3 Steps to Start Your E-commerce Store

Starting an e-commerce store is the need of the hour when launching any business these days. When setting up an e-commerce market platform for the first time, you need a checklist prepared to ensure every customer has a unique and smooth experience while navigating through your products.

Besides, the navigation and multiple elements affect platform visibility and end-user experience. It is difficult to achieve complete marketing success with your platform on the first try, but with this proper checklist, you can launch a successful platform that realises all marketing goals.

Steps to start an e-commerce market platform

Step 1: Pre-Checklist for E-commerce Market Platform

Buy a Domain

Before building a website, the business should customise its domain name. A personalised brand domain is expensive but also worth it, considering that it represents your e-commerce platform’s permanent brand identity.

Set up an Email Help Desk

Customers can conveniently find your website with a relatable domain name and remember where to mail for customer support if it matches your website domain. You can create a separate email ID for maintaining the brand name on all platforms, even if you take the conversation with customers outside the website.

Organise newsletters, product emails, and updates, and maintain contact with customers through the help desk e-mail. 

Activate Sales Channels

Different e-commerce setups have varied activated sales channels. Generally, social media and Google ranking help generate sales, but these aren’t the only platforms where you can market. Plan the path toward your brand visibility, and activate sales channels through not one but multiple social platforms to maximise your audience base. The leading sales platform is your official product website. Don’t forget to promote your website through all chosen sales channels after launch.

Step 2: Your E-commerce Platform

Home Page

The first impression is the last impression – in the case of a website, it cannot be truer. Visualise how your customers should feel when interacting with your website and ultimately buying your products. On the first visit, they might be casually browsing through the pages. Their experience with website navigation must match industry standards to ensure they come back later when they need your products. Simply generating organic traffic is not enough; in the end, increasing conversion rates matter to peak your sales.

These are some general inclusions on the home page:

• Value proposition  
• An attractive logo with eye-catching fonts to have a long-lasting impact on customers
• Search Box for easy and streamlined navigation
• Windows to view popular products
• CTA in concluding paragraphs
• Menu page options
• Localisation options for regional success 

Website Pages

The home page is necessary, but your focus should be on pleasing the customer. For that, you need a more elaborate website. Design individual pages representing varied topics. Let us list the most must-add pages;

• About us: Explanation and history of your establishment, details necessary for branding. Relevant points about team members in the outlet, the owner and CEO, and the organisation’s motive.
• Service Page: A product page with options to list every item according to relevance, popularity, price range, colour, etc.
• FAQs: Customers can learn more without constantly accessing the contact us or Support page if frequently asked questions are included—research common reviews and question topics before structuring FAQs.
• Contact Us: Phone numbers, social media profile names, e-mail, and address. The Contact Us page should be easy to find, listed under every website page.
• Privacy Policy & Terms of Service: A business discusses privacy policy details with its legal team. Generally, it concerns privacy details regarding the relevance of product information, customer support, product guarantees, e-commerce outlet contact details, etc.
• Order Details: A live record of customer orders, shipping details, order ID, and product information.
• Wish list: A personalised wish list for every customer creating an account on your page.
• Popular Promotions: Recently available discounts, page events, and sales period beginning and ending dates.

Content Structure

An e-commerce website has multiple pages, but structuring the content for maximum visibility and relevance needs time and effort. Consult professionals and the management team to design draft pages structuring content in multiple formats before fixating on the best.

Product Pages

We also know them as listing pages according to category. For example, a clothing e-commerce platform is divided into male and female categories, with further subdivisions like girls and women, and boys and men. They need further categorisation where every product has a unique description.

Our suggestions on product page designs;

• Product Gallery
• Promotional and informational description of the product
• High-quality images featuring models using the product
• Similar product list under what the customers were initially viewing
• Warranty cards, applicable offers with the product, linking parent company or manufacturer
• Customer ratings and reviews
• Options to filter and list items according to price range or other factors

Blogs & Reviews

Not compulsory, but necessary, a blog is the target area for search engine optimisation chosen by most e-commerce platforms. You can showcase your marketing content creativity skills under blog topics. Keep the blog regularly updated and introduce diverse topics with a mix and match of questions, reviews of products, how-to lists, usability comparisons, market analytics, etc.

Contact information & Payment gateways.

Your customers liked your page, agreed to buy your product, and are ready to move on to the payment gateway. But how safe is it? Choose a reliable payment gateway your customers are familiar with.

Online merchants frequently use Payment processors commonly adopted by similar e-commerce platforms. It should be safe, reliable, and accepting of all sorts of payment options, allowing debit and credit cards, support online payment procedures like Google Pay and PayPal, money orders, and EMI options with stated terms & conditions.

Step 3: Set up promotional e-commerce market platform channels

Your page setup is complete! Just one problem, how to promote it? With no customers visiting your e-commerce platform, all the products remain unsold irrespective of platform quality. The third checklist deals with promotion and campaigning.

Search Engine Optimisation

A profile is incomplete without SEO strategies. It is the heart of your marketing options. Don’t follow through with the plan by cramming keywords into every website. Instead, strategise how well-written product content is to incorporate most long-tail keywords. Google has an algorithm to identify when pages have intentionally crammed keywords. Your SEO strategy can backfire and reduce Google’s ranking. Always refer professionals to boost organic traffic through SEO.

We have listed popular SEO practices for e-commerce platforms;

• Perform market research to find short-tail keywords or head terms and long-tail keywords.
• Maintain 1 to 2% volume density while optimising content according to keywords.
• Mind map content structure.
• Include on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
• Focus on both inbound and outbound linking. 
• Prioritise social media marketing for SEO.
• Incorporate infinite scrolling with a ‘load more ‘ option.
• Optimise Google My Business and SERP content.
• Fix technical aspects like page loading speed, performance, visibility, and accessibility.
• Include focus keywords in meta, title meta description, metadata, and alt image descriptions.
• Respond to customer reviews and questions in the Google My Business profile to promote engagement and boost SEO strategies.
• Avoid overcrowding or cluttering content structure just for search engine optimisation. 

E-mail marketing

Customers subscribed to your website should receive updates about discounts and sales through newsletters or personalised emails. E-mail marketing has grown in popularity because of its inclination towards high conversion rates. You can include the following in promotional emails;

• Latest products and short descriptions
• High-quality and resolution images with a bright background
• Product and web page links, shareable social media links
• Suggestions to join page premium programs
• Suggestions to buy items from their wish list
• Order details, shipping information, and link
• CTA and follow-up paragraphs
• Link to provide feedback or review about items bought
• Discount codes for long-term members
• Customer support numbers

Website/In-App Messages

Did you know that introducing a mobile-friendly application or website guarantees higher conversion rates? Long gone are the days when customers preferred using personal computers. The digital world inclines mobile-friendly applications because of better usability and flexibility. They can be interacting with you anytime, from anywhere, not just by buying your product(s) but also by casually browsing. 

Often, window shopping drives customers. You must have an established app within app messages, notifications, pop-ups, and convenient mobile-adapted navigation options to allow this.

Notifications

Every customer should receive a notification before their order is shipped or to update them with new offers. It depends on your marketing targets and how the notifications are designed. Add your brand name, emojis, funds, and creative sentences to allow user engagement through these notifications.

Customer Support

How ready at hand is your customer support? Try minimising the response time and maximising explanatory factors for improved customer support. After all, this e-commerce platform is created with the main focus on how customers feel while using it.

Conclusion

The work is far from over! Maintain your e-commerce platform by remaining active on social media handles, updating page information, adding new products, and the rest. Usually, a separate marketing team is hired to handle all these pages, with a technician backing up page glitches and shortcomings. Besides doing the necessary, you’ll also need to maintain constant trend research because most customers follow what is trending and desire such trending products. Don’t just focus on designing a good product; support your customers by matching demands.

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Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.