5 Tips for Starting Your First Ecommerce Website

If you have decided that you want to set up an ecommerce website, then it is important to make sure that you do it right! It is likely that everyone will make some mistakes but it is a good idea to make sure that you do not make any big mistakes and that you are able to avoid the biggest pitfalls so that you are as successful as you possibly can be.

Find the Best Ecommerce Platform

You will need a platform that will give you the best value for money. It is really important to think about what you need from it and make sure that the one that you are using will give you everything that you need. Of course, if you are new to ecommerce then you might not really know what you need form your ecommerce site. If this is the case then it can be a good idea to have a look at what different places offer and then you will have a good idea of the sorts of things that are available and this will give you the opportunity to decide what will work best for you. Make sure that you consider the customer service as well because if you are new to ecommerce then it is possible that you might need to contact them for some help and so you will want them to be quick to respond, friendly and helpful.

Select the Right Payment Gateway

It is important to realise that different payment gateways will give your customers different options. Your customers might prefer a certain payment method, such as Paypal or credit card and you will need to make sure that you offer them what they want. It can be difficult to access this but you need to think about perhaps what country they are based in and what payment methods are popular there and available to them. Also think about what they are likely to trust. Some payment methods have charges as well for customers and you need to consider that as well. It is a good idea to also consider how much they will charge you. You will be able to pass that charge on to your customers but it will mean that your prices will go up and that could make you less competitive. It is therefore really important to make sure that you are aware of the costs and that you compare them before choosing.

Test the Website

It can be so tempting to launch the website as soon as you can and get it out there. It might be because you are excited or because you want to start making money as soon as possible. However, you do need to be extremely careful. You need to make sure that it is all working properly and so you need to test it. Try to get other people to test it as well as they may be more through. Also, make sure that you proof read all of the product descriptions and double-check that all of the prices have been put on correctly. It would be devastating if you sold your first product and has accidentally priced it way to low and made a big loss. You also need to make sure that you have all the required information in the descriptions of the products and that there is enough to allow the potential customers to have enough information to tempt them to buy.

Make Sure it Works on Mobiles

It is easy to forget that a lot of people will want to access your website form a mobile device. A normal website will not necessarily work and you will end up with an unusable site for anyone on a phone or tablet. Some platform will automatically work on all devices but others will not. It is therefore well worth checking this out before you start so that you will be able to be confident that it will work for everyone. It can be easy at the time, to forget that some people do not have a desktop computer and only have a mobile device to access the Internet and so it is important to bear that in mind when you are designing an ecommerce site or any site in fact.

Use Social Media

It is so important to utilise social media. All modern businesses need to make sure that they have a presence on all of the main social media channels. It will take time to keep up with it but you need to make sure that you are posting on there and also responding to comments etc. You can schedule posts and you can even use someone to do it for you if you have trouble keeping up with it.