Currently there are many tools with which to assemble or create an online store in a matter of no time, and this facility encourages many entrepreneurs to create their own online store, thinking that they will give a «hit» and that sales will rain very soon, but the truth is, that in a few months later they will see that they have invested a lot of time and effort and that the result is not the desired one.
In addition to these tools and motivated by the difficult economic situation that many companies and professionals currently have, it has triggered a market of debatable professionalism that offers online stores for 50 euros / month, and in this way they take advantage of people who search I am very excited to have an online store, and in this case at the lowest possible cost.
This fact has caused the number of new online stores to be created, at the same time that other online stores that have not worked are dismantled.
Why doesn’t an online store work?
Have we done everything necessary to try to get good results?
I will explain step by step what you should do to create your online store, you decide if you want an online business card for your company or an effective sales tool.
8 tips on how to create an online store step by step
1.- Starting point.
As in any project, the first step should be to prepare a briefing of the online store, which allows us to see our project with a greater breadth. In addition to this, we must define a series of factors that are important to know well and that will help us in the process of choosing the tool that we will use to create the store.
Aspects to clarify before creating an online store:
- Analyze the prices of the competition. We will carry out this analysis using an excell sheet and for this we will choose from 3 to 5 competition companies that sell our products, and we will leave a last column to add the prices of our online store. To sell on the Internet it is key that our price is competitive, this does not mean that our price is the best in the entire market, but we must know that if our price is not competitive We are NOT going to sell a single «tail». So, before spending time and money, we must first analyze if we have the possibility or ability to compete in this voracious market that is the Internet.
- Size of our product catalog. How many products will our online store have; tens, hundreds or thousands. Not all solutions have the ability to correctly handle thousands of products. In addition, the user must be offered a comfortable path to the product, as well as the possibility of searching or filtering.
- Level of customization of the store. Here we will define the scope of the project in terms of its design and programming. Depending on the degree of demand, we will gradually eliminate some of the tools to create an online store.
- Technological level of the person who is going to manage it. Useless give a Ferrari to a person who does not know how to drive, So this aspect must be taken into account so as not to die of success when using the most complete and complex online store tool.
- Promotion. If you are going to create an online store and you are not going to use a promotion strategy for it, it is most likely that the sales are absent.
- Budget. Always reject that they create an online store for you for 50 euros a month, if you want a professional sales tool, contact a good professional and take charge of the real and not fictitious cost of the project. A good professional is sure that he values his work and that in no case will he create an online store for you at a bargain price.
- Calendar. It’s very easy to say that I need the online store for yesterday, but the truth is that every project requires design, execution, error correction and training time, so if you want an online store in a few days you will have to use an online cloud solution, although I always recommend that you use a development from an open source solution.
2.- Choose the Web tool that we will use to create the online store.
Based on the requirements that we have mentioned above in point 1, we must choose the simplest and most effective tool, and that best suits our needs. For this we have 2 options depending on the time and money we have to carry out the project:
A.- Express solution to create an online store.
Among the best solutions provided by the cloud are Wazala and Shopify.
1.- Wazala
Wazala is a very simple tool that will allow us to create our online store in just 15 minutes. You do not need to have technical or programming knowledge to start a lot of your business on the Internet in one afternoon.
Advantage:
– You can sell physical and digital products
– You can upload the photos of the products very easily
– Simple purchase process
– You can sell on Facebook, in this case by integrating a social ecommerce tab.
Disadvantages:
– You cannot work on search engine optimization or SEO.
– The entire store administration is in English.
When choosing Wazala is a good decision:
It is used in very small businesses with a very reduced catalog of products, and especially when there are no more requirements than the basic ones provided by any online store.
How to create an online store with Wazala
2.- Shopify
With Shopify we have the most complete cloud solution to make an online store, which unlike the previous case we have no limitations due to our catalog as well as SEO optimization.
This online tool has improved considerably in recent years and we can use it for all kinds of online store projects, even those that are demanding.
Advantage:
– You can have an online store and Blog at the same time
– We can sell on Facebook
– You can sell physical and virtual products
– It allows you some SEO optimization
Disadvantages:
– It is very thinking for stores in the English language, although it allows us to have our online store in Spanish, there will be some aspects that will not be translated such as the structure of the urls.
– As in the previous case, the administration of the online store is in English.
When choosing Shopify is a good decision:
Small companies but with the aim of expanding to the Anglo-Saxon world.
Create an online store now with Shopify
B.- Personalized solution to create an online store.
I always recommend a solution tailored to the client, since we avoid having limitations and being tied to the functionalities that a cloud service provider offers us. Although a priori everything seems disadvantageous (it is more expensive, it takes more time, etc.) in the long run we will see that we will be rewarded with a good volume of sales, and we will be able to recover the investment made in the first year of its life.
1.- Woocommerce (Basic Solution)
There are those who think that WordPress is a tool that is not sufficiently prepared to be used as an online store, but they are really wrong. The great evolution that the Woocommerce plugin has had makes WordPress a very valid option to create an online store.
Advantages of using WordPress:
- WordPress is the best tool for positioning in search engines, so it will greatly benefit our positioning or SEO strategy.
- It has a blog with which you can carry out a content marketing strategy. Creating relevant content in your sector is a good way to make yourself known and to get a reading community around your company.
- It will reduce costs when performing SEO, either in human or financial resources
- It is the easiest tool to manage and the fastest when uploading products manually. In just over 2 minutes you can have an article uploaded and fully optimized.
- Updating the WordPress version is very simple and does not usually give complications.
- You can find hundreds of templates that will greatly facilitate the creation of the online store.
Disadvantages of using WordPress:
- Woocommerce does not have advanced functionalities that are difficult to provide a solution, although it has different modules that can provide us with this or similar functionality.
- It is not intended for moving large quantities of products. If our store is going to have thousands of products, it is not the most recommended solution.
- Since the process is carried out in a single step, and not in 5, we will not be able to have the data of the abandoned baskets of the users, we would only have this data if they finished completing all of step one or were previously registered.
- It does not allow to keep a control of billing and accounting. It only has a very simple module for general sales statistics.
How to create an online store with Woocommerce
2.- Prestashop (Standard solution)
It can be said that it is the most natural and most used solution to create an online store. It is a tool in continuous evolution and improvement, we can see this in the 4 or 5 annual updates it carries out, and it has the largest communities in the world in the ecommerce sector. This, logically, gives us greater security and guarantee in case of finding a problem.
However, I would like to point out that in Prestashop we can also find bugs or failures, especially if we have the latest version of the product, it is always preferable to have a couple of versions prior to the latest available.
This online store solution meets the most demanding requirements and needs.
Advantages of using Prestashop:
- It has a very complete billing and accounting system.
- It has a medium level of difficulty when it comes to managing all its functionalities, some simpler but others somewhat more complex.
- We can carry out massive loads from an excell, this will considerably reduce the registration of our product catalog.
- It has hundreds of free modules that can improve or optimize our online store.
- The latest versions of themes and templates already include an internal blog, although it is somewhat limited.
Disadvantages of using Prestashop:
- Higher cost in human resources for its management, as well as to carry out its SEO.
- Higher economic cost without hiring an SEO strategy for our online store, the reason is very simple, aspects that WordPress can be automated, in Prestashop you have to do them manually.
- Uploading a product will take 4 to 5 minutes, so it will take longer to upload our content manually.
- If you come across a bug in Prestashop, be patient, but if you are looking for help in the community, you will see how in a few days they will offer you a solution.
How to create an online store with Prestashop
3.- Choose the categorization of our online store.
We must create the structure of categories and subcategories where we will segment the products of our online store. I recommend that you dedicate the time necessary to avoid problems in the future and make changes that may negatively affect the online store, specifically I am referring to usability and search engine positioning or SEO.
4.- Personalized design of the online store.
Although it is one of the aspects that is sacrificed when we want to reduce the cost of the project, the truth is that it is an aspect that differentiates us and gives us our own identity. A good design can be a good sales tool and that our brand image is known more quickly.
To do this, what you must do is create a premium and responsive theme for the online store, although the 90% of the users what they do is choose a theme and carry out a small customization. If this is your case, it is very important that you choose a premium and responsive theme, the cost difference is very little but the premium code is more optimized and free of errors, it will also have a better predisposition for positioning than a normal theme.
5.- Usability and accessibility.
If the user gets lost in the navigation of our online store, or does not find the specific product, or the purchase process seems complex, it is very likely that this person will not make the purchase and have a very negative experience in our online store, so it is very important that the navigation paths that we want our users to follow are well defined. If we dedicate efforts to improve the user experience in our online store, this will help us improve the perception of our store and help us increase sales.
6.- Beware of duplicate content.
It is very important that the content of the product sheet is original and not a copy and paste of the manufacturer’s page.
The duplicate content of our online store should not exceed 25 or 30%, as Matt cutts recently told us in one of his videos, in any case as long as you can avoid it.
If you want to know if your online store complies with the basic aspects that avoid duplicate content, you can use the Virante tool.
If we want to compare the duplicate content of our online store with that of our manufacturers, we can use webseo analytics.
If instead we want to analyze the content that has been extracted from our website and published on external websites, we will use Copyscape, PlagSpotter or Plagium.
6.- Do not forget to enter the Meta Title and the Meta Description. Each product must have a unique Meta Title and Meta Description, if we repeat in either of the two we will be generating duplicate content, on the other hand if we do not enter these values this will negatively affect the positioning of the product and the general of the online store.
It is very important what and how we create these two contents. Many people make a copy and paste of part of the text, because it is the simplest and easiest but it is not the most efficient.
7.- Create your own blog.
Provide relevant content related to your topic and create a reading community around your company. Content marketing is a very effective tool as long as the content that is generated is of very good quality and useful to the community of readers.
8.- Use a good online marketing strategy.
The main problem that any online business has is its low visibility on the Internet, so it is very important that you carry out an SEO and Social media strategy, so that they know you before and your products reach thousands of people in a short time.
You will have to wait 3 to 6 months to start seeing the results of the online marketing strategy, do not be fooled by professionals who guarantee to be the first or that they are going to report a series of sales, since the Google algorithm It is always in constant flux, and no expert knows science science the future changes that Google will make and how they may affect your website, we could say that nowadays talking about guarantee is the same as cheating.
The only thing that a good professional can guarantee you is to work hard to improve the visibility of the brand and to report the desired sales as soon as possible.
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