How to Launch Your Ecommerce Store

Most eCommerce design and development studios will share the common steps on how to start your online shop. They will point out finding a product/s to sell, getting inventories, setting up your business, building your store, then start selling. They’re all correct. But there’s more that you should know.

We like to do it differently and we have proven our way to be effective. We’ll share with you some tips that will help you launch your eCommerce store the right way and how to keep it running. And you won’t hear these tips from other studios!

Identify Your Competitors

Ok, I know we said we will share different information with you. We just want to set you up for the next steps because before you can perform them, you need to identify who you are up against. They can be other eCommerce stores that are selling the same products, businesses that are selling in similar niches. Make a list of the top five or even ten if there are a lot and you will use their websites in the next steps.

Learn How their Website is Performing

“Wait, how the heck can I learn about that?”, you might say. “And that’s too technical!” Running an eCommerce store is technical in the first place. Some apps and professionals make it easier for everyone to get accustomed to it. Online tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs allow you to gather information behind a website’s search engine optimization performance. SEO and marketing professionals use these to gather competitive information in different industries. 

By running a website’s URL on any of these platforms, you will gain information about:

• What they are best visited for
• What channels do they use to bring in visitors to their website
• If they are paying for ads or not that led to their performance
• If they are paying for search traffic
• What top domain names refer visitors to their pages

These are just some and there’s so much more to get out of it that is very useful in planning and running your eCommerce business. 

The downside of this though is that both SEMrush and Ahrefs can be costly especially if you will not be using them every day. That’s where professionals will be able to help you to get you the data that you need.

You might be wondering, when you get the reports, what are you gonna do with it, or you cannot understand it. It’s a service that web design and development studios like OneVector Design Co offer where you will receive a friendly and analyzed report to make consuming it a lot easier.

Make Your Own Keywords

The main purpose of gathering keywords from competitors’ websites is for you to identify what has worked for them and what may work for you especially if you will be selling similar products. It also gives you ground on where to start rather than going out in the wild to list down the words that will bring traffic to your website. 

When coming up with your own set of keywords or keyphrases, you can customize the ones that you have gathered to be more tailored to your business. 

Google has a free-to-use tool called Keyword Planner which allows you to type in search terms you have gathered and other keywords that you want to use for your eCommerce store. When you get the results, you will not only find the relevant keywords to your search but also the number of people using those words. 

With the proper combination of keywords to go in your website’s copywriting, it will be doing good in a matter of months.

Start Creating Content About Your Shop

Now that you have created a set of keywords you want to use, it’s time to start using them on your website. A few ways you can use them are:

• The copywriting of your website
• The product description and tags 
• Metadata of individual pages or products
• Images also can contain keywords through Alt Text
• Articles about your products or your business

These areas of the website all contribute to searchable pages. Content is what brings you out there to be found by potential customers.

The first four points above will go on your website which will allow spiders to grasp the same information people are searching for on Google. Articles on the other hand can both be on your website and on other platforms too. Depending on what industry you are in, you need to publish an article in the most notable article sources about your product. Don’t forget to integrate keywords in the article and hyperlink them to your website. 

Keep Creating Content

One of the keys to successful online shops is consistency. You have to keep supplying the internet with words that are related to your business. This will allow you to develop rankings in search results over time. It will take time, but it will pay off in the long run once you get there. 

Over time, customer trends change too. You will have to revisit the keywords your target customers have been using to find stores like yours. The good news is that you already started with it a few months ago by checking your competitors’ websites. The better news is, your website has acquired its own analytical data which you can now use to learn about your actual customers.

Study the Analytics

After some time, your website will gather activity and it will provide you with useful insights about your customers’ trends, behavior, interest, and pain points. You can use all these in remarketing to existing and past customers. You can also use this information to plan your next strategy.

With analytics, you don’t just learn about what’s good on your website. You also learn about the bounce rates, what marketing channels are you supposed to use and take advantage of, most visited pages, and more.

Final Thoughts

Websites and social media both come with analytical data whether it is called analytics or insights. They are actual customer behavior towards the pages of your online shop and your competitors’. Make use of it to your advantage. It is so much useful to plan if you have data instead of guessing what your customers or competitors may have been doing on the world wide web.

It can be jarring to perform all these activities, especially over time with data gathered keeps on increasing. Professionals can make it easy for you so you can focus on your business and come up with the best strategy to run it. You don’t have to go at it alone. Collaborate with other professionals to get you there faster.