ARE YOU BUILDING AN E-COMMERCE WEBSITE? 8 Steps to your Success! (PART – 3)
Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by Santy in eCommerce Solutions
Well, from the initial 2 parts of this guide, we discussed about basic 2 steps for choosing your domain name and your hosting provider. then on the 2nd part, we discussed critical steps of setting up shopping cart website setup, setting up your merchant account and setting up SSL certificate for your website.
Now, in the final part of this 8 Step Series Guide, we’ll discuss about integrating website analytics and boosting up your webstore sales with online promotions. Here we go…
Step #6: Website Analytics
To understand your website users effectively, you need to go a step further and understand website analytics.
Create your website account with Google Analytics and integrate its code into your website pages. This will gather a lot of information about your website visitors and its trends.
On regular intervals (we recommend at least once a month), review your website analytics reports, understand the visitor trends, the pages where bounce ratio is higher, the analysis of the exit pages, etc. you can also set goals in the analytics account and measure the conversion ratio on those goals.
Step #7: Online Promotions
Since it’s a web-based product and your target audience is online users, it makes a great sense to invest in online promotions & marketing strategies. Some of the key activities you should consider here are:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay-Per-Click Campaigns (PPC)
- Online Content Promotions including Blogging, Article publishing, etc.
- Social Media Optimization (SMO)
- Online Press Releases Submissions
- Promoting products through mini-stores with Amazon, Google Product Search, etc.
Apart from this, you can continue your efforts on traditional way of marketing for offline media including Print Advertising, Radio, TV, etc.
Step #8: POST Launch Review
To measure the success of your online venture, it is required that you re-evaluate your portal within one year of the launch.
- Review your sales plan with the actual order conversion through the website. Identify what is going well and what is going wrong with the website.
- Review the sales report on cross-selling products and evaluate how well you did by pushing additional product sales subtly while user is on checkout page.
- Review what is the general period of the year when your sale boosts up online. Is it mostly holiday season? What kind of offers & discounts brings more sales to you? At the same time, evaluate which product types & categories are not doing sales, you might also think of removing it from your catalogue or you can promote those products with additional discounts if it fits in your profit/margin ratio.
- Review the total number of transactions on your website and the amount of transaction fee you paid to the gateway company. Evaluate if there are any better payment gateway providers available in the market who can provide better deals on your sales volume.
- Finally, if everything is going well per the plan, you better can plan on expanding your catalogue and product offerings. May be you can also think about shipping to different city/regions or even foreign countries.
Read previous steps: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
About the Author:
Santosh Kompalwar is working as Director of Techview Web Solutions Pvt Ltd and the Technology Solutions Experts for the various organizations. Santosh is Co-Founder/CTO of The Real Recruiter, the real estate industry’s complete recruiting technology platform. Santosh is also Co-Founder of CodiScan – A Mobile Marketing & Loyalty Program. He can be reached at +91-9665040106 or e-mail him at santosh@techview.biz. Visit his website at www.techview.biz, www.therealrecruiter.com and www.codiscan.com
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