Useful Tips and Ideas for New E-Commerce Start Ups Part 1

So you have decided to take the plunge to launch your first online web shop and all going well you will be the next e-commerce tycoon splashed all over the trade magazines. You have done some research and you see others are doing it with some good results so there can’t be much to it… can there?

When starting out with your first online e-commerce venture, no doubt you will have done some research and accumulated a fair bit of useful information regarding web design, search engine optimisation and selling online in general. The chances are, by now you are suffering from ‘information overload’ and although you have taken the time to read up on the various aspects of running an e-commerce store, knowing what to do with all this new found knowledge and in what order to carry out the various stages of launching your online web shop is another learning curve within itself. From our experience, this is when start up e-commerce entrpreneurs flounder and create problems that will need to be rectified creating additional work a long time after their site launch.

There are very few Golden Rules and there is no definitive right or wrong way to go about starting up an online venture but preparation is the best advice to be given.

So we have compiled a short to do list to be used prior to actually building your e-commerce web shop that will help you form a plan of action along with some tips and ideas to help you get your site prepared and optimised and running efficiently and hopefully achieving those all important sales. This is not the definitive road map to a successful web shop launch but a rough guide that should prove useful and avoid the need for you to revisit certain aspects of your site structure and set up after you have launched to make drastic changes.

Before You Launch

Your Product Lines and the Market

Once you have established the products you intend to sell and identified your suppliers, take a look at who will be your competition and assess their site appearance and SEO methods. By analyzing your competitions web-site design, assessing what looks good and maybe what doesn’t will help give you ideas of what you may want to implement, or not, within your own e-commerce store. Check what meta data they are currently using, there are a number of free tools available that will give you vital information such as keyword search data and saturation statistics. It is important to know how competitive your niche is, the keywords your main competitors are using and their positions within the search engine results. This information will help you to decide where you concentrate your efforts and may help with choosing additional keywords or phrases to use within your site and backlink strategies.

More Keyword Research

Meta Keywords are probably the most important things to get right for your e-commerce venture and time spent on researching different keywords and phrase combinations to include within your web site content and design elements is time very well spent. There are literally millions of keyword queries done each day on the various search engines and typically, all keyword data is gathered using well known keyword tools such as Google Keyword Tools etc. So from this data you should compile lists of chosen keywords/phrases to be used for generic site pages, site category pages and specific product pages.

Domain Name

This is a very important aspect of your e-commerce venture, you are advised to choose a domain name that describes what you sell and one that includes main keywords. The best domain names to have are short, easy to remember and easy to brand. Before purchasing any available chosen domain name, check to see if any of the other TLD’s (extensions) are available, for example if mywidget.co.uk is available but mywidget.com is a live and operating site then go back to the drawing board and find a new domain so that your site cannot be confused with the existing one.

Web Site Content

It is strongly advised to start preparing your web site content at the earliest stage possible, particularly for what will be your homepage, about us page, category pages, sub-category pages and so on, using your chosen keywords where possible. If you already know what products you are going to be selling on your e-commerce site then write down what will be your category structure eg. main category headings and each of their subcategories, once you have this you can then compile short, keyword rich category descriptions along with your meta data (meta title, description and meta keywords). You could do the same with regard to the brands / manufacturers of the goods that you will be selling as most shopping cart software will create pages and for manufacturers and list products by brand in the searches so this is another opportunity to get your keyword rich content visible and indexed. Having well thought out and keyword rich content is very important for search engine spiders to find once they start crawling your new e-commerce site. With well prepared search engine optimised content added to individual pages you will have a far better chance of gaining good search engine ranking and increasing organic web site traffic. This is an excercise best prepared for and implemented right from the start rather than having to back-pedal at a later stage and having to re-write your web site content to resolve poor site performance!

Branding Your E-Commerce Site

Creating the right image for your new online shop is something that should be researched and given a lot of thought and consideration to. The branding of your e-commerce store will be something that shouldn’t change to drastically once you have launched and you are actively marketing your site. So getting the look and feel of your site along with the right logo etc is of high importance as you will promoting and building up your brand to increase visitors and your online sales. The more memorable and recognisable your brand is, the more at ease your visitors will be and will result in more buying from you. It is also a lot easier to gain a place in a competetive market if people recognise your brand and know who you are.

Continue The Research

The world wide web is constantly evolving and new ideas are put into practice every day which throws up new opportunities or marketing ideas and strategies that could help your online business, not forgetting of course new products that may come available within your sector so ensure that you follow the latest industry news. After all, learning something new is fun and exciting, especially if it can make you more money.