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Building a website to sell your products online and get your ecommerce store up and running has never been easier. Here’s our 6 step guide to getting it done.
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Building your own website gets easier every year, but building an ecommerce store for your online business takes a bit more planning and effort. An ecommerce website should include features like a custom domain name, an intuitive user interface (UI), an appealing website design, a frictionless shopping cart and checkout flow, and search engine optimization.
As a small-business owner, you have many ecommerce website builders to choose from. No matter what ecommerce platform you choose for your website, you’ll follow similar steps to get your online store up and running. Here’s a step-by-step rundown.
Starting a successful online store has much in common with establishing a brick-and-mortar store: You identify a target audience and make efforts to connect with them, invite them to shop, then close the deal with a smooth, positive retail experience. Here are strategies for tackling each of these six steps so you can get your business online and start selling.
The success of your ecommerce business hinges on your ability to connect with the types of online shoppers who would sincerely like to buy your products. Before you start selling online, take time to do the following:
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It’s common for small business owners to launch an ecommerce website to sell things using a professional website builder. You’ll likely want to choose a platform with a built-in online store builder, which lets you list and sell products on specific pages of your website. Here are the key steps that go into launching your ecommerce site:
Website builders like Shopify, Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace offer content management systems (CMS) that let you design the custom look of your site. Here are a few components of website design:
Shopify Themes—built for commerce
Take your store from launch to scale with themes that make selling easy. Check out Shopify themes to review a collection of templates ideal for small business websites.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. You can reach far more customers with an online store built for search engine visibility. When thinking about how to make a website to sell, here are some strategies to improve your SEO rankings:
With your website built and optimized for search, you’re ready to launch it and sell products online. Here are some ways to market your new ecommerce store:
Free marketing plan template
Calibrate your strategy and create a content roadmap for paid and organic channels to earn new customers and keep the ones you’ve got with our marketing strategy template.
You can continue to improve your website after it’s launched. Here are three strategies for doing so:
Continue to monitor site traffic and trends. Using tools like Google Analytics and your site builder’s analytics tools, monitor the ways customers interact with your ecommerce store. Use this information to plan marketing campaigns, guide new product development, and optimize your site for better search engine visibility.
Yes, thanks to modern website-building software, you can build a website without any prior coding experience. You can choose from popular web builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix‚ among others. You can also opt for a website builder that’s designed for ecommerce, such as Shopify.
The best way to ensure your website is mobile-friendly is to use a website builder that automatically codes with a mobile-responsive design. Today, all of the major website-building platforms—including Shopify’s website builder—use mobile-friendly designs. Given that over 60% of all web traffic comes via mobile devices, mobile responsiveness is essential.
You can track website traffic and engagement metrics using free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, alongside paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. If you have a Shopify merchant account, you gain access to a wide variety of reports and analytics that help you track and analyze online store conversions, inventory, sales attribution, customer behavior, and much more data.
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