With many years of experience, in one form or another the team have been working in ecommerce since the the early 2000s. Back when we started Fastfloor in 1996, it was only the pioneers, amongst them Amazon in 1995. For us the gold rush started to build around 2005.
Since then ecommerce has evolved, the market has changed the most with the arrival of many big players and steady consolidation. The adoption rate continues to grow globally having not yet reached full maturity. Recent statistics suggest the US will continue to grow at a rate of 9% a year until 2029.
We love Shopify, with a near 20% share of the ecommerce platform market and rapidly growing, it's the go to choice for any retail merchant. There is nothing to maintain, that's taken care of by Shopify, so you can invest in making your store grow.
We thought to help you get started, we would share a few pointers we have observed to pave the way to your ecommerce success.
1. Make sure your product and / or your service offering is unique. Gone are the days of being able to sell someone else's branded products online.. in our view, any kind of trader / middle man business won't survive. That market is firmly taken care of by market places such as Amazon, Ebay, Wayfair, Shopee, Lazara to mention a few.. and outside that, almost all major brands have a D2C strategy. So how can you succeed? You need to either manufacture or make your own product, unique to your brand. Or if that's not the case offer a value added service to a product you resell.
2. Don't break conventions with your website design. Customers expect to see your logo at the top left, the basket on the right, the menu on the top, and a search feature to easily find products. You might have a super creative idea for an ecommerce site, but customers fundamentally don't want to have to think... they want a recognisable experience that is fast and efficient. Make it look great with brand assets and product imagery, but leave it there.
3. Invest in Digital Marketing. As we have said over the years, you may have launched the most amazing ecommerce website that anyone has ever seen, but without Digital Marketing it's comparable to building an amazing shop on an industrial estate vs a high street. Without traffic you won't be found. Shopify is highly intuitive and many things you can do yourself, often with the help of some focus on social media marketing. It's important to be authentic. With our Shopify Store build and maintenance packages we can help make sure everything is setup for you to make a start. Or if you don't want to do that we can take care of it with our Digital Marketing retainers.
4. Learn and refine. Continually measure your Shopify sites performance through the built in Shopify Analytics and if things become more advanced Google Analytics. Where are your customers leaving your site.. are they abandoning the cart when they see your shipping rates, are your prices too low or too high. All of this can be found with the analytics tools, once identified issues make changes. We work with many customers providing our Conversion Rate Optimisation services to do exactly this.. identify, fix, refine and repeat.