The pandemic has redefined not only the way we live but also the way we shop. Though a number of shoppers went back to physical shopping experiences after the restrictions were lifted globally, the popularity of online shopping hasn’t plummeted. The culture of online shopping continues to thrive. In India, the internet has penetrated deep into the villages and this has enhanced digital adoption including online shopping.
Digitization has also encouraged entrepreneurs and merchants to reach a wider market than before. Launching an online store and finding new customers has never been this easy. Even for those, who already have customers through their physical store, adapting to the online shopping system came with long-term benefits. All they need to do is to find a balance between offline and online business. Whether you have a small business or a brick-and-mortar grocery store, opting for an online store not only complements your offline business but also comes with numerous advantages.
Below we have listed the benefits of taking your business online to leave you convinced that it is the right move:
A. Expansion Of Customer Base
An online store can help widen your customer base by removing physical barriers. Customers from all across the country or even internationally can place their orders. You can introduce your products to the new target audience and even cater to a number of interested customers you have no clue about. An online presence can help you turn your local business into a global one.
B. Flexibility In Business Operations
There are no limitations regarding business operations and timing in an online store. You do not need to be physically present at every transaction. Popularise your online presence among your existing customers and let them place orders any time of the day. If a physical store is available online, leads can be generated and inquiries can be placed even when it is closed. You can address the queries of your potential customers once you are open. It is similar to keeping your business 4x longer.
C. Build Brand image
Nowadays customers tend to check the online presence of any business. They go through the website and the reviews to make informed decisions about your products and services. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that online presence boosts customers’ confidence and trust in your brand, thus influencing their purchase decisions.
D. Scale Up Cost-Effectively
Taking your business from offline to online means adding a lucrative sales channel in a budget-friendly way. All your data gets accumulated in a single place, helping you to gain insights into your business whenever required. Besides these, there are multiple advantages that help your business grow while keeping marginal costs disproportionately low.
Step By Step Guide To Take Your Business
At first, glance, establishing an online presence in your offline store might look like a huge task. Let’s ease this for you by breaking this down into a step-by-step guide:
- Research and prepare
- Build an e-commerce store
- Make your business ready for customers
- Make your store discoverable online
- Attract more customers
- Evaluate and grow
1. Research and prepare
As you already own an offline store, the daunting task of research and preparation may be easy. However, there are certain aspects that will be different and you need to take care of them. While some of the business tricks and steps that you took while starting your offline store will need to be retraced, you also have to keep in mind the pros and cons of selling online.
Your research and preparation will start will evaluating the viability of your online business. You have to study the online market you want to enter by checking whether it has room for new merchants. There are certain questions that you should find answers to: Can your business grow in the current market? Will it be able to compete with rival businesses in the same category? Do your customers make online purchases and what are their shopping habits?
You also need to manage your inventory management and then figure out your pricing strategy. As online business gives you access to a completely different segment of consumers, you might find the opportunity to boost revenue with the help of value-based pricing. Besides these, you should also draft a business plan that helps you be in line with your set goals. It is basically a roadmap that will help you in business operations and growth.
2. Build an e-commerce store
Finally, you have arrived at the stage where you need to do the main big task of setting up your online store. First of all, you need to select the right e-commerce platform and then choose a domain name and host. Selecting the right domain name is crucial for establishing brand identity and creating first impressions on customers.
As you already have a customer base, keep it similar to your existing brand name, if not the same. There might be brands with similar names so put effort into creating a different domain name from others. However, stick to the basics by keeping it short and simple, avoiding misspelled, unfamiliar and complex words.
The next important step is to pick the right domain host that helps you store the content of your website and provides its server. After you are done with this, it’s time to decide on the look of your website because that will help you create the first impression on the new customer base. As it is your internet storefront, be in sync with the design of your existing brand while keeping the taste and preferences of your customers in mind.
You are not yet done with working on the look of your website as you have to display your products or services at their best. The product images you use should be of high quality with a zoom option. The size and resolution of all the images should be the same. You can also add filters and other important information such as accurate pricing details, expiry date and manufacturing date among others.
3. Make your business ready for customers
The main motive behind building an online store is to enable smooth business operations on it. While customers should seamlessly be able to place their orders and pay and you should be able to fulfill their demands. Besides these, you can even integrate operations into your store.
To make your online store business ready, first and foremost, you need to set up payments. Customers have access to a wide range of payments ranging from credit and debit cards to UPI and traditional cash payments. A payment gateway should be set up to facilitate smooth transactions.
The next step is to integrate the online business with your offline store’s marketing, inventory management, sales and logistics among others. You can also ease your work by taking the help of automation applications. Last, but not the least, you need to take care of shipment and fulfillment. You can opt for third-party apps and plugins to effortlessly manage the chores.
4. Make your store discoverable online
One of the most important factors to consider while planning your brick-and-mortar store online is to plan a strategy that increases the visibility of your business. The Internet is full of online stores that sell similar products online. So high discoverability is crucial to succeed in a highly competitive e-commerce business.
Your business must come to the notice of your potential customers. After starting an online store on Shopify, you must start making it easily discoverable to increase the chances of success online. Below are the three steps that help you increase the visibility of your online store.
i. SEO
Search engine optimization is essential for your online store. Search engine bots crawl multiple pages on the internet and rank them as per search keywords, domain authority and other SEO elements. It is advisable to implement the best practices of SEO to rank your store higher in search results.
A higher rank not only drives more traffic to your online store but also helps you establish the brand identity. The right SEO practices result in incredible results but it is easier said than done. There are common mistakes that Shopify merchants make and the SEO goes for a toss. Some of these mistakes include — not modifying tag pages, posting redundant content, not working on URLs, failing to access locked robots.txt, not customizing pages, not focusing on page titles and meta descriptions and using the wrong template.
Here is our Shopify Store Guide that helps you solve these problems and make the most of SEO.
ii. Google Presence
This step is part of SEO but it is more focused on a single search engine — Google. You must set up your business page on Google so that those who know about your business can easily find your website. A strong Google presence not only drives more traffic but also helps you build trust among employees, investors and media for promotions.
For this, you should also focus on organic marketing. The lure of immediate revenue through paid ads is not sustainable. As you might know that in 2021 Apple brought anti-tracking changes reducing the effectiveness of paid ads on iOS. The company refused to share user data which means advertisers won’t have access to users’ information like who downloaded an app after coming through an ad and more.
Google also introduced similar measures. They allow users to opt out of personalized advertisements. If you choose the option, Google deleted the unique advertisement ID of the user. This means that you won’t receive a return on investment like before if you opt for paid ads. Also, there won’t be any assurance that your personalized ads reach your target audience. In such cases, targeting can be based on the website visited by the users and their general location.
iii. Right Place, Right Time
You should know the most about your target audience and feature your products where your customers are likely to make online purchases. Apart from your store based on Shopify, you should also sell your products on other e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart and Etsy. Social media is also a place where you should target your potential customers.
Build your content marketing strategy around your target customer rather than the product you sell. Content includes videos, images, and podcasts among others. Social media is a place where you can combine all forms of content and promote your venture.
The transition from offline to online is impossible without studying your market in and out. And all this should be done in the preparation phase of your online store. You must have a fair idea about your potential customers and how they make online purchases.
As you are advised to sell on different marketplaces along with your own Shopify store, keep the dashboards as easy to understand as possible for your team members. It might get hard for a single person to fulfill each order once you start getting more of them.
5. Attract more customers
Your ultimate goal with transitioning from an offline store to an online store should be getting more customers. It is not possible for a brick-and-mortar store to sell products across the international border, Shopify allows you to expand your business globally.
In September last year, Shopify launched Shopify Markets Pro and Shopify Translate & Adapt to help merchants in international selling. The initiative was aimed to democratize small business owners’ access to international commerce. The new Shopify Markets Pro helps them expand their business globally. It covers more than 150 countries. Shopify Translate & Adapt, on the other hand, localizes the customer journey to boost international selling chances for merchants.
To capture more of the audience, digital marketing is an essential practice. It helps you target your message in the right form to potential customers. No entrepreneur desires to struggle with Google Analytics, which shows the total traffic on your website. Digital marketing strategies help you promote your products and online store and result in more traffic.
Here are some tips to make the most of your digital marketing plan:
i. Methods
You must understand digital marketing avenues before getting started. It is wise to learn the basics of digital marketing strategies before outsourcing them to some expert or agency. The methods are vast but there are some common strategies that work for most of the e-commerce stores. Influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing, referral campaigns, conversion rate optimization, organic marketing and guerilla marketing are among these common practices.
Influencer marketing is at its peak right now. Across the globe, brands are roping in influencers to boost sales and engagement. While Shopify is allowing brands to build their online stores to directly sell to customers, influencer marketing is helping them establish a strong relationship with their target audience.
Email marketing is an old tool for promotion, though it still stands to be effective with much less cost involved. So one must improve email messages to improve conversions through this high-performing sales channel.
ii. Target Audience
While planning for your online store, try to find out your target audience. It helps you plan the rest of your digital marketing plan without compromising on your marketing objectives. Once defined your target audience, you can chalk out a marketing plan that fits the best.
Preparing a marketing plan needs hours of research about the target audience and competitors in the field to find out the best marketing channels. Big businesses can take the help of marketing agencies and experts, but a bootstrapped small-scale business would face difficulties in reaching out to marketing experts due to budget constraints.
iii. Automation
Remember that manual operations will take your time, effort and a lot of money. Try to leverage automation tools of marketing to gain the best results. You can leave marketing operations on auto-pilot to focus on bigger things that need your physical presence.
As suggested above, when your marketing gets in full swing, customers start expecting more from your store. You need to provide constant support over various channels to resolve customers’ queries and online service requests. For this, you can install chat bots that engage the customers with a reasonable response.
Another way to automate response can be in the form of frequently asked questions (FAQ) articles, troubleshooting guides, self-service mechanisms and user manuals. It is of utmost importance to improve customer service for better retention of your products and store.
6. Evaluate and grow
You need to evaluate the progress at regular intervals for constant growth online. The best part about digital marketing is that you get to know how many people have seen your ad on Google or social media sites. It is not possible for outdoor advertising of your physical store.
The data you get from digital marketing is beyond one’s imagination. You can process it wisely to gain the best results. It also helps you focus on strategies that actually work for your business. Here are three methods that help you process the data for increased sales.
i. What Works
The first thing is to identify your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It means what works best for your online business. Metrics that tell you about website traffic also reflect the areas of high conversion rates. The ultimate goal of an online store owner is to get more sales and rising KPIs can take you close to your goal.
ii. Metrics
You should not get confused about what metrics to study for growth and expansion. Just look into Google Analytics and use Google Tag Manager to measure KPIs that need to be worked on. With careful examination of your data, you can evaluate the business position in the market.
iii. Optimise
Now that you know what works and what doesn’t for you, the next thing is to learn from your mistakes and optimize the areas of improvement for growth. The insights you get from Google Analytics can help you iterate the best practices and avoid past mistakes.
Don’t be harsh on yourself if you don’t see an impressive number initially. It takes time, learning, unlearning, relearning, facing constant challenges and discovering new opportunities to expand your business from offline to online.
