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Many eCommerce merchants are NOT getting sales as much as they deserves. The reason is sites aren’t generally developed by having sales factor in mind.

An eCommerce store may be failing to generate sales due to:

• Slow web loading
• Not optimizing products and checkout page by rea

 

2020 was the worst year across the world for all the businesses except eCommerce, the only business which prospered in 2020 was eCommerce websites and Apps. Looking at the current scenario people have created a habit of buying things online by sitting at ease at home and this habit is going to remain permanent.

I am assuming that you already know what is eCommerce and have landed on this page as you have made the decision to join the world of eCommerce by selling something online. It could be your existing products or you may be buying from multiple sources and selling online(What most people do).

Here I will try to explain what are essentials you should work on to start an eCommerce website and what best technological platform will be useful for that.

Let’s see some statistics here so you can make the right decision on if it is wise for you to jump into eCommerce or not.

eCommerce Statistics to consider while building a website in 2021

1. 61% of eCommerce purchases in the world have been based on recommendations from a blog and influencers. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
2. First online shopping purchase of almost 59% of Millennials is through Amazon, that makes Amazon one of the biggest eCommerce store in the world. (Source: Inviqa)
3. Statistics says it is the best time to start an eCommerce right now, by the year 2040 almost 95% of all the purchase made in the world will be through eCommerce. (Source: Nasdaq)
4. In 2020, Amazon accounted for 47% of all US eCommerce sales, which will touch 50% in the year 2021. (Source: Statista)
5. There is a very high amount (55%) of customers who buy things online tell friends and family when they are dissatisfied with their eCommerce service or product they consumed. (Source: UPS)
6. Out of the total people using the internet, 93.5% of them have purchased have done eCommerce transactions at least once as of now. (Source: OptinMonster)
7. The average growth of the eCommerce industry from the last 10 years is at 23% but still, around 50% of businesses in the USA don’t have eCommerce websites. (Source: BigCommerce)
8. The Next Boom in the eCommerce industry is going to come in B2B business and 69% of B2B businesses say they are going to stop printing the marketing material in the next 2-5 years. (Source: B2XPartners)
9. Only 2.86% of eCommerce website visits convert into a purchase, so if your site is converting more than this than consider yourself very lucky and give a bonus to your digital marketing team (Source: Invesp)
10. A survey has found that No. 1 reason people do online shopping as they can shop anytime in the day without any time restrictions. (Source: KPMG)

Now let’s go through the points which you need to consider before you start building an eCommerce website, these points will help you to list features and functionalities required to build your website.

Here I am assuming that you have done good research on what products you want to sell online as without having good products to sell thinking about eCommerce is waste of time.

Initial research and strategies for your eCommerce store:

• Whom to sell – Your Target Audience
  It is imperative to define your target audience as per the products you are trying to sell, If you are trying to sell baby products than mothers are the most suitable target audience than fathers. If you are trying to sell gifting products then emotion plays a major role in gifting and women should be your major target. If you are trying to sell Electronic products then men are making a major decision and if they are white goods then women are the decision-maker.
• How to reach your Target audience?
  After the advancement of social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat reaching your target audience has become very easy. You can create an advertisement and target the exact age, sex, city, marital status, and interest of your target audience. Not only that in these advertisements you can even set on what time you want to showcase your advertisements. It is been known that if you want to get maximum sell then you need to target your advertisement at night time after 8 pm when people are just passing time on social media and have enough time to make a decision and purchase your product.
  
• Use your competitors to your advantage
  Why reinvent the wheel, before you make your marketing plan you need to thoroughly research your competitors and their marketing activities, you need to research the tone of their text, what kind of blogs they are writing, what kind of content they are publishing on social media, now if you go to the Facebook page of your competitor you can even know all the advertisements they are running currently on Facebook. You can analyze their keywords and source of traffic with tools like SpyFu, QuickSprout, and SimilarWeb, and target the people they’re targeting.
  
• Where and how you are managing the stock or you planning dropshipping?
  It is very important to have an effective plan to manage the stock or have a dropshipping model. You have to ensure your business has sufficient stock in hand to meet customer demand. If you are a newbie in the eCommerce industry and want to save money on warehouse and storage then Dropshipping is best for you as you don’t have to handle the product directly.
• How are you going to manage shipping and returns?
  Another big part of knowing how to start an online store is deciding how you’ll be shipping your products, AKA where you’ll be doing business. You have to consider various aspects of shipping like methods & rates, packaging, shipping solutions. According to research, every year 30% of orders get returned. Renowned eCommerce stores offer return options with the required flexibility and precautions.
  
• What are your marketing strategies and if you are going to have a budget to spend on marketing?
  Some of the effective marketing strategies are:
  
  – Email Marketing
  – Content Marketing
  – PPC
  – Social Media Marketing
  – Search Engine Optimization
  – Influencer Marketing
  – Affiliate MarketingTry and find out which strategy will give you the best impact. Determine your budget, whether it’s based on a fixed income or a percentage of revenue, This way it will be easier for you to allocate resources and measure the results of your campaigns.
• How are your costs and your markups?
  When pricing a product for your eCommerce store consider these 4 angles:Your costs: Your costs will be a prime consideration of your pricing to have a sustainable business.
  Your competition: know your competitors’ pricing model.
  Psychology of your buyer: Understand your customer and learn what they are looking for (budget option: priced cheaper than your competitor)
  The market: Once your business met the costs, how much more do you want to have of surplus

There are multiple points you should consider for products:

• How many different SKU’s you will have? 

With the emergence of technology, the healthcare sector is flooded with options for consumers. If you want your brand to stand out and more importantly, trusted by the people then certain imperative features are required in your store, which will not only create trust in your products but also will help you increase your top line.

Ingredients
Healthcare products are of personal use, before using the healthcare products, a customer wants to know what they are consuming as it directly affects them personally. Not only that but in most countries, it is compulsory as per the law to showcase the ingredients of the products you are selling. Before you start selling your products in different countries, please study the law about that country and abide by the law.

You can also position your whole brand in what kind of ingredients you are using.
https://evandefacialcare.com/ has highlighted natural ingredients in a big loud way on their top banner of the home page.

Advantages of ingredients
You have already listed ingredients, but the “why” is very important. If you want to build the trust of the product in the consumer mind, then you need to engage them with the product, and showcasing ingredients is the best way to do it.

On Montesarymade.com, they have not only highlighted the advantages but also have allocated ample space on their page to showcase the images and product details.
Link: https://www.monasterymade.com/products/intense-moisture-set

Your Story/Philosophy
Mostly the segment you are dealing with has 75% female consumers, and the best way to gain the trust of female consumers is by connecting them emotionally. Storytelling will give your brand depth, it will not just tell you about your product, but via storytelling, you can convey your values and philosophy. You can build a successful long term relationship with your customer with your core set of beliefs.

Your Story should have the following things :

• Emotional connect
• Transparency
• Care for society
• How you came up with the idea.
• How you are solving the problem.
• How are you changing human lives.

Directions for use
As discussed before that, we need to engage a customer with our product to build trust. Now one more way of doing that is giving them the direction of use, mostly direction of use are pretty obvious but still if you show that to the customer and add a bit of a twist in the direction of the use and customer will start believing in your product and magic which will generate from it.

If you read the below direction, they have articulately given direction by saying, “dot the product onto the ring finger and warm the material by rubbing it with the thumb in a circular motion.”

Personalized profile/Skincare Quiz
Customer is king, and if you make them feel special than they will remain loyal to your product for a lifetime. You can design personalize questionnaires, which would make them answer the health concerns they are having and which would lead the customer to buy the offered products. This questionnaire will make the customer feel that website is offering not any generalized product which is made for all, but some personalized products after listening to the concerns customer are having.

Subscription plan
Repeat purchase is the key to a successful business, and a subscription plan is the best way you can offer to a customer where they are purchasing your product repetitively without even coming to your website and, more importantly without spending an extra new dollar on the marketing!!.
When you are offering a customer a service where they don’t have to remember to order the product when they are run out of it is called a replenishment subscription.

It is paramount to understand you need to spend top marketing money to get a customer on your website and more importantly to make them buy the first product from your website. Now as a company owner if you calculate the cost of bringing customers the first time on your website is actually more than the profit you are making from the sale of that product, repeat purchase is the only way where you can make profits.

The major reason customer signup for subscription plan is to save money and you need to make sure that if a customer is going for a subscription plan then you are offering them at-least 15-25% discount.

Shop by different groups
When a customer is coming to your site they don’t know what are your products, they know the problem they are having, and helping them to guide in the right direction is half the time product sold.

Video Testimonials

People are always sceptical about the products when they are affecting their health directly or indirectly and to win the trust or remove the skepticism video testimonial plays the biggest role.

There are multiple reasons why Video Testimonials are a must for any products you are selling which are going to be consumed or used personally on the body.

1) Credibility and Trust
A written testimonial on your website might help you to convert the potential customers but to get fully trusted in your product they got to hear it from “Horse’s Mouth” and a video testimonial is the best thing for gaining trust. This adds authenticity to your product.

2) Emotional Connect
Reading a testimonial won’t connect the reader with the person who has given the testimonial but if they are watching the video then they will be able to see the face and emotions of the testimonial giver and that will directly connect them emotionally with the product.

3) Humanizing your brand
By putting video testimonial on your website you are not only creating trust but you are also humanizing your brand value, before the eCom era customer use to go in-store to buy the product but now they are buying online and if they see certain happy faces on your site that will give positive effect and will make your site more friendly and will establish a connection with your brand

4) Social Proof
Science describes social proof as people follow the action of others considering that others have taken a certain decision and it ought to be the right decision.
When you are dealing with female consumers, social proof plays a major role in making the buying decision, there is no major social proof than video testimonial.

Gift Cards

In the gifting industry, Cosmetic Gift cards make some of the best gifts, many times consumers are confused about what to gift and gift card really solves that problem easily.

Some of the benefits of why gift cards are useful to consumers

• They can gift as per their budget
• A person can buy whenever they want and whatever they want.
• There is no hassle of asking for a shipping address or paying extra for shipping.
• The recipient will have guilt free-spending, which normally recipient won’t spend if it has to buy with money
• It more polite way to gift cash.
• And most important, Gift cards are practical.

Our Team/Consultants/Advisors

When you are selling cosmetic and health products, consumers are always in skepticism about the quality of the product and how it won’t give them side effects. If a store try to show them who are people behind the formula of the products or with whose approval these products are made than it will help them to trust your product

Free online consultation

If you are into high-end skincare or health-related products than offering an online consultation service can be very helpful, customers will feel that they are getting personalized service and someone is there to listen to their exact problem and give the best solution for that, and for that customers are always ready to pay extra.

Reward points

You must pay for customer’s loyalty, and customers will stick with you for a lifetime. After certain purchases, you must have square-off the marketing expense to bring the customer on board, if you pay back 25% of the marketing expense required to bring the new customer back on board on the existing customer then they will feel special and will stick to your brand forever. Not only that, by giving them reward points you can keep reminding and pushing them to utilize the reward points by buying new products from your store.

You can also use a reward points strategy for spreading the word about your product by the customers, extra reward points can be given on the following actions :

• On Referrals
• Sharing the purchase on Social Media
• Giving testimonial about the product
• Rewards on Signup

Increasing Respect

There is increasing awareness among the consumers about sustainable living, they are getting conscious about living life without harming the nature around us. If we show how our products are natural and not harming the environment they will not only like your products but they will start respecting your brand, and respect will generate brand loyalty.

Blog
In the modern world, whenever any health or body-related issue occurs first thing a person does is goes on google to search for it, this is the best and right time to capture users attention, you should not try to directly sell your product, but first of all, you need to educate the visitor about the problem and its consequences in detail and then offer the solution to it.

Benefits of Blog writing in Healthcare and Cosmetic eCommerce store :

• Improves your search engine ranking
• It signals that we know about the problems better than anyone else.
• It tells that your business is alive with new ideas and solutions
• You can promote offers in your blog content
• It can facilitate discussions
• Attracts organic traffic on the website
• All this says that if you are a healthcare or cosmetic store than blogging is a must for your store.

All this says that if you are a healthcare or cosmetic store than blogging is a must for your store.

Thank you page

This is the last screen of the user journey on your website and you must be thinking that user acquired, sale made and that is the end of the journey of the user. Have you ever thought of how to use this page for influencing the user to come again to your site without spending money on the marketing.

• We should have links to your social media pages on this page so that before leaving the website they can follow you on social media.
• We can ask customers to let their friends and family know about your site by having a form to refer to your friends and family and can win some exciting gifts.
• We can ask a customer to share their recent purchase on social media by giving some good message.
• If your customer is not registered and has used the guest account for shopping then we can ask them to sign up as a user by just entering the password
• We can ask them to review the website or giving feedback on the shopping process on the website by asking “How can we improve”
• We can give them some discount coupon code for their future orders with some validity of dates.
• If your website is having blogs then we can divert to the blog section where they can read the blogs.

Magento has over 2,40,000 worldwide users. It stands best in the eCommerce industry. And its all because of its extensive customization options and rich features.

Budget is the real concern that lies in our customer’s mind for the whole Magento project. There are some important elements which can cost you for implementing Magento

Some Of The Other Important Elements That Can Affect The Pricing are

• Migration to Magento Latest Version (1000$ – 5000$)
• Server Cost (500$ – 4000$)
• Designing and Development Cost (5000$ – 25000$)
• Extensions Creation/upgradation (500$ – 3000$)
• Support & Maintenance (2000$-20000$)

You want to build your space in the digital world and sell things online?

You need an online store developed with your specific requirements. We offer over a hundred plus custom eCommerce solution to make sure that you sell millions with our services. If you want to build a new store or upgrade the existing one; all you need is a Magento Development Company.

1. Basic Magento Website (5000$ – 15000$)

If who want to build a generic Magento website then Basic Magento is right for you. Small businesses opt for Basic Magento as it gives them all they need.

The basic website will give you limited features such as:

• Basic Magento Functionality
• Simple Design Or Theme
• Access To Magento Community Site
• No Integration With Back Office Systems
• A Smooth CMS

2. Custom Magento Website (15000$ – 25000$)

If you are someone who is looking to upgrade or migrate from another eCommerce platform then you should go for Magento custom website.

Custom Magento store comes with following benefits;

• Custom Magento Design
• Integration With Back Office Systems
• Custom Attributes Required To Be Created For Products
• Customer Groups
• Migrations To Host
• Extensions, Etc.

3. Magento Enterprise Website  ( 25000$+ )

The Best part of Magento Enterprise is that you can rest assured as Magento takes complete care of your eCommerce sales right from order to shipping. It has everything you will ever need and some of the added benefits are

• Built-In Modules
• Mobile Friendly
• Multiple Stores
• Full Page Caching
• Free Professional Customer Support
• A Large Amount Of SKU’s
• Hosted By Magento
• Search Engine Optimization
• Customer Segmentation
• Targeted Promotions & Merchandising
• Custom Coupons
• Integration With Shipping Providers
• Social Media Integration
• Training And Much More

You can also get Magento developer on an hourly basis and the rate depends on the experience level of the developer.

Apart from the above-mentioned features in the Custom Magento website, Magento Enterprise Edition gives you some additional features as well.

• Mobile Commerce
• Multiple Stores
• Full Page Caching
• Free Professional Customer Support
• Built-in Modules
• A large Amount of SKU’s
• Private Sales, Wholesale, Gift Registries
• Hosted By Magento
• Search Engine Optimization
• Customer Segmentation
• Targeted Promotions & Merchandising
• Custom Coupons
• Return Management Authorization

Keeping our standard and quality checked, we give engagement models on flexible rates to our clients. To turn your ideas into reality we offer Magento developer for full time, part time or on an hourly basis who will design and develop your eCommerce store that will stand out from your competitor.

We offer the best of services to our valuable customers in the most affordable way possible. Contact us anytime and we would love to help you in building great Magento websites.