Now is the best time to start an ecommerce store. Last year, the number of people who purchased products online, was just 16%. And it had been growing gradually by 1% every year.
But this year, because of the pandemic the number shot up to 25%. More people are now comfortable with buying products online and soon it will become the norm.
If you want to generate some money online, you too should set up an ecommerce store. Setting up one is easy as there are several tools and software that simplify the process. Plus, you have different ecommerce platform options to choose when setting up your online shop.
Here are the tools that make this possible…
An ecommerce builder:
You can always hire a top designer to create a custom ecommerce store for you. But that’s going to take a while and cost you at least $3000. Also, every time you need a change, you have to contact the designer to fix it for you. This will cost you money and time.
But if you use an ecommerce builder, you can set up the store on your own in less than a day. Most top builders like Shopify, BigCommerce, and 3dcart come equipped with drag and drop builders, themes, templates, and apps that make it possible for anyone to create a high converting ecommerce store.
They also include hosting, so you don’t have to pay extra for that
A merchant account:
A merchant account is a commercial bank account that allows you to accept payments both online and offline. They’re the ones that allow people to pay with credit cards, debit cards, and other digital methods.
If you were running a simple offline store where you only accepted payments with cash, a merchant account won’t be necessary. But as you are running an ecommerce store, a merchant account is essential. Some great merchant services for your business are Square, Stripe, and Payment Depot.
Most of them charge per transaction. This ranges from .5% to 5%. Some even offer monthly fees. Make sure you spend a lot of time picking the right option for your business. It needs to be robust without any downtime.
Email marketing software:
After you create your ecommerce store and set up the online payment process, you can drive traffic with methods like ads to generate sales. But if you want to get the highest bang for your buck, you should invest in good email marketing software. This is because the return on ads is about around 2.5 to 3X. That means for every $1 you put in, you will get about $3 back.
But with email marketing, the return is $38 for every $1 spent. This is why you should combine email marketing with advertising and other organic methods.
After people buy your products you should upsell them with an email series to get them to buy more products. And you should get the people who don’t buy your products to sign up to your email list. As you can nurture and convince them to make a third purchase.
Shopify recently introduced free email automation software for their customers. If you go with them you can take advantage of this. But if you have a larger budget, I recommend you to invest in a more advanced email marketing software with link triggers and SMS.
Affiliate marketing tools:
Another tactic that generates a better ROI than advertising is influencer marketing. It returns $6.50 on average for every $1. But the problem with influencer marketing is that it is harder to implement. You need to find influencers to work with. After that, you need to vet their followers and engagement as a lot of them pay for fake metrics to charge you more.
If you want to avoid this risk, I recommend that you try out a cousin of influencer marketing called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you don’t pay the influencer any money upfront, you pay them for every sale they make. This lowers risk.
To attract more people, make sure you give the influencers a good percentage of the sale. Something around 30% to 50% can be mouthwatering.
But do be careful with affiliate marketing as it isn’t completely risk-free. There are some sly influencers who buy the products themselves or get their friends to and then return them.
Amazon recently had a run-in with an influencer who scammed them.
Make sure you get a top affiliate marketing software. It should help you manage influencers and track fraud.
Analytics tools:
The biggest ecommerce marketers succeed because they constantly track their website’s performance and make modifications according to the data. Here are the two types of metrics you should be tracking and the perfect tools for them…
Quantitative analytics:
Quantitative analytics consists of metrics that have to do with quantity. These include clicks, visits, page views, sales, subscribers, etc. You can track them with a tool like Google Analytics.
Qualitative analytics:
Qualitative analytics are metrics that track the quality of the traffic. These are things like the amount of time they spent on your site and the parts they focused on most. You can track these with a heatmap tool like Hotjar.
You always don’t require a third-party tool to track both these metrics as some ecommerce builders are built-in with them.
Conclusion:
These are the 5 things you need to start an ecommerce store. It can cost a bit to get all of them. If you are on a tight budget, you can get free and cheap versions. This can slow your growth, but you will have something to build upon. While if you have money to burn and are very serious about growing a top ecommerce store quickly, you should invest in the best tools.
