We are taking into account your responses to joining the eCommerce community with unosoft, and coming up with new articles 🙂 .
Today we are tackling a topic suggested by one of our community members: how do you an online store, but also some marketing and SEO tips so you can take advantage of the momentum and attract traffic & sales from the start.
We’ve discussed these topics before, but not necessarily in one article. So, if I’ve piqued your curiosity, let’s take it step by step.
Contents How to create an online shop & Marketing and SEO tips
- Plan the things you need for your online store
- Choose platform and service providers such as delivery, payments, invoicing etc.
- Start promoting your store before launch
- Marketing tactics for a store just starting out
- SEO and optimization tips for an online store
1. Plan the things you need for your online shop
If you already know what products you want to sell – whether you produce them yourself or get them from a supplier, the first thing you need to do is to organise some files with them.
Create a list of products or request it from the supplier, to be prepared as for an import. See here how to complete an import file to upload to the unosoft platform.
Depending on the type of products, you organize and category structure. You need them especially when there are a lot of landmarks and you want people to find them easily in the store. Here you can read about choosing and structuring categories.
Also select one or more star products – unique or with certain special benefits.
These will be the attraction of the site and will bring customers into the store, then guide them to other complementary products.
For these products you create or commission banners so that they are visually compelling. Make your own logo for the shop.
Also make multiple photos of star products, in context, or even videos. Keep them handy, because you’ll use them from the start on marketing.
While you’re doing all this, if you don’t have a legal form, solves the problem. Choose the right form for you – whether it’s PFA, LLC, II or other. You can consult specialist firms to guide you to the right choice if you can’t make it on your own.
What’s left to do is a official Facebook page for your business, with the desired name and a business Instagram account, where you start revealing things about your project and build an audience that becomes increasingly familiar with your business name.
Last but not least, as soon as you’ve chosen your name, buy a domain with the same name and hosting for this one + the company’s official email address.
Look more professional and trustworthy when customers see addresses like [email protected], not gmail, yahoo or something else.
Read also: What not to forget before opening an online store
2. Choose the platform and service providers such as delivery, payment, invoicing etc.
Once you have these files and goods decided, it’s time to choose an eCommerce platform. The platform is basically the admin panel behind the online shop.
There are multiple types of platforms, so you should do a little research before making the right choice for you.
Search for a platform that is easy for you and your future employees to use, even if you don’t have programming skills. It’s vital not to depend on a programmer for every tick, but to be able to do things when you want – including at 3am, if necessary.
Then choose platform that allows you to launch quickly and is even equipped with built-in marketing tools.
The fewer separate third-party integrations you need, the more you avoid potential technical problems and delays.
We recommend you to try unosoft, our eCommerce platform, which you can rent with a monthly or yearly subscription, at a decent pricing plan depending on your business level.
Contrary to surface opinions in the market, a SaaS doesn’t lock you in with your store on the platform. Because the assets you own – content, images, product descriptions, text, videos – can all be exported if you want to move elsewhere.
It works just like a normal rental: when you come, you also bring your clothes, your personal belongings, the furniture you like. And when you leave, you can leave with them in the same condition. But you don’t take the walls with you to your new place, do you?
On the other hand, at unosoft you’ll find all the superlative conditions to make your shop a real penthouse:
- 14 perfectly customizable themes
- Robots for automating repetitive actions and saving time
- +165 preset integrations
- Special services for managing shipments with GShipments and online payments with GPayments
- UX optimized ready page structures
- Ready to use native tools for SEO optimization
- Customer-friendly checkout that guides customers to complete transactions
- Huge documentation in text and video format
- Support team ready to answer your questions and help you when you have questions
- Constantly created blog content and video
- A community of over 16,000 members where you’ll always find new and fresh opportunities
Basically, you have more than a platform. You find a complete solution and a community that will support you to grow fast and scale without mistakes.
The unosoft platform can be tested for free before choosing a subscription. You have 15 days to practically start setting up your store and, from our tests, most customers don’t even need that long to make a decision.
At this stage, it’s also important to establish who your service providers are, so you can quickly integrate with them:
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- Courier company – As I said above, with unosoft you can activate GShipments, which gives you access to multiple suppliers, from which you can choose the ones with the best cost per order.
- Payment Processor – Likewise, with GPayments enabled, you have access to multiple payment methods to offer on the site, at preferential fees that we have already negotiated, depending on your subscription.
- Billing software
- efulfillment service provider – in case you want to get started with such a collaboration.
- Email marketing / SMS marketing platform – for sending at least transactional communications (i.e. post order, such as order confirmation or review request emails).
Read also: How to open an online store with unosoft – Step by step guide to creating a store
3. Start promoting your store before launch
I also mentioned 2 things to do before launching your official store.
Even if it doesn’t work so well organically anymore, Facebook and Instagram help you make your presence known online and gain credibility with your future customers.
Your friends and acquaintances will be the first to follow you here after you invite them and share the page. It doesn’t hurt to start some awareness ads and gather a mass of followers.
Once you activate the desired subscription from the platform, you can also build a subscription form pageso that people can subscribe to your database and wait for your launch offer.
You can promise them an extra discount, prizes, gifts on their first orders, to encourage them to give you their email addresses.
Another strategy to attract people is to organize a giveaway with more substantial prizes. For those who haven’t won them you can offer discounts on your website, so they can enter the store and buy the products they want once they become affordable.
Even if you don’t have the products in stock yet or you’re not ready with the shop setup, you can leave some active products to pre-order. You’ll be amazed by people’s reaction, even if you may feel that you still have a lot to do on the site to make it perfect.
Basically, you are now testing the marketability of products and the real interest of consumers. Based on what they tell you on the site chat or through comments, you actually find out what actions you need to implement in order to sell well.
Read also: To DO List when you want to launch an online store (or product)
4. Marketing tactics for a store at the beginning
- Market on content. You can make a blog, which will help you on many levels, including SEO, answering customers’ frequently asked questions, announcing news, etc. In parallel, start making short video content about your products, your store’s mission, packaging, store differentiators, curiosities, etc. Use reels, TikTok, YouTube Short, Facebook, etc., and spread this content everywhere.
- Giveaways are guaranteed to bring you traffic. The important thing is to choose prizes that are relevant to your type of business (e.g., credit of x hundred lei for shopping in your store, gift products from your offer, products/services from partners, etc.), and have clear goals for each giveaway you organize.
- From the very beginning use forms to get email addresses. There can be forms on a specific lead capture page on your website, in blog articles, in the footer of your store, popups, etc. The bigger your base gets, the more likely you are to communicate with users who are more ready to buy from you.
- Of course, use email marketing and always communicate with your base.
- Make sure people are encouraged to buy more in store. That means having marketing tools set up right in the store: popup after checkout with product recommendations, product bundles, OTO offer on checkout page, gift products at certain value thresholds in the shopping cart.
- Find out which channels your audience is on and invest in some ads there. For example, if you’re targeting gamers, you’re more likely to find them on YouTube and Twitch than on Instagram. Or if you’re targeting Generation Z, you’re more likely to find them on TikTok than on Facebook, for example.
- Make sure you have a customer loyalty program, from the first customer. You can invite them to leave you reviews, give friends discounts in your store as micro-influencers, create content for you and so on. And these actions on their part are more compelling than any advertising you do.
Read also: How to sell online: Online Marketing and Selling Guide + Checklists
5. SEO and optimization tips for an online shop
The good news is that if you use the unosoft platform it will be extremely easy to do SEO actions without much technical intervention – the platform has ready-made settings to fill in and save, you don’t need to understand the code behind it.
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- Complete meta tags as you add pages and products – for each product you have a tab allocated for completing the meta title and meta description (i.e. the text that is returned for your site when people search for your products on Google).
- If you have a lot of products in your store, you can use the Advanced SEO application. It’s a premium app, but it allows you to automatically optimize all pages that match the set conditions. See all the details about the app here.
- Add the sitemap to your free Google Search Console account. The map can be found at https://www. domeniultau .ro/sitemap/sitemap.xml .
- Save the Google Analytics tracking code to your website, so you can monitor events in your store (traffic, site behavior, eCommerce data, etc.).
- Use the free blog module in the unosoft platform. Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to post constantly, at least create a list of 5-6 basic articles, from which people can learn about the mission of the store, the buyer’s guide to your site, what they need to know about payments or delivery, what are the top most special products in the store, etc.
- Activate the free Schema.org app.
- When you have news and great/special offers, send a release and a few advertorials to various general + niche sites. You can also do this at regular intervals with an allocated budget. This way you get backlinks for your website and its main pages.
Read if: SEO guide for online stores – Learn how to optimize your store in 30 days!
Sure, today’s tips are relatively general and can be detailed.
But for that, you already have at hand eCommerce no Bull$#!t book, which you can find in the unosoft Academy along with other specific courses, videos on our YouTube channel and lots – lots of blog posts.
All that’s left for you to do is to delve into each topic that interests you and start taking action. That’s the only way to get results 🙂
Don’t forget that you can unosoft head free for 15 days. During this time you will also receive a series of tutorial emails to guide you, and my colleagues are available to answer any questions you may have.
Good luck with sales!
