Business digitalization is a trend of the past few years. As our lifestyles become more saturated, and we start living on the go, doing everything online starting from communication and reading the news to learning and shopping. This year COVID-19 turned the economics upside down making it harder to start a new business and brought a new reason for people to take their businesses online. With several waves of lockdown, it became the only way for small retailers to survive the pandemic.
For many small business owners building their first online store may be challenging. So to make this process easier, here we go with 5 basic steps to follow:
Choose the domain name
The first and most important step is choosing the domain name for your website. It’s the identifier for your brand name in the browser bar e.g youtube.com or un.org are domain names. The easier is your name to remember, the better. Usually, it’s the first thing your website visitor sees and based on that, creates the first impressions about your company, so it’s worth taking some time to find the perfect domain to represent your brand.
Estimate the budget
Prior to the website development, it’s worth estimating your budget for creating landing pages from scratch and for further maintenance. It will help to find the solution, as simple drag-and-drop website builders will be much more limited in the functionality than the development of a custom-coded website or mobile application, but on the other hand, they are significantly cheaper. So, you can start small and then see what you really need.
Think about the functionality
The key step for building a store is defining what functions you will need. These are the number of pages, categories, supported payment methods, delivery locations, and so on. As well as how all of these functions suppose to work. Start with drafting a use-case scenario, where a potential user needs to follow certain steps to complete the checkout. Make sure your website is easy to navigate for your target audience to increase the number of sales. For instance, if you are managing a flower boutique, make it simple to order flowers online even for a non-tech savvy user developing an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Choose the platform and hosting provider
Low-code CMS solutions like WordPress or no-code website builders are faster to develop and easier to manage. Prior to making a final decision, research how they work, assess the convenience of the admin panel and answer the question on how often you would need to work with it and make changes to the website look. If you need to make changes frequently, it’s desirable to choose a platform that will be convenient to interact with. Then, goes the choice of the hosting provider. Here the process is streamlined as you decide how many users will be on the website, what platform should be supported, and how much you are ready to pay. Beware of super-low prices as it may appear that the renewal fees will be twice as much.
Take care of SEO and Marketing
Once your website is ready, the work is not finished yet. You would want clients to find your website somewhere, make your website appear on the first page of search engines, and convert leads into real deals. Here’s where the Marketing tools like Google Analytics come into play. As for bringing the website high in search results, careful content planning and SEO optimization is a must.
As you see, launching an online presence is not only about the pages available on the internet, and it can be hard at first especially for non-tech savvy people. However, with thorough planning and knowing all the aspects that need to be considered, things get much easier.
