How to Create a Low-Cost Website for your eCommerce Store

These days, many more people are taking their businesses online. The reason thousands of eCommerce websites get launched every day. A website serves as an online business window and front office for many businesses. That is where they get to make their first contacts with their prospective customers online. If you are taking your business online, you have to learn how to create a low-cost eCommerce website that will serve your needs. Even if you are not too skillful in computer programming, you can take advantage of the lots of educational resources, software and step-by-step guides available online to build your own website. With these resources, almost anyone can build an eCommerce website step by step. Here is what to do.

Choose Your eCommerce Website Builder

Luckily you can have unlimited access to DIY services from the websites of reputable Website Builders like Wix and WordPress. If you want to run an affiliate program, you can join a reputable eCommerce platform like Strong Future International SFI. On this platform, you have access to a free webpage to do your business from. This is more so when you don’t have the right technical knowledge to do things right. On SFI platform, you can set your eCommerce store up and running in a matter of minutes. If you choose to build your website on WordPress platform, it allows you to add eCommerce functionality plug-ins to the website. These allow you to customize your eCommerce website as you choose to then add more options if you so wish.

Choose a Suitable Domain Name and Hosting Platform

Here is where things become a bit tricky. You must carefully choose a domain name that is not already in use by anyone else. The hosting platform must first sort that out before hosting your website. Your domain name should ideally be your business name or its variation, if the original match is already taken up. You may be required to pay monthly hosting fees when your store is up and running. That in essence may be your only true cost if you are building a DIY eCommerce website. No matter how your website comes about, make sure you take into account crucial operational factors like reliability, security, reputation, uptime, loading speed and more to make sure it is really useful to your business. For low-cost purposes, you can consider the hosting plans of Hostinger, Hostgator and Dreamhost.

Pick the Right Theme/Template to Customize

If you are building your website DIY on WordPress or Wix, you have access to a range of free themes you can choose from and customize for your eCommerce website. On WordPress, you can easily integrate your eCommerce website with WooCommerce through plug-ins. If done correctly, the website will become really suitable for displaying products, taking orders, receiving payments and shipping out purchased products. When your chosen theme is right and suitable, it easily molds into your eCommerce business. You must make sure that the theme you choose to customize has the right visual appeal and is easy to navigate. This is in addition to other vital and necessary traits like mobile-friendliness and high flexibility for easy adaptation.

Add Your Products/Services to the Website

This is where the real marketing takes root: adding products to your website. The way the products are displayed and the descriptions accompanying them are of vital importance for marketing purposes. Be sure to accompany your displayed products with a clear and concise product description. This is because the more informative this description is the more impactful it is. If you provide the necessary information in the right order, it makes it easier to skim, assimilate and understand.

Use only High Quality Professional Photos of your Products

The average human being is highly attracted to the visuals of your marketing products. So, if you use high quality and professional photos of your products, they attract attention easily. If you are marketing affiliate products, embedding these photos with affiliate links/codes helps to direct buyers to the appropriate website where the products can be purchased. Using the right keywords on the products description helps major search engines like Google to find the product on your website. Ultimately, these efforts help to make the process of choosing the right product fairly easy for the consumer.

Set Up your Acceptable Payment Methods
 
If you built your website DIY on Wix or WordPress, you can easily set the payment options you prefer. Most eCommerce website builders and plug-ins offer multiple payment options to eCommerce stores owners. They have access to online payments via multiple payment processors, Debit/Credit cards, Cash-on-delivery and so on even though each method may come with its own fees, processing time, and ease-of-use considerations.

Set Up your Shipping Options

Onsite, you can also set your preferred shipping methods which your customers can choose from depending on their convenience. Setting up the right shipping option is necessary and hugely important because it can serve as a marketing technique as well. This is why Free Shipping can be one of the top reasons many people buy products online and save costs. Even if the products cannot be delivered free, be sure to assure consumers that you are using the most reliable and cheapest method to deliver their products.
 
Test and Launch Your eCommerce Website

Before you launch your eCommerce website, make sure to test the website well enough to be sure it does what you expect it to do. That way, you can always take quick steps to rectify whatever faults you find with it before launching it. Thereafter, you must keep an eye on whatever faults you’ll encounter along the road through user experience and comments. It is hugely important to be sure the website is optimized for mobile devices. You can then test how it performs on cell phones and other smart mobile devices. This is because, according to Google reports, a very high percentage of eCommerce traffic comes via smart mobile devices.

Conclusion

Any business owner who is determined and serious about it can easily create a low-cost eCommerce website by DIY approach. Even though DIY approach to create the right eCommerce website is a possibility, it usually takes quite a bit of time and effort to get it done. Additionally, it is quite a difficult option for people with minimal technical knowledge. However through DIY approach, you can always take full advantage of low-cost eCommerce website creation options that offer a lot of flexibility, tools, and plug-ins. Any time you wish, and as you wish, you can easily maintain and modify the website on your own without any outside technical assistance. Doing so helps you to save time and costs.

Digital Marketing Quick Tips for Small Businesses Start-ups

Small business start-ups always face huge marketing challenges. Many learn early enough to take to digital marketing as one great way to take on the challenges. If they take their businesses online early enough, digital marketing can really help them to face their marketing challenges in good stead. Marketing online is the right place to be because most consumers are now resorting to using more online tools to search for local businesses they want to patronize. Small business owners can always take advantage of this marketing reality if they choose to take their products/services online to reach more customers/clients at lower costs. That is where digital marketing can greatly be of help. Find below some quick tips to accelerate this process.

 

Take Your Business Online

Many experienced digital marketers like to say taking your business online is a given. It is not always so particularly for many small business start-ups. Many small businesses still need to be persuaded that internet technology has changed many things in business marketing environment. The smartest thing to do for your small business start-up is to get it online as fast as convenient. To get it done, you may choose to hire the services of professional webmasters at a fee or DIY using Wordpress templates that are quite simple to use, versatile and flexible. Small businesses can easily take advantage of the content management dashboard from WordPress to service their customers well. Having a good website where you can market out of is the first major step in that quest. A good website can serve as your online office and e-commerce shop. It is your business window in the internet world where potential customers first make contact with your small business.

Optimize for Local SEO

Most small businesses are local businesses. It is imperative therefore to optimize your website for local SEO as soon as the site is up and running. In this quest, listing the business on GMB, Google-My-Business is highly recommended. Once your listing is complete on GMB, and the listing is optimized for local SEO, as soon as searchers hit the computer button for “business near me”, Google pops up your business along with others in the same local environment of the searcher. Your business gets good organic traffic as a result. This is exactly why it is very necessary for local businesses to optimize their GMB profile to help them build long term relationships with customers particularly in their local environments.

Enable E-Commerce on Your Website

If you are using WordPress template for your website, you can take advantage of its in-house tools to manage your small business.  WordPress enables business owners to use the WooCommerce plugin to set up their business and start to make transactions almost immediately. If however you decide to use specially designed website by webmasters, they can help you to customize the website for e-commerce functions as well. That allows you to open an e-commerce shop for the products you are selling. That is where you can easily list/display your products for sale. It will in addition be fairly easy for you to track sales, leads, and to build a customer database from this e-commerce shop.

Effective WordPress SEO Techniques

If you own an online business, your priority should always be how to grow your sales. This you can do by deliberately and systematically raising your brand awareness and acquiring new customers. That task is easier if you have in place some effective Search Engine Optimization, SEO techniques, without which the task becomes almost impossible. For marketers in e-commerce business, smart digital technologies from WordPress can indeed make such SEO tasks easy for marketers that are not too experienced. That is because digital marketing and online advertising techniques are getting more and more sophisticated in tandem with the sophistication of the internet. Some SEO techniques may be specific to the type of platform you are using for your e-commerce business. But because of the ease-of-use and popularity of WordPress websites among marketers, SEO techniques come with the package. If your own website is on WordPress, here are some effective techniques you can try out for your business.

Take Advantage of Plugins

Luckily, WordPress has many different plugins that marketers can take advantage of to help them identify and fix broken links. Doing so helps to ensure your website is simple to navigate and with improved website speed. These are very critical SEO requirements. Plugins help your website to be properly optimized on WordPress making it easy for customers to find your products online.

Publish only SEO-Optimized Content

The language you use and the way you deploy keywords on your website content matters a great deal for your search engine ranking. These keywords help Google and other Search Engines to qualify and rank your website in their SERPs. If your content is relevant, easily readable, and has the right keywords, it helps its SEO.

Create a Sitemap

If you market from your WordPress website, never fail or ignore to create an XML Sitemap file. That map helps to provide detailed information about pages and the relationship between each of them for the benefit of search engines. It helps them to easily understand and crawl your website’s structure and content for ranking purposes. The ultimate goal of every marketer is to create an online store website that ranks tops by the search engines. A good XML Sitemap file helps that effort.

Use only SEO-Friendly Themes

On WordPress, marketers have the advantage of using in-house well-optimized themes that have built-in SEO options if you are diligent enough to locate them. Such SEO-friendly themes are built specifically for some types of businesses and niches. If you are lucky to find one that matches your business, it helps to create more chances of getting a better ranking for your website store by search engines. Since content is what is largely responsible for driving traffic to online stores, well-optimized themes help content to do so.  

Mend Broken Links

Characteristically, search engines are always very sensitive to broken links. For that reason there is hardly anything else that tends to affect SEO more negatively than broken links. As a marketer, it is inevitable that you must use redirect links and backlinks to your products. But be sure that these links are always through links. You can do this by regularly and routinely checking the links you added on your website to be sure they are not broken. Broken links always have negative affects on previous SEO efforts you may have already undertaken. Nothing distracts customers worse than clicking on links that lead them to nowhere.

Improve Your Google Ads Settings

Smart online marketers always rely on search engines to advertise their goods/services. Many inevitably turn to Google Ads. If you want your paid clicks to transfer in higher percentages over organic clicks, be careful with your Google Ads settings. To make sure your advertising is properly optimized, check your ads settings and consider using cheaper cost-per-clicks ads for better results.

Be Creative in Your Product Descriptions

Write only catchy and easy-to-remember product descriptions. That requires some creativity. Unique content is important, but it should not be plain and monotonous. Your aim is to arrest the attention of visitors at the quickest opportunity. Catchy product descriptions tend to help that process. If you write product descriptions that people easily see and remember, you attract more and better traffic for your website. By adding relevant keywords to your catchy descriptions, it usually works great for your website SEO.

Optimize Your Products Images

For traffic purposes, visuals are hugely essential for online stores. Most people always want to see beautiful, clear pictures of the products they wish to buy. For this reason, the more aesthetically pleasing the images are, the more attractive they are to buyers. That is why it is very important to put up only images of the highest quality to market your products. Even with that, it is also essential to optimize such images. That helps search engines associate and link the images with your products. The optimization is done by adding the ALT tags with relevant keywords to every image of your products you put out on your content.

Make Your Checkout Process Seamless

Making your checkout process seamless is to reduce the percentage of abandoned orders in the checkout process. Most online shoppers always love what is easy and user-friendly. Unfriendly and uncommon payment methods together with cumbersome, complicated and long checkout processes can frustrate many customers to abandon orders in shopping carts. This phenomenon no doubt greatly affects sales volumes and profits.