How to Bring Your Retail Business Online with eCommerce

Many Irish retailers have invested greater resources into the implementation of eCommerce capabilities to enhance, and in some cases, replace their brick and mortar operations.

It goes without saying that eCommerce activity in Ireland has skyrocketed in recent years, with online spend estimated to having grown by as much as 30-40% in recent years.

This shift has revolutionised the retail industry and has granted businesses of all sizes the opportunity to expand their reach, reduce overheads and offer more convenient shopping.

In reality, for many retailers eCommerce is as much of a necessity as it is an opportunity however, and maintaining a competitive edge is highly dependent on an online presence.

 

Taking Your Retail Business Online

If your business has traditionally been brick and mortar and eCommerce is uncharted territory to you, leaping into it may seem daunting. However, with careful planning and execution you can transition your business to the digital space with ease.

Vitamin has significant experience in supporting retailers with digitalisation, providing business and creative consultancy, as well as supporting them with our full-service suite of branding, design, website development and digital marketing solutions.

This guide will walk you through key steps to moving to eCommerce.

 

1. Understand Your Goals and Market

Before jumping straight in, take some time to reflect on the reasoning for venturing into eCommerce, and define both your goals and your desired target audience.

Understand Your Goals and MarketVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford

What do you hope to achieve with your online store? Is it simply to increase your sales? Is it for a broader customer base? More efficient inventory management?

It’s also important to perform an exercise of creating customer personas to better visualise how your customers look, and what their online shopping preferences are.

It’s important to remember that the customer profile of your physical store may not necessarily reflect the profile of the type of customer that will browse your website.

During this time, you should also perform a general market research to identify the external factors affecting your industry, understanding the needs of your target audience so that you know how to address them, and studying your competitors.

While it may be tempting to proceed straight to the hard actions, do not underestimate this very important scoping phase, as the information you obtain during it will guide you

in every decision that you eventually make in the online space.

 

 

Register Domains Choose the Right eCommerce PlatformVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford2. Register Domains & Choose the Right eCommerce Platform

Now that you’re ready to get started, you will need to first register your domain. This is effectively what will become your website’s URL, and should, ideally, correspond to your brand’s name or the closest possible variation of it that you are able to purchase.

If you are operating a new business, and are still in the process of creating your brand, our expert team of brand consultants and graphic designers can assist you with its creation.

With your brand’s domain name registered, it’s time to select the right eCommerce platform for your business. From Shopify to WooCommerce, and Magento to BigCommerce, the possibilities are endless, and all of them have their pros and their cons.

For example, WooCommerce via WordPress allows for extensive customisation but should only be considered if you have technical expertise resources on hand.

Many of our clients opt for Shopify for its ease of use, and its suitability for beginners and small businesses, while offering a full suite of features to allow you to succeed.

As Shopify Partners, our web development team would be more than happy to assist you with the development of a Shopify eCommerce website for your business.

 

3. Build Your Online Store

You’ve done your research, purchased a domain and chosen the right eCommerce platform for you. With that in mind, all that’s left to do now is to build it!

Focus on creating a seamless and visually appealing experience for your customers.Build Your Online StoreVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford

 

a)  Design & Branding

You should endeavour to use your existing brand colours, logo and typography to ensure consistency between your offline and online assets. It is also important, in recognising that your customers will browse your website from desktops and mobile devices, to choose a clean, responsive design that will look great on all devices.

 

b) Product Listings

If you are to sell your products online, you’re going to want to put their best feet forward. Think of your eCommerce store as a showroom – you want your customers to feel confident enough that your product will meet their needs, and you can inspire this confidence with high-quality images and detailed descriptions for each of your products.

In creating an easy user navigational experience, you should organise your products into categories and if you have a large catalogue of items, implement product filtering.

c) Payment & Shipping

Your potential customers have found a product they wish to purchase. Next is to ensure that a selection of payment options are available to them so that they can purchase it.

Consider payment methods such as credit/debit card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Wallet. You must also determine your shipping costs (e.g. costs for standard delivery, express shipping, free shipping over a certain value etc.) and outline your shipping policies and delivery times.

 

Integrate Essential Tools FeaturesVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford4. Integrate Essential Tools & Features

To optimise your eCommerce store for both yours and your customers’ convenience, integrate tools to enhance functionality and improve customer experience.

To help with tracking site traffic and user behaviour, ensure that you have set up Google Analytics. It can also show supporting sales data as well as your eCommerce platform.

Review if you can enhance the customer service experience by installing a live chat or chatbot support to assist shoppers with their queries in real time to improve conversions.

 

5. Develop a Marketing Strategy

Before launch, create robust marketing strategy ready to roll out to build awareness of your brand, bring in site traffic from potential new customers, and drives conversions.

If you need assistance, our highly experienced digital marketing team can offer consultancy and provide a full-service suite of solutions to drive success for your business.Develop a Marketing StrategyVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford

 

a) Social Media Marketing

Create a social media presence for your brand across all relevant platforms to your target audience, such as Facebook and Instagram. This is important for building your brand and showcasing your products. To ensure maximum reach, it is best to allocate an ongoing budget to running targeted ads to grow your presence and reach potential customers.

 

b) Content Marketing & SEO

They say content is king, and this is true as not only can content, by means of a blog, share the mastery and thought leadership for your products and/or services, but it also serves another purpose of improving your visibility on search engines.

Give your products the best chance of being discovered by optimising your product descriptions, titles and meta tags with relevant keywords that your customers search for.

Building backlinks that direct those from external sources to your site improve your domain authority, and make it easier for you to appear higher on organic search engine results.

 

c) Digital Advertising

As well as running targeted ads across social media, you can also reach potential customers through Google Ads. As Google Partners, our team has vast experience delivering Google Ads campaigns for our clients, including Search Ads, Display Ads, Shopping Ads and Performance Max ads, all of which play their own role in driving success.

 

d) Email Campaigns

Email marketing provides the highest return on investment of any marketing straetegy, and consumers spend 128% more when shopping from emails than from any other methods.

This is because your email list comprises existing customers and highly engaged soon-to-be-customers who are actively seeking communications from your brand.

You should focus some resources on growing a compliant, consenting email list, both at the start and continuously as this is a powerful and valuable marketing asset to have.

 

6. Ensure Security & Compliance

Ensure Security ComplianceVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing WaterfordThere are lots to consider with your new eCommerce store, one of which is online security. This is paramount to building customer trust. Some of the things you can do to ensure security and compliance is to use SSL certificates to encrypt customer data, ensure your payment gateway is PCI-compliant and clearly outline your privacy and return policies.

Particularly in regions like the EU, there are many legal parameters surrounding data protection, and we recommend new online retailers consult with a GDPR expert to ensure that their operations are fully compliant with all data protection regulations.

 

7. Test & Launch Your Store

Test Launch Your StoreVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford

You have covered the most important bases for your eCommerce store, from website development to digital marketing, and from user experience to compliance.

It’s just about time to finally launch your store to the public. But first you must perform testing, to ensure that the customer experience matches what you envisioned for it.

Check that all links, buttons and forms work as they should; testing payment and checkout processes; and ensuring that your site loads quickly and is mobile-responsive.

If you are satisfied that is customer-ready, hit publish and start marketing your site!

 

8. Monitor & Optimise

Monitor OptimiseVitamin-Creative Graphic Design Web Design Marketing Waterford

It’s important to remember that, while you may have successfully built and launched your eCommerce store, this represents a start point – not an end point.

As the owner of an eCommerce store, flexibility and adaptability is important, and you should continuously monitor performance and seek opportunities to improve.

Analyse customer behaviour and sales data regularly to identify trends and test different variables for improving this. Gather feedback through surveys or reviews to get a proper understanding of the user experience, and regularly update your product catalogue, content and features to ensure your eCommerce store maintains a competitive edge.

 


 

By taking your retail business online, you’re investing in the future.

Of course, there is a lot of preparatory, and ongoing work, involved with putting it together and ensuring its successful continuation, but the benefits are priceless.

eCommerce not only complements your physical store and drive sustained growth for your business, but it also unlocks a whole new revenue stream beyond your prior brick and mortar capabilities. Embrace eCommerce and watch your business thrive with it.

Vitamin offers a full-service consultancy for eCommerce start-ups and has a team of experts ready to assist you at every touchpoint. Get in touch to see how we can help you.