COVID-19 has made a great impact on our daily life. With a view to minimising the risk of spreading the pandemic, social distancing has become our new normal — A ban on social gatherings of several people, or even a lockdown has been implemented in many countries. 

It leads to a decrease in the number of customers in physical stores. More consumers tend to purchase products online, ranging from necessities to cosmetic products. In other words, online shopping is now turning into a global trend that business owners should pay attention to.

According to a survey conducted by Facebook IQ, instead of price and convenience, safety is much more crucial when it comes to shopping — 71% of interviewees in the US revealed that it was of essential importance when considering where to shop. Moreover, nearly a half of respondents across the globe said that they planned to keep shopping online even after the pandemic ended. It also unveils that there was a six time increase in conversations related to contactless shopping and living in recent months.

With these figures in mind, it is obvious that COVID-19 is a driving force leading digital transformation for many companies over the past few months. It is the best time for shop owners to develop online business, in a bid to maintain their business growth under the global crisis.

Even so, it isn’t easy for newcomers in the digital world, especially those without any professional skills and knowledge in e-commerce. What should you do to start your journey? Here’s a list of dos and don’ts for creating an online shop!

1. Don’t create an online store all by yourself

This seems to be a good option for e-commerce beginners with coding skills, providing freedom of customising their own website design. 

Nevertheless, most of you would have no idea what functions should be included in a successful online store, and the process of website development, such as building a shopping cart and integration of secure payment gateway and delivery systems, could be time consuming. 

Therefore, we advise newcomers to create online stores through an easy-to-use e-commerce platform, which is more efficient when compared to doing it all by yourself.

2. Don’t overlook checkout pages

When building an online store, many e-commerce beginners might believe that its priority should be increasing its attractiveness by creating a beautiful layout and attractive content, as this could influence customers’ first impression of your company, and help convince customers to continue browsing your website. 

However, in the case of increasing shoppers’ conversion rate, a seamless checkout process outweighs attractiveness. A report by Visual Website Optimizer in their e-commerce survey 2014 shows that confusing checkout was one of main reasons for cart abandonment, which means the more complex your website is, the easier your customers leave. 

Thus, rather than the attractiveness, you should focus on optimizing the checkout process first. It isn’t necessary to have a fancy layout and a blog in your store. We suggest keeping it simple instead. If you have numerous articles for promoting your products, upload them on all your social media accounts!

3. Don’t be lazy

Creating an online shop through a well-developed e-commerce platform is a good start of your business journey, but it could result in failure if you are not well-prepared. 

To keep your online business sustainable, you should ask yourself several questions before the launch of your store:

• What products will you sell online? Are they special and attractive enough?
• How will you receive payment and ship products?
• Who will be your target audience? If you’re already in business, have you had an analysis on who your best customers are?
• What will be your selling points and business strategies?
• Who will be your competitors? How can you stand out among others?

4. Do promotion

No Sales Without Marketing, No Marketing Without Sales

Shannon Prager, President of Leadit Marketing

This really makes sense, but a vast majority of shop owners assume that sales could be driven by the online business itself. In fact, without promotion, consumers will not proactively visit your online store, let alone purchase your products. At the same time, you cannot have sufficient resources to hire professionals or even build a marketing team for advertising your business without profitable sales.

So, do promotion when running your business online, which can possibly make a considerable profit. Taking our “Boutir x VS Media Online Book Fair 2020” as an example, we created Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) to promote books from our exhibitors on Facebook, which delivered an astonishing 27:1 return on advertising spend (ROAS)! 

5. Do data tracking and analysis

Since consumers could take diverse actions when browsing your online shop or reading your ads, like clicking a product link, adding products in their shopping carts, and so on, integrating different analytics tools with your store can help you understand and analyze customer behavior, traffic and your ads performance.

Facebook Pixel is one of popular analytics tools which can be easily integrated into many e-commerce platforms. This allows you to understand how consumers interact with your business by showing all collected data on your Facebook Pixel page in Events Manager. For instance, you can track conversions from your Facebook ads, which can help you optimise their performance.

Many shop owners also set up another renowned analytics tool — Google Analytics. Apart from tracking what consumers are doing in your online store, it can collect various types of data, such as how long they stay there and how they got there in the first place. You can couple it with your social media and blog pages as well.

6. Do find reference for your ads 

Last but not least, if you have no idea how to create your ads, you can search ads in Facebook’s Ad Library to find inspiration. As stated by their official website, it is:

• Available to everyone: Even if you are not Facebook users, you can still view and search all active ads in the Ads Library, except those with certain types of content, namely alcohol or gambling.
• Searchable: Everyone can search ads by any keyword or page name, including the names of famous brands, celebrities, and organizations associated with social issues and politics.
• Informative: Besides basic information of advertisers, Ad Library can clearly show details regarding the ads you are searching, such as their creative, text, starting date and ID number.

After reading this article, are you ready to build your online shop? Get started with Boutir and register for our free trial now: https://www.boutir.com/app

If there are any inquires, please feel free to contact our professional customer service team at : m.me/boutir.hk