ecommerce-website
Strategy

Launching an eCommerce Website? Here’s What You Need to Know

Posted by Pixafy Team

It isn’t that unusual for a business to find itself entering the ecommerce foray. You may think that the rise of online shopping means that any company moving into the space is playing catch-up, but that may not be the case. Specialized local retailers may have not had much incentive to go online until recently. Startup brands might have wanted to build around a defined community before launching their web brand. Restaurants or organizations selling experiences are increasingly branching into ecommerce to open new sales channels and improve customer experiences.

These are just a few examples of why a company may be branching out online, and the use cases are plentiful. If your business is in a similar situation, or you’re at least thinking about launching an ecommerce branch for your organization, the process may seem intimidating. However, technological innovation is creating opportunities that weren’t available in the past.

The key is to understand where to get started. Here are a few tips to help you get off the ground:

Identify why you are going online and adjust plans accordingly

Having a clear vision for your project is vital. Knowing the purpose and underlying goals of the initiative will simplify the decision-making process down the line, helping you avoid getting bogged down by all the options and choices that may come up.

“Having a clear vision for your project is vital.”

Entrepreneur reported that finding success with a new ecommerce business often relies not on getting all of the information available and understanding it, but instead on finding the right information for your specific needs. You can’t do that without a clear idea of where your site is going.

Launch your project with a solid goal and brand identity and that can forge your plans. Within this process, it is important to identify your audience so you can build out sales and marketing strategies from the outset.

Deal with infrastructure

There are a lot of backend systems that will keep an ecommerce business running. Your web host will support site performance goals and potentially influence your site options – though some platform providers also handle hosting. Your shipping and fulfillment plan will have a huge influence on the way you set customer expectations and manage costs. You also must be ready to handle sales tax, choose a warehouse location and select a carrier. These types of issues are all vital to smooth day-to-day operations.

Deciding on a platform is also critical as it will often provide the technical parameters within which your site exists. An Entrepreneur article highlighted that Shopify can be ideal if you want to alleviate the technical overhead of getting a site off the ground.

Before you settle on a solution, however, you should also figure out if you want a custom or proprietary backend. It can take a lot of work to build out a custom site, but it also gives you unlimited customization options, which can pay off in some sectors. An open source platform could be a compromise as well, giving you a base to work with but freedom to alter the underlying code.

Consider how the business will operate

Setting a good foundation for the site and backend operations is critical, but you also have to be ready to adjust your business. How will your marketing plans need to adapt to support your website? What new challenges may arise for your customer service teams? Who will actually be responsible for managing the site?

These types of questions don’t represent insurmountable hurdles that you have to leap over, but they are important strategic issues that should be addressed in order to glean the most value possible from the site.

Don’t get overwhelmed

All of these choices can seem like a lot to consider, but making good decisions can also give you an advantage when your ecommerce strategies properly align with your brand identity. Instead of letting the pressure escalate, get help. Launching an ecommerce site creates technical challenges ranging from ERP integration to interface design, and few people will have the full skillset or connections needed to handle all of these tasks on their own. Third-party ecommerce development specialists, on the other hand, can.

At Pixafy, we bring together a network of platform providers, design specialists and development experts to handle end-to-end ecommerce projects in customer-friendly ways.

We can help you get a site off the ground, and give you more to think about as you strive for excellence. Check out our webinar we recently held with our sister company Net at Work : “What to Consider When Considering eCommerce”.