Since the start of COVID-19 and especially the Circuit Breaker in Singapore, many businesses begin to truly understand the importance of being able to sell online and automate business processes. Generally, IMDA and Enterprise SG have been promoting the Go Digital Programme for a while now. It’s up to the businesses to move forward or risk closing down.
With E-Commerce Ads popping up everywhere for small business owners and the Go Digital programme encouraging it, many business owners are wondering how to move forward.
There are many options available out there today in the market. The majority go with the easiest option which is to try and use Shopify. It is fairly easy to use as long as the user has at least have a certain level of comfort in navigating things online, computer usage, e-commerce terms, basic designing, managing a documented stock.
The next available option would be the usage of WooCommerce. It is a great platform and fairly easy to use. The only knowledge the user requires would be purchasing of hosting and domain, and WordPress. Once you can do this, you’re good to go. Of course, some designing skills as well if not the user experience is going to be pretty bad.
As a business owner, do you have the time to go through tutorials for a month and keep on improving your e-commerce store while running the core business?
Here are 3 most important characteristics needed for a successful e-commerce website:
- Scalability & Flexibility
- Your e-commerce site must be flexible and scalable. So that you can always expand upon the inventory, make customizations, improve process flows, automate processes, etc.. For small businesses, this is usually not a problem. For the medium and large business, do consider this when creating your e-commerce website or you might get stuck with a beautifully rigid website.
- Mobile Responsive
- With 80% of our time spent on mobile phones, the website needs to be suitable for mobile-first, other devices second.
- Search Engine-Friendly
- The site needs to be simple and clean so that it can easily rank and appear in SEO searches.
So now that you know what a successful e-commerce website needs, what’s next?
Well, you need to let people know that you now have an e-commerce site. The first and most important group of people you need to inform, past and existing customers. These are free leads for you. Make sure to get them on board your e-commerce website. After this group, you will need to spend a little to make your new e-commerce website for the right group of people.
We will cover visibility of your e-commerce website in our next post.
Now that you know all these, come forward and create your very own E-Commerce Website with us!