E-commerce: 11 things to do and know before getting started

I have been in e-commerce for almost 13 years and I have met quite a few e-merchants.

I have seen that today, with the arrival of online e-commerce training vendors, a number of people are embarking on online sales because they think it is an El Dorado.

A way to make money quickly.

But what they forget is that e-commerce is a profession in its own right and that it can be learned.

Creating a shop requires mastering several skills: logistics, web marketing, customer / supplier relations, social media management, web design, natural referencing, etc.

Managing a merchant site is one of the most complete jobs on the internet.

I know a lot of e-tailers who work on their site for months and even months without paying off themselves. It’s hard work, but so interesting when you know how to do it.

The purpose of this article is not to tap the trainers who are often former e-commerce business owners but to make aspiring e-traders understand the “difficulty” of being an e-commerce business owner and the basics to have to succeed his e-commerce from start.

1.Invest time and money in your e-commerce

Invest financially

I still see too many e-merchants who want to save on everything and therefore do not want to invest, not even 30 € to create a professional logo, or 70 € to have a more ergonomic theme for example.

Wanting to touch everything, it allows you to learn a lot, gain skills, and save money. But you cannot master all the skills necessary for e-commerce alone. You must delegate! I can already hear you say, “I have no money? How can I delegate ?! ”

There are online microservices platforms (5euros.com, fiverr…). With these platforms, you can get a good quality logo for your e-commerce store at 20-30 €! On these platforms, individuals who want to make ends meet are paying for their services.

I’m not talking about investing thousands of euros but at least a few hundred euros for the launch.

Subsequently, once the site is launched, do not hesitate to do the same to develop site traffic (without traffic there is no sale – as beautiful as your site may be). Invest a small budget in Facebook advertising, launch contests, have your products tested with bloggers who in return will give you articles that will turn into turnover.

If you do not invest a minimum of money on your site nothing will happen!

No sales.

Nobody knows your site.

Google doesn’t know you. He didn’t refer you.

You are therefore invisible!

I am not saying that without money you cannot succeed but it will be much more complicated!

E-commerce is hard! When a physical store opens, if it is well placed it will have natural traffic (passers-by on the street) from the first day. While your e-commerce site will have very few visitors on the first day (s).

When 40-50% of visitors to a physical store buy, the ecommerchant sells it only to 1 or 2% of its visitors, this is called the conversion rate or conversion rate e-commerce.

You understand that investing in the launch of the site and even more afterward, on a daily basis, to have traffic must, therefore, be a priority for you.

Time investment

When you start, I advise you to start alongside your salaried job, because you can wait months and months or even years before having a decent turnover which will allow you to pay yourself.

So yes, you will work more than 53 hours in full with your salaried job. But honestly, when I work on my sites, I don’t feel it as a constraint, it’s a passion. It will require you to organize to reconcile professional life, child (ren), friends, family, but it is feasible. You will probably see your friends less, go out less, but you have to know your priorities. This is what I advise you to do so as not to waste your time because you have little time, so you have to be productive. Make to-do lists. Do task after task and cross out tasks after it is done.

If you think that you will launch an e-commerce site without enough invested money and especially without elbow grease, go your way, you will have to “fight” to get each order.

2. Make your site professional

Your site should inspire confidence. It must reassure the client. E-commerce has become professional for a long time. The customer is mature and we can no longer do online sales lightly. Customers buy on Amazon because they know they will have no problem with their order, and even if they have a problem they can return the product for free.

Take inspiration from big sites to create your e-commerce site. You must put down on paper the functionalities that you want to find on your site, the host that you want, the design …

This is called the specification.

Here are some essential elements to make your site professional:

• Display your phone number clearly visible at the top
• Display credit card logos at the bottom of the page
• Have a contact page, legal notice, CGV
• Create a page “Who are we?”
• Create FAQs
• Avoid misspellings
• Create a size guide
• Have a well-detailed delivery page displaying the delivery times, the carriers used and the cost
• Use a deeper internal search engine than the basic one on your site
• Use quality visuals showing the product from every angle
• Use video to showcase your products
• Display that the product is in stock on the product sheet as well as the estimated delivery date
• Make descriptions that explain the benefits of the product and not its characteristics
• Simplify account creation or authorize guest orders

In addition to reassuring the visitor, you must make their life easier, the visitor is volatile. If he has to look for the information, he will eventually leave and if he is not reassured enough he will not buy from you.

3. Do not store or little product

One of the biggest mistakes e-merchants make is wanting to store their products from the start.

I advise you to start with dropshipping suppliers because you will have little investment and you will be able to integrate a lot of products.

Why dropshipping? At the start of your business, you do not know which products will work or not, stocking at this time can be fatal for the life of your small business.

Tell yourself that a product that doesn’t sell is money that goes out and doesn’t go in your pocket, not to mention storage costs if there are any.

On the other hand, the essential thing, you must be able to update your stock with that of the supplier so as not to sell an unavailable product. Sales are scarce at first, so don’t cancel sales and lose a customer because of that. Nowadays, there are many modules that allow the synchronization of stocks.

Once you have found your top products, of course, I strongly recommend that you buy them in bulk for better margins.

4. Stand out from your competitors

If you sell a product that everyone sells, you will have very little chance of being bought from your home. Select a product that is not already sold at Carrefour, or in the physical store that has a storefront because they will necessarily have better prices than you. You must encourage the customer to buy from you. For this, I advise you to do a market study before creating a site.

How to encourage the customer to buy from you?

Create your own brand To develop their turnover, many e-commerce sites create their own brand. This allows for a unique product and therefore a better impact with buyers. And above all to have higher margins than on other products.

In my work, I see the strength of this strategy. We make 30% of our turnover on our brands, which is not negligible with comfortable margins.

However, you must have a strategy for developing awareness of your brand, otherwise, as for your site, nobody will buy it because nobody will know it.

Offer a customization service By adding personalization to a product, you make it unique to the buyer and you can also sell it for more.

Offer superior commercial service to your competitors Let’s be honest. If you had the choice between 2 sites: one offers free delivery and the other offers free delivery and returns. Which one would you go to buy on? I think I already know the answer…

Also, be available by email or phone. I see it at my work. If you knew the number of people who call each day either to be reassured or because the product is technical and they need advice. Like physical stores, e-commerce is not exempt from the advice part, you must reassure your future customer by phone or email on the reliability of your site and your products.

Your priority must be your customer, you must bring him value.

5. Have a real long-term strategy

With the rise of fashion dropshipping + Facebook traffic, the new e-merchants who are launching have no long-term strategy.

The only strategy is to build Facebook traffic, find a winning product and “scaler” (increase advertising) to make more sales and resell the store a few months later.

The real problem with this strategy, which I call the “coup strategy”, is that at the slightest problem on Facebook ads, overnight, the C.A. can drop or even end up at 0.

I’m not saying this strategy is bad, but you shouldn’t do that. You have many marketing tools at your disposal so you might as well use them!

If you launch a site seriously, it will ask you for time and money, we just saw it above, and you must have a strategy. Know where you are going, what means you need to get there. You will then have a clearer vision of your site and it will be easier to develop it.

6. Don’t depend on a single source of traffic

This takes up point 5 a bit. With a single source of traffic, you will not get very far if it suddenly cuts off.

In SEO for example, I saw friends see their traffic be divided by 3 in a few days.

Well, he was a malicious competitor and everything went back to normal, but only after 1 or 2 months. Result: a sudden drop in the C.A.

Your sources of traffic should be diverse and varied, that’s ideal. For example, 20% referring sites (the other sites that talk about your site), 20% AdWords, 30% SEO, 20% Facebook Ads, 10% marketplaces. This is just an example but you understand the principle.

7. Work on your SEO before launching your site

SEO, despite what I just said, remains one of the safest and above all the most profitable sources of traffic because once your SEO is established, it will cost you almost nothing …

You will have regular orders without depending on advertising which can quickly be expensive.

I’m going to simplify the concept of SEO but it’s just to let you understand what it’s all about. SEO is:

• quality content
• links from other qualitative sites in your topic
• the user experience: the more the user clicks on your links via search engines, the longer he stays on your site and the better.

There are lots of other criteria like site speed, title tag, Hn tags, but if you’ve already understood the basics of SEO, that’s good.

Here is a simple launch SEO strategy to set up before even launching your stage site

by step :

• Start a blog on which you will write articles related to your topic – the earlier you start it, the better
• Comment on blogs / forums in your topic by bringing value and to make yourself known to bloggers
• Suggest guest articles to get your 1st links but also make yourself known
• Create a waiting page to get links to the home page and not just the blog
• Have your products tested by bloggers/influencers always with the aim of obtaining links
• Select the keywords to work on the e-commerce site – opt for uncompetitive keywords but with a suitable search volume
• Fill in the title and H1 tags of all your categories, product pages…
• Rewrite product descriptions

Allow between 3 and 6 months for these different stages. It all depends on the depth of the catalog you are going to add.

8. Create a checklist and marketing plan

I’m talking about it a little more, to properly frame your project and not forget anything, I advise you to make a checklist.

You will list all the actions to be implemented for the launch of your online sales site and even after.

You will therefore create a checklist and a marketing plan for at least one year.

Of course, the marketing plan will not be followed to the letter but according to the opportunities that arise. It will, however, be your compass for where to go.

The preparation phase is as important as monitoring the plan.

9. Train yourself

As I told you, selling online requires mastering a number of skills. You must, therefore, train yourself in these.

I am not telling you to become an expert for each but at least to master them a minimum.

With the Internet, information is everywhere who knows how to search. Uses are changing so fast these days that you have to keep up to date. I had my e-commerce license in 2012, it is soon in 2018 and the uses have changed since then. You have to follow blogs and influencers for each skill, go to events, join Facebook groups … You have to be curious.

10. You must obey the laws

I see a lot of people who go into e-commerce without having professional status.

From the first sale, you must be a company or a micro entrepreneur, it is mandatory. Becoming a micro entrepreneur is easy on the internet, to be in good standing and give confidence to your service providers, suppliers and especially customers, you must quickly create your micro business.

A visitor, when he arrives at your site, does not know you. He will read your GTC and legal notice to find out who is behind it. If he sees that it is a private individual who does this in his garage, he may not have confidence and will not buy.

On your site, you must display a cookie bar, send the invoice to the customer after placing an order. And there are lots of other legal obligations.

I strongly advise you to educate yourself on the subject if you don’t want to be in trouble.

11. Don’t be discouraged.

You should absolutely not be discouraged!

The life of a business is not a long, calm river. One business is an emotional roller coaster.

And even more in e-commerce.

One day, you will make the best turnover you have ever made and the next day, you will make € 0! See instead on the length and not day after day because otherwise you will get discouraged.

What you need to do more than the previous month is the goal.

Do not be discouraged at the slightest drop in turnover because you will know. Some days, you will see your traffic increase but not your C.A. and sometimes it will be the opposite. It’s for all these reasons that I find e-commerce exciting.

Note that I did not go into details for each item listed. If I had to explain everything in detail, the article would probably be three times the size. The goal is to deconstruct the false beliefs of a beginner e-trader and to sharpen your mind on all the aspects to master before getting started.

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