If you're on your way to starting an online store, it can be a little overwhelming. Unless you have a background in the digital space or are a self proclaimed 'Geek', your talents (and interests) likely lie elsewhere.
As an entrepreneur, you will need to be a jack of all trades. The learning curve can be steep. You're likely focused on your product, logistics, marketing, building a name for your business and fostering those crucial relationships. eCommerce is important yes, but when starting a business, there are likely some more fundamental things you need to focus on to get your business set up.
This guide aims to be a helping hand, a shortlist that can help save you some time researching and free up some of your time to focus on the other areas of your business.
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume you've already registered your business name, you can visualise your brand and have a rough marketing plan.
1. Registering your domain - getting your 'www.mybusiness.ie' URL.
A website URL isn't necessarily the first thing you need, but it is easier to have from the start, as changing it later on can mean downtime for your website, which can waste some of that traffic you've worked so hard to get. So it's best to get it right from the start.
Deciding on what your URL should be should take a few factors into account. You will want it to be simple and resemble your business name, you'll also want it to be easy to read.
You will also need to make sure the website is available and hasn't already been taken by another business.
Buying a URL is called "Registering a domain", you usually pay a yearly fee that can be anywhere from €5/$5 right up to the millions. Once your business name isn't a really popular term already, you should get away with spending around €20/$20 - €50/$50 a year on your domain.
You need to register your name from a domain registry. I recommend either Blacknight or GoDaddy.
Blacknight are a well known, reliable Irish business that most of the biggest companies in Ireland use. Blacknight are your best bet if you want a .ie domain name.
GoDaddy is one of the biggest American providers. They are reliable and can be cheap, but it can be tricky to avoid their upsells and price hikes after a year or 2.
Visit a domain provider and you'll be able to type in your desired URL and see what's available and how much it costs. This is where you can play around with the wording or adding hyphens.
It is best to avoid numbers (unless its in your business name) and avoid anything that might be copyrighted or trademarked.
Your URL can play a small role in ensuring your rank higher on google. But more on that later.
Should I get a .com .ie .co.uk or .org?
If you're a local or domestic business you're best bet is to go with a local country domain. These look like this:
.co.uk - United Kingdom
.ie - Republic of Ireland
.pl. - Poland
And many more!
The reason being, is that local people trust this more. They know it's a business that is more relevant and local to them. It's also usually a little easier to get your desired domain name with a country specific domain.
If youre sights are set on international business, you should aim for a '.com' URL.
However, .com URLs are in high demand, so you might need to switch up the URL you are trying to get, or switch to a .org, .blog or other.
It's important to try to stick with a domain that is well known or common, as people tend to trust these more. For example .xyz is so uncommon that people are unsure if it would be a reputable website.
Once you have your domain picked you need to get it set up so that it takes you to your website.
2.Picking a platform for your website
The website platform is what you'll use to manage your website in terms of updating product information, adding marketing banners etc. Without a platform for your website, your website would be extremely technical to manage. A platform makes your website more user friendly to update and maintain.
There are many platforms you can use but it really comes down to 2 options. Shopify & WooCommerce are likely your best 2 options. Shopify starts at around €30/$30 a month whilst WooCommerce is a free alternative. For the additional benefit and ease of setup, it's a no brainer to go with Shopify.
Shopify comes with a host of benefits and makes things like designing, updating, taking payments and email marketing a much more manageable task.
3. Setting up your new site on Shopify
Setting up your site on Shopify is a guide (at least) in itself. There are a couple of main components you want to get right.
Your homepage
Think of your homepage like the menu you're served in the restaurant. It needs to capture peoples attention and explain to them exactly what you do, in as little time as possible.
With the advent of the social media, it goes without saying that peoples attention spans are now shorter than ever. Keep this in mind when you are designing your website, both in the text and imagery you use but also the steps that it takes to find and purchase your products. You want it to be as simple as possible.
Your homepage should include a few key elements
Homepage Main Banners
This should capture the visitor, with a aspirational picture of your product or a design which fits with your brands identity. This is where you put your most compelling offer. It does not need to be a discount, but that helps. It should lead people to what you think is the most important section of your site. It could lead directly to a product, a sale page or a product list page.
Below this it is good practice to have what is called a Product carousel. This is a list of your products that users can swipe through to browse.
Underneath that you can add whatever supplementary content you think is necessary. It is good practice to have a section on delivery times, costs, guarantees and another other key selling points that your business has.
The aim here is to persuade people that you have a good product and service on offer and you a trustworthy and interesting.
Product Page
The product page is the virtual sales person who will sell your product. This is where customers can see your product, learn about it and purchase it.
You want your product page to be as persuasive and informative as possible.
Start with the images. I'm sure you've heard the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words", so make sure you have good images of your product, it's worth investing in a semi-proffesional set up to make sure you do your products justice. It's important to have professional level product photography, as this is what people expect. Aim to have at least 6 images, and if you can try to add a lifestyle image in.
For your product description, you want it to be in depth and exciting. If you can, adding images to the description helps, things like close ups of the features you're talking about. Try to space out your description so that it is easy to read and not overwhelming.
If you want to take it to the next level, you can add Frequently Asked Questions. This clears up any doubts a customer may have, and might be the difference between them abandoning the idea of purchasing and proceeding with the checkout process.
4. Tying it all together
By now you should have the basic structure of your store. Your homepage should tell a store about your value offering, but most importantly, link to your product. Customers should be able to land on your homepage and navigate to your product or products within 1 or 2 seconds. Then your product page should answer any questions a customer might have and hopefully make their way to the checkout. The beauty about Shopify is they already have their checkout optimised so that it is as simple and easy as possible, so you don't need to worry about it.
5. Payments
We might be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. We need to make sure our website is transactional, that means we can take payments. Another perk of Shopify is they make this process super simple. Traditionally you would need to agree terms with a payment provider, then ask a developer to integrate your payment gateway into your website. With Shopify you just need to enable payments. Go to Settings in Shopify and click on Payments. Then 'Activate Shopify Payments'. You can read the terms and pricing structure, there are cheaper options, but in the long run, it's not really worth it. Shopify Payments works seamlessly and provides the best user experience, making things like Apple Pay and Google Pay seamless. The costs for Shopify payments is around 2% + €0.25 at the time of writing. You can organise your payouts from Shopify to be daily, weekly or monthly. They also have a built in fraud detection system, which helps!
6. Receiving and fulfilling your orders
Now that you have received your orders you'll want to start shipping your orders to customers. There's no right or best method to do this, as it is very individual per business depending on where they're located, how big their products are and where they're shipping it to. You'll need to do some research on delivery companies to find out who offers the best rates and service. You'll also need to stock up on packaging supplies. If you're just starting off and you don't have many orders, your best bet is to use your national postal carrier. When things get a bit more advanced and busy, most big delivery companies offer label printers and systems that integrate into Shopify, so you don't need to copy and paste customers addresses or hand write them.
7. Marketing your new store
Now that you have your store set up and operational, you need to start getting visitors. There's a few different methods to this, but the biggest methods are likely going to be through Google or through social media ads. If you're more old school, you might rely on traditional methods like newspaper ads or word of mouth.
To get traffic through Google we need to optimise our website so that Google knows how high to rank it. This is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. This is a disipline in itself and we couldn't possibly cover all that needs to be done in this guide.
To nail down the fundamentals, you likely need to take a couple of crash courses. But for a start you can do the following
Make sure your website is loading fast, things like large image file sizes or a large amount of text can slow your site down. Use a tool like Pingdom to measure how fast your website is, you'll want to test the homepage and your most popular product pages seperately. You want it to load in less than 2 seconds.
Secondly you'll want to add some keywords to your website. Your keywords will relate to your products or business unique selling points. Think of what people will likely search to get your site and build these keywords into any text you have on your site, like in your homepage or product description. There are more advanced methods of keyword research but this is a good start.
We recommend you watch some Youtube videos on SEO. This one is a good place to start.
For social media ads, this is another area that can become quite complicated. We definitely don't have time to talk about the specifics of it. But to simplify it down, you want to advertise on the channel that you think most of your target audience will be on. Think of it like this Facebook is likely the older demographic, Instagram is slightly younger but slightly in between and Tik Tok is generally the youngest, but is definitely expanding to the older demographic.
Again for this, we recommend a few YouTube crash courses. (YouTube will be your new best friend). Our advice here is start small and make sure your website is as optimised as possible before driving traffic towards it, otherwise you are potentially wasting some of your marketing budget!
Andddd that's it in a very small, very condsensed nutshell. We wish you the best of luck on your new adventure.
There is a vast amount of resources online that can help you, some more detailed than others. Just take it one small step at a time.
