How to make an online store with your own hands: A quick guide
Creating an online store is a process that will require you to have a whole set of skills and abilities. At the moment, the retail market is going through hard times, but despite this, due to quarantine restrictions, making an online store now is one of the most profitable solutions. Offline business due to restrictions on attendance and trade at the moment is not able to bring anything but losses. Therefore, the only thing left for entrepreneurs is to create online stores and corporate websites for their organizations.
Such a resource can increase the profitability of the company several times, but for this, the corporate website must be made according to the latest trends and interest users from the first seconds of their stay on it. Achieving this effect will require a lot of effort and time from you, we will tell you a few secrets that can help you achieve what you want and make a popular online store, let's get started!
How to start creating an online store website
Like any project, the process of creating a website for an online store begins with planning tactics and brainstorming. You will need to solve a lot of questions before proceeding directly to the creation of an online store. These issues include::
- Choosing a niche
- Her research
- Competitiveness of your idea
- Search for suppliers
- Choosing the brand style and language
Each of these points can determine the success of your business even before creating a website, so we recommend that you think carefully about each of them. After you make a decision, you can start making an online store. In addition to creating an online store site with your own hands, you can also order an online store under the keys from professionals. What are the advantages of this solution, we will tell you a little later. Next, we will look at the process of creating an online store from the point of view of an entrepreneur and let you know all the pitfalls of this process, let's start!
“Is it easy to make an online store?” - Talk about the development process
Is it easy to make an online store? This question sounds from the lips of many entrepreneurs, especially in the current conditions. Against the background of a raging epidemic, when no offline point is able to give you a profit-the creation of an online store or website for the company will come in handy. Even if your business is related to the sale of products, and the quarantine restrictions do not affect this niche - with the help of the store's website, you can increase the number of sales by at least half. Everything will depend on the demand for your product on the market, the pricing policy and the presentation of the company itself. In order to get a significant increase in profit, you will need to put a lot of effort and provide the project with a marketing component, with which potential buyers will learn about your company. You can make an online store yourself, this is a fact! Next, we will look at the list of steps and actions that you will need to go through to launch your first online store. The list of stages of the development of the website of the online store in a short format is as follows:
First stage: Preparatory work
Planning
As we said earlier, to make a successful online store, you will need to think about what niche you plan to trade in, how your company can attract customers, and how you plan to cope with the competition in the market. It is worth noting that the good old dumping perfectly showing itself some 20 years ago-does not work on the Internet. As a rule, you, as well as your competitors, are provided with goods by the same supplier, and it will be extremely difficult or even impossible to agree on special conditions exclusively for your business.
That is why before you launch an online store or start the process of creating it, you should weigh all the pros and cons and create a full-fledged business plan. The business plan will allow you to calculate all the risks, expenses and expected income in advance. Based on this data, you can make a decision about how to make an online store. Of course, you can make an online store and bypass this stage, but the lack of data on the niche and the calculation of the competitiveness of your offer compared to the offers of your competitors may not allow you to promote an online store and lead your company to bankruptcy. This is what any entrepreneur wants to avoid, and to prevent this from happening, it is very important to weigh all the pros and cons, to explore the market. Make a conclusion about the profitability of the project you created even before you start investing money in it.
Development of the plan
To make an online store really popular in the future, you need to follow a clear plan from the very beginning, which will allow you to avoid mistakes and not forget about important elements of the resource. At this stage, your task is to think in as much detail as possible about how exactly you will make an online store, what tools you will need for this and what result you want to get in the end. Creating such a plan as detailed as possible is your primary task, but without the proper experience, you will not be able to make it completely correct and detailed.
In the plan, you should specify not only your goals, but also the ways to achieve them. In order to make a high-quality online store, you should think in advance about the structure, design, content, advertising companies, and everything that can help promote the resource as quickly as possible.
Sketches and prototypes
Making an online store with your own hands, you will have to create a lot of prototypes, with the help of which it will be much easier for you to understand where a mistake was made, an important page was missed, or the invented design does not fully perform its direct functions. With the help of prototypes, you can also test the intuitiveness of the structure of the future online store site, so you should not abandon this stage and immediately start creating an online store.
The first stage will allow you to thoroughly prepare for the development of an online store site, but it will not simplify it. If you have already had experience in creating websites, then development will be easier for you. But if you plan to open your first business on the Internet, while never having to deal with the development of resources-we recommend that you contact specialists. The team of the web studio Gloss can create an online store website for you. The website developed by Gloss will fit all current trends. In addition, it will be designed according to your wishes, you will get the site of your dreams without spending time on learning all the subtleties of development. If you want to create a website yourself with your own hands, in the next section we will tell you about the development process and the pitfalls that you may encounter on the way.
Second stage: Development of an online store website
Any website has several components that allow entrepreneurs to attract the attention of users and potential customers to their products. Next, we will consider a short list of such elements that allow you to make an online store not just a working resource, but also a profitable business. The website of the online store consists of:
Structures
The structure of the site is its skeleton, which allows users who visit the main page to get acquainted with the catalog of the resource and purchase the product in which they are interested. Thanks to the constant updates of search algorithms, now a competent structure can play a key role in customer loyalty. It can also help the site to pass indexing faster — this aspect should be given special attention. A well-developed structure will help you make the online store popular. To achieve the desired results, you should check the invented structure for intuitiveness and ease of perception.
To do this, you just need to ask a couple of friends to find the contact page, catalog and delivery information are located on the main online store. If your teammates can complete the task in less than 60 seconds, then congratulations, you have created an intuitive structure. If the search for information from your friends will take more time-the structure requires improvements.
Layouts
After the structure in the form of an outline, you should take care of transferring the structure you have made to the Internet space. If you have never done anything like this — we strongly recommend that you contact specialists. One mistake in the process of creating the layout can lead to a complete failure of your resource, which will have an extremely negative impact on the promotion of the business and the cost of the subsequent launch of the resource. At the moment, the demand for domains and services of specialists is very high, the later you contact them — the more you will pay for their work.
Despite its visual simplicity, the layout of the site is a complex and confusing process, where without knowledge and experience you are unlikely to be able to do something that will be popular. If you want to make a high-quality online store, we recommend that you turn to professionals in this business. So you will protect your resource from mistakes made during the layout and save time by dividing it between tasks more efficiently.
Of design
Customers love with their eyes, so when making an online store, pay special attention to trends and trends in the field of web design. If the design of the online store made for you will fully correspond to the current fashion and interest customers — you will not have to wait long for success.
To achieve such results, you should learn more about this year's trends in the design of resources and draw an analogy with their popularity. By choosing a style that perfectly fits the specifics of your company — you can start developing the design, which will also take time.
Haste never leads to anything good, but when you make an online store yourself — once again, you should not delay the time. The faster your site goes online, the earlier it will start to be indexed, the faster you will be able to get the first profit from your business. In this paragraph, you should make a reservation about the constant changes in trends and why it is so important that your site is designed with high quality. The fact is that in addition to scanning the content and intuitiveness of your site, search algorithms can also evaluate the design of your resource, the presence or absence of a mobile application, as well as the principle by which you created the resource. If making an online store, you resorted to the principle of Mobile First - your resource will be promoted more effectively than others, this principle is currently the most preferred from the point of view of search engines.
By combining the three components, you will get a basic online store, which can already attract users at this stage. In order to attract as many potential customers as possible to your online store, you should think about using tools for promotion, we will tell you more about them in the next section.
Third stage: Promotion
Making an online store is not everything. In order for a business to start making money, it is necessary that it constantly attracts your target audience, and for this you need to use promotion tools. There are two main ways to advance. Each of them requires time and finances, but the cost and pace of development are different, and using them at the same time can allow you to bring the website of the online store to the top of the search results significantly faster. The tools for promotion are:
Contextual advertising
Contextual advertising migrated to the Internet from billboards and signs, so familiar to us. Its essence for hundreds of years of the existence of advertising itself has not changed at all. It should attract customers and customers, as well as create the image of your company and match the corporate style. There are many different types of contextual advertising. Make a choice in favor of one of them is only after a detailed study of the competitive environment, the methods used by your competitors and their results. It is worth remembering that if one type of contextual advertising is ideal for a niche and quickly develops sites — its use in another niche does not guarantee the same success. You should also pay attention to the quality of the design and settings of the ad. These parameters will determine the success of the promotion, the results after the launch of advertising campaigns and the final position of your resource in the search results.
Optimization
Website optimization is the primary promotion that will help the online store to become much more interesting for search algorithms. With the help of competent optimization, you can achieve good positions and improve the ranking. Comprehensive work on all the elements of the site can help you with this. When promoting your online store with SEO, you should optimize everything on the site, and pay special attention to the content. Optimized content can lead to your resource search algorithms. Thanks to the coincidence of the optimized content with the search queries of the segment you are interested in, you can expect a significant increase in traffic and turnover.
You can learn more about each individual type of promotion and how they work by visiting our blog, but is it possible to avoid studying the question? Is it possible to make an online store without spending time on it and at the same time get a high-quality resource? The answer is unequivocal yes!
Is it worth doing an online store with your own hands
In order to make an online store and successfully promote it in the future without experience in development, you just need to order an online store from specialists-web studio Glyanec. Our studio has been developing corporate websites and creating websites for online stores for more than 12 years, and during this time we have accumulated invaluable experience, which has made us leaders among the studios of Ukraine. In addition to creating online stores, we also develop contextual advertising campaigns, so if you want to get a high-quality comprehensive promotion or you are concerned about a number of issues related to ordering an advertising campaign — just write to our manager in the online chat posted on each page of the site.
If your business needs a high-quality resource or you want to make an online store, but have never dealt with the creation of sites-order the development of an online store site from the market leaders, the website creation studio Glyanec. By ordering the creation of an online store in the web studio Glyanec, you can be sure of the highest quality of the resources that we create, and our support even after the launch of the site. If you want to start a business on the Internet, but do not know what to do, and how to cope with the different stages of creating an online store site — order an online store from us and start your successful business.
In order to order the creation of an online store, you just need to fill out an application on the website and send it to us. Immediately after processing your order, our manager will contact you to clarify all the details of the project and discuss the terms of availability of the resource. Make your online store popular and in demand by ordering its creation from the best web studio in Ukraine — the Glyanec website creation studio.
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