I often ask myself while I was building my business in internet marketing, what would be the best approach in building a virtual store?
Well, take a look at a popular marketplace like, eBay or Amazon which comes with restrictive policies for sellers. Virtual stores like this downplay merchants branding all to maintain a homogeneous image.
If you are a seller to create your online stores, keep in mind that it is a whole different experience. Usually, they have full control of their customer’s experience. Whether it comes to highlighting a sale or rearranging a product, sellers can use their site to directly interact with their customers which would bring more sales. However, “with great power comes its responsibility” because of the freedom to explore, some sellers might not know where to start when trying to curate their stores.
In other to start attracting your customers and then retain them, you would need to follow my Inside view on building a virtual store.
These strategies would help you understand buyers’ experience with each content in your store and explain how it can be used to attract old and new customers and boost your sales.
building a virtual store stages
- Engaging Web Design
One thing you need to understand is that it doesn’t matter if you have the best product in the market or you have the best customer service compared to others, if your web design is awful, then I have bad news for you.
According to research, 93% of buyers everywhere consider a great visual appearance before making any purchase. To create the best platform for your virtual store then you can either outsource to a professional or learn to code and make it yourself. Another way to capture the attention of your customer is by adding a full-width image and also small text.
- A Superb “About Us ” page
The moment a customer goes to your About Us page, then it shows how much you have captured their attention.
However, by building a great About Us page, then you are ready to prove to your customers the reason why your product is the best.
Itay Verchik says that, All that is needed is to highlight what you care about, what your platform does, and the important note is what exactly can you offer to your clients. After all these you can feel free to add other necessary information like:
- Contacts
- Address
- External social media links
- Partnering with multiple brands
Most people find it difficult to give their money to a little or a start-up company, which usually isn’t easy for merchants. You can build your reputation by highlighting the various companies that you are in leagues with.
You don’t have to team up with giant companies, just big companies that can attract your good customers, the more partnerships you the better.
- Provide great payment options
There is no virtual store out there today that doesn’t offer popular payment options. Your best decision is to provide a great payment option for your customers.
Take, for example, Paypal is a famous payment option. However, other popular options can help your virtual store. You can search for the top 10 best payment methods out there.
- Advertise on Social Media
Advertising on social media is considered one of the most famous ways most businesses use in advertising their products.
This is a medium that helps in connecting with old and new customers. Advertising on social media can include things like a simple post on Instagram or a cool design placed on Facebook.
You can mix tools like Google Analytics, which can help you keep track of the channels that your customers visit, then you can put your effort into those channels.
- Create an SEO rich blog
By implementing the use of a blog can help in generating traffic for you, giving you the chance to meet new customers, seeing how these customers interact with your blog would determine how much they love your product and your virtual store.
Keep in mind that virtual stores give sellers full autonomy of the customer’s experience. Rather than following the usual market policies, setting up your online store using your policies can help build your own customer interactions.
