Beginning your own e-commerce business can strike fear into the heart of any small business owner, but it doesn’t have to be so stressful. I wanted to share some things I’ve learned along the way, and help put your fears and doubts to rest. Soon you’ll see that it’s not as difficult or challenging as you thought it would be.
1) Don’t be afraid of breaking the site
This is, by far, the concern I hear the most from new and prospective Merchant Shop owners, and it’s completely understandable. However, it is extremely difficult to do so. On the off chance that you do end up breaking the site, rest assured that you can restore everything with a simple fix. Don’t be afraid to play around with the back-end; kick the tires, click on the different pages, posts, and form buttons and see how they effect your site. The more you understand how your site works, the easier it will be to maintain and update, which makes increasing your traffic and followers a breeze.
2) Don’t neglect your shop
Regular maintenance is required for your Merchant Shop. The great thing about your shop is that you can update your contact information, content, blog, images, products, etc. all by yourself. It’s extremely user friendly and allows you much more control over the information you want to share with the world. Get to know the different aspects of your shop. Click stuff. As I stated previously, you can’t break the site!
Another benefit of updating your site is that Google, and other search engines, like to see new information being posted – whether it’s a sale announcement, blog post, an added video, or even comments from your visitors. When Google notices this kind of activity, you will have a better chance of increasing your search engine presence, which will in turn increase your site visits and ability to gain new customers and followers.
3) Quality traffic is better than quantity of traffic
Would you rather have ten friends that you only see occasionally, and talk behind each others’ backs, OR one friend that you can always count on for advice and has your best interest at heart? Most of us would choose that one friend.
The same idea works for your website traffic: Would you rather have fifty visitors go to your homepage and leave, or ten visits where the visitor navigates through the entire website, reads blog posts, and buys products? You want the ten engaged customers, who are more likely to recommend you or your website to others they know. They could bookmark your website and continually check back for your next sales event.
Quality is better than quantity when it comes to attracting visitors to your shop, and it will increase your awareness of not only your community, but your industry as well.
4) Schedule a regular appointment with your shop
It’s a great idea to set aside some regularly scheduled time to spend on your Merchant Shop. Dedicating a specific place and time to work on your site will not only allow you consistency in regular maintenance and blog posts, but will increase your chances of gaining a following. Visitors are more apt to follow someone who regularly posts new information to their website
5) Know your limitations
Taking on a Merchant Shop can be overwhelming, as there is a lot going on behind the scenes. While you should be able to navigate your site’s backend, don’t feel like you should have to write programming code or add a theme. Understanding you limitations and knowing that there are Merchant Shop specialists (NuggetWeb support) there to help you figure out the more difficult aspects will only make learning how to run your shop much easier, and you’ll be more inclined to use it.
Nobody learned how to maneuver all of the tools our Merchant Shop owners have available to them overnight. Sometimes it take multiple attempts at posting, adding pages, and managing your products to get a firm grasp of how it effects what your customers see. And it’s okay if you make a mistake or two (or a few) along the way. That’s how we learn, and become better small business owners – we make mistakes, we fix them, we learn from them and we move on. But practice makes us perfect, and you’re on your way to becoming just that.
Tim Walker
NuggetWeb Co-founder