are wildly successful businesses out there that just found the right product at the right time, but if you look at the newest and most successful brands to launch in the last few years most will have come from something the founder is passionate about.

Working this way makes it much easier to connect with your target audience and your passion for the products will shine through without you even noticing. An example (possibly a bad example in that they now sell everything known to man), of this, believe it or not, is Amazon. Amazon started as a hobby from Jeff Bezos garage selling books from a few different distributors, and you don’t need us to tell you just how successful that turned out to be!

#5 Digital Marketing

As the old saying goes “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, as tempting as it is to opt for just one channel of digital marketing be that social media, ads, SEO or email marketing. The truth is to ensure the success of your business you need to do all of those. The people that are buying your products may all have some things in common but they all also have lots of differences and each one will buy based on different reasons and different methods, so you need to make sure you are communicating with them on their level – and not just your prefered method.

An example of this is small businesses that ignore the other methods and just use social media, what if you are excluding a large portion of your target audience that is not on social media? Yes, there are people who are not on social media at all! Ensuring that you invest in all aspects of your business marketing plan is the best way, this is not to say you need to water your marketing plan down by overstretching it, but excluding ways of getting your business out there will only limit your chances of further growth.

Need further advice? Get in touch with us here at Morgan Branding we have a fully dedicated team ready to help you and your business get ahead online. You can get in touch via our contact page or get social with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn! 

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