For those looking to experience all the challenge and adventure that comes with starting your own business, eCommerce as an industry can be a bit of a playground. These enterprising initiatives have the potential to yield a high reward with even minimal upfront cost investments, allowing budding entrepreneurs to learn the ins and outs of running their own business in real-time.
But what if this isn’t your first time round the track? Or what if you have a killer idea for an eCommerce venture that you want to do justice? If you are looking to build an eCommerce empire and are seeking a set-up for success, then these top tips may just help you get there.
Here are 7 steps you can take to make sure that your eCommerce venture is poised for profitable growth.
1. Set up your infrastructure
The first thing you’ll need to do is invest in your basics. And just like you wouldn’t buy yourself cheap socks and undies, you don’t want to skimp on these foundational assets. This means securing yourself the best business transaction account to suit your company’s needs, the most suitable warehousing space for stock and inventory management, and most importantly, securing the right domain name for your online store.
Your warehousing space could be third-party managed, an independent lease, or it could even be a corner of your garage if you’re looking to sell products that are smaller and easier to manage. Even so, it’s best to adopt a growth-oriented mindset when investing in your stock management and order fulfilment solutions, as this is not a step that you want to be taking simultaneously to filling an ever-growing backlog of orders. Slow shipping times can cripple the reputation of your business.
And speaking of the reputation of your business, having a bank account that’s under your business’ name can only help boost your company’s credibility. This is one of many reasons why a transaction account is crucial to the foundation of your enterprise.
And the same goes for securing your domain name and all variations of that domain name. Paying a little extra upfront to reduce the risk of accruing copycats can help sustain the integrity of your brand over the long term.
2. Find a reliable supplier
If you are looking to build a business that can cater to customers for years to come, then it’s imperative that you maintain strong relationships with your supply and distribution partners. Of course, whilst local order fulfilment services are easy enough to establish, it can be a little bit trickier to find a supplier that you see yourself working with over the long run.
With that, it’s encouraged that you do a little research and contact a few suppliers in your industry niche. Order a small sample of their products in order to determine quality alongside cost. You may find that a supplier with slightly dearer prices is able to offer a better quality product. So a decision will have to be made about whether you go with a cheaper product or a pricier product that can promise your customers better quality.
This decision can be made based on the nature of your product. Is this item functional and should therefore be of a higher quality? Or is it a single-use product that could be better off being a little cheaper to ensure that you can undercut your competitors? And most importantly, can your supplier provide stock over the foreseeable future and preferably in bulk? The answers to these questions will naturally help shape your supplier selection.
3. Identify your product opportunities
Once you’ve found your preferred supplier, the next step is to determine whether or not there are other products that you could sell alongside your original product idea. These alternative products are typically referred to as ‘product opportunities’ and they can be dictated by a number of different factors, including what other stock your suppliers have access to as well as what other demands can be found across your market demographics (but more on this later).
More often than not, most eCommerce business owners wait until their business has generated some profits before diversifying their product offerings. But there can be benefits to providing a few different products from the get-go. For example, having a few different products can help present your eCommerce business as more than just a ‘one trick pony’. Having a thoughtfully diverse product range can also help when it comes to marketing and Facebook or other social media product listings, as you can display a range of products rather than just having users scroll repetitively through the same product – just in different colours and sizes.
4. Outline your target market
If there are seemingly no product opportunities available to you through your supplier, then you can put this on the backburner for a little while and focus on other elements of your preliminary research. In doing so, you may find that product opportunities can make themselves known organically as you learn more about your target consumer market.
And speaking of getting to know your target market, now is the time in your business development strategy to really dig into the demographics you’re looking to engage with once your online store goes live. Do a little independent research, create some buyer personas, and use these templates to help develop a firmer idea of what you’d like your branding and the tone of your store and web content to look like.
5. Research your competitors
Another key component of identifying and engaging with your target market is discovering where they’re shopping currently. This means exploring your market niche as it exists now and taking in the competitors that populate this industry landscape. What are they selling? What does their branding look like? What tone of voice are they using for their social media content? All of these insights can help you prepare your own marketing and business development strategies.
And on the topic of product offerings, even if there are no direct competitors who are providing the same products that you’re looking to sell, there can still be eCommerce businesses or even brick and mortar stores that do offer similar goods. And there’s every chance that these stores can diversify their own offerings down the line – especially if they happen to see your business performing well during their own competitor analyses in the near future. So it certainly pays to not only be thorough with your competitor research now, but to continue this practice throughout every iteration of your own eCommerce business. Make thorough market research a fixture of all your growth and development planning. And remember that it’s best to be data-driven, especially when it comes to competing in a global marketplace.
6. Finetune your branding
Once all your market research has been completed, it’s finally time to get to work on your business branding and style guides. This means identifying your colour schemes, the ideal colours and styles you’d like to see across the icons and other interactive elements of your website and online store, and once again, the tone of voice you’d like to use in your business’ web content and communications.
Developing these guides now can help you gauge what your online store and social media profiles will look like once they’re fully operational. It can also help provide any employees or digital advertisers and social media managers that you work with down the line to know how best they can represent your brand when handling external communications for your business.
This is also a good time to consider how your branding may be impacted if you expand your business to other regions or even overseas markets. If this is a goal that you do have in mind for your enterprise, then you’ll likely need to conduct a little regional market research and engage with the cultures of any areas you’re looking to expand into.
7. Build your online presence
Last but certainly not least, it’s time to put all this research and planning into action by fleshing out your online store, social media profiles, and all the other customer-facing digital assets that you’ll be using to help drive your business forward. This is arguably one of the most important and daunting steps to take when building an eCommerce enterprise, but rest assured that a little tactful design and development here can go a long way. So take your time!
Most eCommerce business owners run social media promos in the lead up to their store launch, just to generate a little engagement and hype prior to opening your doors for the first time, so to speak. This can help you generate a larger number of sales in your first month than if you were to do a soft open.
That being said, if you’re not looking to provide promos or discounts from the get-go, then there are ways that you can grow engagement without undercutting yourself. For example, you could work with influencers to promote your products and build anticipation from there, or you could just release promotional images of your products that also support the legitimacy of your business alongside appealing to your target demographic. The fun thing is that the best strategy here will be largely dependent on the nature of your business and the wider market niche it occupies. So get creative and think critically about what the best move forward will be for you. That is half of the fun of running your own eCommerce enterprise after all – the opportunity to try out new methods and become a digital pioneer.
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Keep in mind too that the work doesn’t stop once your store is fully up and running. In actuality, this is only the beginning for you and your business! From here, you’ll need to manage your sales and marketing strategies alongside amending these strategies to align with sales periods or as your company’s sales objectives change over time.
The most important thing is to keep yourself ready to respond to any market stimuli or opportunities at a moment’s notice. Being proactive can help you maintain an edge on your competitors and keep your business at the forefront of its industry niche over the foreseeable future.
