6 Steps to Start Your Own Local eCommerce Business

As the business cliché goes, all businesses are local. Therefore, even if you market online, optimizing your website for local business is a very smart thing to do. If you find a business niche that excites your local population, you are in good business. From identifying the local radius to investing in good customer service, following are six tested steps you can use to start off your own local eCommerce business:

1. Thoroughly Research the Market

Market research requires due diligence. It is absolutely necessary to conduct a market research on your chosen market using surveys, focus groups, interviews, and industry reports. This research will help you to identify who your target audience is within your chosen district, city, or region. Carefully identify the specific group(s) of people most likely to purchase your products or services. Through this, you can create a buyer persona that describes the ideal customer in your local market. If you identify their age, education level, language, and interests, it can help you to properly frame a brand messaging that resonates with them. 

Next is to perform a competitive analysis on other businesses selling similar offerings in your area by analyzing their price points, target customers, sales pitch, and shipping policy. By understanding the competition well enough, you can easily recognize the unique value proposition (UVP) of your own offerings. This can help you to stand out in your local market and attract the right customers.

2. Identify Your Market Niche

You can do this by first choosing the scope of the local area where you plan to focus your sales efforts. This could be as small as a town, an entire province or even a state. It helps to factor in your operational capacity, delivery costs, and customer density. If your eCommerce business will not be serviced by a physical storefront, it is best to choose a delivery area around your order fulfillment warehouse or where you store inventory. For efficiency and effectiveness, you must set a clear delivery radius based on where you pick, pack, and ship inventory to avoid wasting time and money on long, inefficient deliveries.

But, if the business will be serviced by a brick-and-mortar storefront, it is best to choose a local delivery radius around that area to create cross-selling opportunities. By doing this, it can help turn your in-store shoppers into repeat online customers. Alternatively, you can easily offer a variety of product options to enhance customer experience out of same store.
 
3. Launch Your eCommerce Store

Depending on the products you are selling, it is advisable to choose a reliable eCommerce platform to host your online store for local sales. There are many advantages in doing this. Many popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and others do offer the software tools you need to build and run your online storefront even without prior experience. These platforms help you to facilitate routine everyday tasks like inventory management, payment processing, and marketing, thereby helping you to cut down on operational costs significantly.

4. Market to Local Customers Online

To acquire local customers, it is best to invest in marketing strategies designed to drive traffic to your local eCommerce store. Get the business on Google My Business, GMB. Invest in Geo-targeted landing pages and Search Engine Optimization, SEO. Local pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns using geo-targeting to find customers in your local area, is also recommended. Don’t ignore Local Referral Programs through affiliate marketing. Partnering with a well-known influencer who lives in your chosen marketing area is also a great marketing idea. All these marketing techniques can help drive local customers to your eCommerce site continuously.

5. Invest in High-Quality Customer Service for Locals

Because your business is focused on a specific number of potential customers in a local area, it helps to try effective retention strategies. Strategies like encouraging customer accounts, offering a loyalty program, discount coupons, cash refund programs, responding to and resolving customer issues promptly are quite helpful. Making it easy for customers to contact your business post-purchase through a variety of communication channels like email, phone calls, chatbots, and even in person is great. All these help to enhance customer satisfaction. The real benefit of a good customer service is to boost customer satisfaction and drive repeat purchases for your local eCommerce business. 

6. Establish an Effective Local Order Fulfillment System

One main advantage of a local eCommerce business is the opportunity to focus your order fulfillment efforts on quick deliveries to a specific local market. You can thus offer next-day or same-day delivery service options with lower shipping costs than remote delivery addresses. You can decide whether you’re going to offer in-store pickup, curbside pickup, or home delivery. The radius of delivery for each of these delivery offers plays a major role in what you can decide. If you engage the right software, you can even automate your delivery systems. If you automate your order fulfillment, it can help you to keep track of your inventory and deliveries. Products delivery can even be better enhanced if you partner with reputable third party logistics companies operating in the local environment. 

8 Top Tips for eCommerce Success

If you want to succeed in eCommerce business, you must listen to experts. Carefully follow what they do and how they do it. Many of these experts are always very generous with their tips and how they are making it in the business of eCommerce. Here are 8 of such vital tips:

1. Habitually Test and Keep Testing Products: This one is technically a classic tip. Make a habit of regularly testing products, copy, communication methods, and pricing to engage your audience. That is how best to know what works and what isn’t in your eCommerce marketing.

2. Regularly Create Added Value for your Audiences: This is a very potent way to drive engagement. To drive direct engagement with content, try offer more personalized, curated shopping research experiences making sure it cannot be replicated elsewhere.

3. Avoid Going with a Small, Publishing-Specific eCommerce Checkout: If you do, your growth can be severely restricted. You cannot afford to have growth issues in your eCommerce business. The systems you need must all be driving growth, not preventing it. 

4. Diversify Payment Options: Try to reduce reliance on traditional credit cards systems. You can expand into other types of payment options such as digital wallets and direct debits. Doing so helps to maximize reach even without any cutting edge technology.
 
5. Understand the Power of Customer Experience: In today’s world of direct-to-consumer publishing, every touchpoint in the chain matters a great deal. For instance, a late delivery, damaged parcel, or incorrect item can easily erode the trust you’ve built with your customers. On the other hand, a well-packaged order that arrives intact quickly and looks professional directly reinforces your brand’s credibility in the eyes of your customers.
 
6. Look into Print-On-Demand Merchandise Suppliers. If you do this, it removes all the distribution and stocking hassle with zero upfront costs. It allows you to test products and designs without any financial risks whatsoever.
 
7. Invest in Data Visibility and CX: Always ensure you have real-time access to key supply chain data from print job status to final-mile delivery. If you do, you can use it to provide proactive, transparent communication with customers. 

8. Treat Product Stories as Part of the Customer Experience: You must be aware that in any mission-driven eCommerce, the story behind the product is as important as the product itself. This is why you must technically use product pages, pre and post-purchase communications to reinforce impact. Most customers who understand the ‘why’ usually return more often and share more readily.