ShopKeep POS Magento

So, you’ve set up your small business marketing site, established your social media presence, opened your brick and mortar store, and sales are doing okay so far.

Now what do you do? Depending on how often your customers interact with your website, the logical next step for many small business owners may be to explore the world of online selling. E-commerce is a fantastic way to increase your sales and reach new customers. Here are 8 fool-proof steps to help you create and maintain a killer online store.

Product Selection

The first step for most people looking to ‘get into’ e-commerce store is to clearly understand what you’ll be selling. This helps you to determine how to create the user browsing experience, how to lay out your products on the site, and even how to design the checkout process. Luckily for you, as an existing brick and mortar merchant, this step will be much easier. You can simply offer the same items that you carry in your physical store, or be a bit more strategic and carry just a variation of them online – based on customer demand and preferences.

Be sure to do your research and strategically determine this. One of the great things about online selling is that it’s possible to get a sense of interest from your potential customers before buying any inventory. Set up a page with a sample of the products you’d like to sell and then ask customers to register their interest by providing their email address. By asking people to submit an email, you are asking them to take a concrete action and getting a genuine sense of their interest in your products. What’s more, you will then have a way to contact them when you are ready to start selling.

Note: If you’d like to branch out and sell different products, make sure your online brand and product offering is consistent with your offline environment. Consumers respond well to brands that are seen to be authentic ‘from the feet up’. This means that if you have an italian restaurant, you’re more likely to establish a success online olive oil emporium than an online store offering imported leaf-blowers.

If you feel that your online store will create a demand that your suppliers may not be able to fulfill, then scale back and offer just a fraction of your product line. This point leads to the second part of step one: selecting your suppliers and fulfilling orders.