Today, online businesses are growing at a much faster rate than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Many local retail stores, craft makers, and even bloggers have started selling their products and services online. According to Statista, global retail sales of e-commerce are expected to generate more than 653 billion US dollars in 2018.

If truth be told, e-commerce is the fastest growing and one of the most profitable industries to date. With online retail sales snowballing at a rapid rate, now is the right time to build your e-commerce website and boost your sales. However, creating a perfect e-commerce website may sound like a huge undertaking, but the process isn’t all that complicated.

Starting an e-commerce business entails a lot of dedication, arduous work, commitment, and some important steps.

9 Tips to Create a Lucrative E-commerce Website

Create a Lucrative Ecommerce Website

Here are some essential tips and tricks that can help you better understand the process of building a lucrative e-commerce website from scratch.

Let’s dive in.

1. Choose the Right Products to Sell

One of the most important and challenging steps to build your e-commerce website is to find the products you want to sell online. Coming up with a unique product idea can be tough because the most popular and common product categories are riddled with fierce competition.

Consumers are just one click away from e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Zappos, eBay, Walmart, and Best Buy. Therefore, it is advised to choose a product that you can position uniquely. Solving your customers’ pain points is always a great idea to drive sales. You can simply identify a problem or deficit and try to capitalize on it by doing it in a different and better way.

2. Figure Out Where to Obtain Your Products

Once you have come up with a new product idea to sell online, now is the time to figure out where to find your products. You can simply look for a manufacturer to produce your own products or find a supplier, wholesaler, or distributor to purchase already existing products from. There are many online supplier directories such as Alibaba, Oberlo, ThomasNet, Kompass, AliExpress, and more which provide a list of vendors to choose from.

3. Register Your Business

This is one of the obvious steps towards building an e-commerce website. Name your online store and find an appropriate and available domain name that will identify your online business. You can buy a domain for your e-commerce website from GoDaddy, Google Domains, Register.com, Domain.com, and more.

4. Choose a Hosting Platform

It is advised to choose an e-commerce hosting platform that can save both time and money. WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify are the most popular e-commerce platforms that make it easier to integrate plugins and payment processes.

5. Build Your E-commerce Website

Once you have decided on a business name and got your domain registered. Now is the right time to build a website for your new business. To save time, many websites offer a host of innumerable e-commerce website themes. You can choose one that allows you to showcase your products in the best viable way.

You can simply download a template from websites that offer beautiful e-commerce website templates and themes. All templates are 100% mobile friendly, fully customizable, affordable, and open source, allowing you to pick one that best caters to your business vision. These DIY online e-commerce website builders can create websites in a jiffy, allowing you to start selling products immediately.

If you want to build your e-commerce website professionally and incorporate more features and specialized unique options to meet the unique needs of your customers. Hire a professional web design agency that can give you an out-of-the-box e-commerce website solution. Explore a list of top e-commerce web design companies here.

6. Create a SEO Plan

You are almost ready to launch your e-commerce website, but before you jump into it, create an effective SEO strategy to enhance the visibility of your website. Optimizing your website for Google and other search engines is indispensable to help them understand what your online store is about and what it sells.

This will increase your website visibility by increasing the chances of appearing higher in search results when potential customers are looking for the products that your store sells.

7. Choose a Shipping Strategy

When it comes to launching your new business, you need to determine your shipping strategy. In order to make sure that your customers glean a seamless experience, map out your shipping process. There are some key factors such as shipping rates, process, product weights, preferred packaging, and packaging sources that must be kept in mind. While devising shipping strategies for your online business.

8. Set up the Payment Gateway

As an online store, you should provide multiple payment options for your customers to provide greater convenience that will ultimately increase your chances of getting more sales.

There are many online payment options such as:

  • Credit/debit/prepaid card payments
  • Bank transfers
  • Digital wallets
  • Cash
  • Amazon Payments
  • Bitcoin
  • Dwolla
  • Intuit Payment Network
  • PayPal
  • Authorize.net
  • 2Checkout
  • BluePay
  • WooRockets.com.

Take some time to research and decide what is best for your online store and what most of your customers prefer to use.

9. A/B Testing

Before launching your e-commerce website, you should invest in A/B testing. Prudently test everything from landing pages and images, pricing, and checkout processes, to emails and web copy. Make sure that your website works perfectly across smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Some A/B testing tools such as Google Analytics Content Research, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, Unbounce, and more can help you optimize your site.

You are All Set to Launch

Finally, it’s time to launch your website with Branex. Remember that starting an e-commerce website is a detailed and complex process – from choosing a product to sell and finding suppliers to building, launching, and driving sales. Following these nine essential steps will ensure that your e-commerce website is launched in a timely manner that will eventually become a profitable business.