Running a modern business is often very frustrating. You have a great product to sell. You know that if you could just get the product out there that customers will flock to it. A lot of business owners go out and rent some office space or a store on Main Street. They get their shelves, stock them, hire employees, turn on the lights and flip the sign on the door to, “Open.” They hope that the people passing by will look in the window and want to buy what they see. Maybe they post an ad in the local paper or some ads on the internet. Then, if someone is really interested, they can go to the store and buy something.
A lot of those business owners go out of business because they can’t pay for all of that.
Saved by Ecommerce
More and more business owners are realizing that instead of the overwhelming overhead and the limited visibility of a brick-and-mortar storefront, they get a lot more bang for their buck by opening up an ecommerce website using ecommerce website builder software. After all, over 34% of the world now use the internet. You have to admit, that’s a pretty big potential customer base!
Technophobes and the tech savvy alike can set up and run an ecommerce store with all the bells and whistles when they have the right tools. Whether you bleed HTML, or faint at the sight of it, if you have some good software you can get your products on the internet market.
Designing your Store
It’s true; ecommerce website design can be staggeringly difficult. This can stop a business owner in his or her respective tracks. However, there is software out there that will provide multiple ways to make designing your website fairly easy. For example, you can make a professional looking store simply by using themes. Without knowing a speck of code, a novice can go to a theme store, pick out a theme, download it and apply it to their ecommerce store. Of course, you could always go in and change the fonts, colors, headers, footers etc., but a lot of times the professional designers really set up an optimized look.
Now, if you’re on the other side of the spectrum and have some understanding of coding using HTML, JavaScript, .liquid or the like, you can use an ecommerce website template editor to create your own unique theme. When you use an editor you basically have complete control over your HTML/CSS if you want it, so if you can think it, you can do it.
In between the above options, if you want your site to look like something unique that is not in a theme store but you don’t have the coding capability to create it yourself, you can hire a professional ecommerce website design expert that you can do all the work for you. This is the best of both worlds: all the quality and customization, but none of the work. Don’t worry, I promise I won’t tell anyone you didn’t do it yourself.
Stock your Store
Now that you have designed your store, it’s time to stock the shelves using the ecommerce website builder software. Basically, you’re going to upload, describe and then put all of your products into collections so that customers can easily search for, and find, what they are looking for. Your job is to take pictures of your products and upload those pictures onto your computer. Next you add a little blurb about what your product is. Finally you put in information about the products weight, measurements, colors, price, etc. Finally, you organize everything into collections and just like that you have a fully stocked store.
Turn on the Lights and Unlock the Doors
You’re almost there now. After you go into the admin page and let the software know a few more things you are ready. In the admin page you will decide on things like automatic payments or manual payments, whether you want each customer to have to set up an account, etc. You can even set up a blog. A blog is a great addition to your website, because, as About.com explains, “Blogs are an excellent method to share a company’s expertise, build additional web traffic, and connect with potential customers.”
You can see a good example of website builder software by checking out Shopify. When you’re done, sit back, take your hands off the keyboard and breathe a sigh of relief, because although you can go back later and use your ecommerce website builder software to do things like set up other languages, set up multiple staff logins and create blogs, for now you can rest on your laurels because you are the proud owner of a professional ecommerce website.