How has the COVID-19 affected your business? Did you lose sales? If your answer is yes then you need to change your whole business plan. People are avoiding to do shopping due to Covid Pandemic, and physical businesses have faced lockdowns. Another effect is that every person now facing economical issues due to fewer working days and spending more money to protect himself from COVID.
According to the survey, the results suggest that the pandemic had already caused massive dislocation among small businesses just several weeks after its onset and prior to the availability of government aid through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Nearly all closures were due to COVID-19, which caused 43% of the businesses in the full sample to temporarily close. source
How Small Business Improve Presence In The Online Market
In business, there is a rule that is called presence, so it became an industry of its own called marketing. Marketing has a very broad meaning in little words and has billions of dollars of industry. Marketing is a basic need of every business and better planning helps your business grow. In the modern world, everyone is too busy in life, so they seek quick solutions for problems and needs. Business is mainly concerned with satisfying the needs of people. Nowadays if you are easily accessible to people then you will have more chances for your business to grow.
Nowadays, everyone keeps a smartphone in their pocket, and billions of people do a trillion of searches on the internet to find solutions to their problems and needs daily. Having an online presence is not only beneficial for big businesses but also for many small ones. But you need to know how to grow your business in the digital world.
- Imagine you have a coffee shop in a business district. Your location is not obvious to many people. So, your business is limited to some known people.
- Imagine you’re a single mom living in a well-populated area. You have some recipes and items to sell, but you reach a very limited number of people.
- Consider you sell some handmade products like handmade jewelry, or you have a tailor shop that now distributes kidswear, but only to a limited number of people in your locality.
Now the main question is how you can improve your sales and your business presence to more people that may be interested in buying your products. So let us introduce you to the modern age business world and modern ways to improve your physical business to more peoples.
Improve Your Physical Business Location With Google My Business
Google My business is a free tool to make your physical location online. Fill out an easy-to-fill form and a few essential information according to your business like Location, Contact Details, Opening Hours, Business Category, and a little bit of information and images about your business or services. Google My Business makes your presence on location-based searchers and when every someone types what they are looking for on Google, it will show your business in front of searchers if your business matches the searcher query. In metropolitan cities, millions of people do searches like “coffee shop near me” Fresh HomeMade Cake Near me” “clothing shop near me” and search engines show the location map to searchers. See the example below how Google shows local business results in the search listing.
Check the results, I make a search that has a location query, and Google showed me some clothing stores that near to my location. Google shows these results on location-based priority, So if you submit your business in Google you can get many visitors that have interested in your services or products.
Social Media Pages
Another source that has a huge network and billions of users may be interested in your products. Social media pages and accounts help you to reach more peoples online to grow your business and sales. These days people are using multiple social networks to get information and connect with family and friends. These networks also allow you to promote your business online with paid advertisements to billions of users. There are many platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and others that you can use to make your own official business page to represent your business and services. So, a good platform to grow your online business and get some new customers. Let’s create your Facebook business page and start selling online on social media.
Bring Your Business Online With Ecommerce Store
As an online marketer and web developer, we get many submissions from US local business owners requesting us to develop new stores in this Covid Pandemic. I think people get more awareness about online business. So, if you want to bring your physical business online here some tips on where to start and what you need to know to start your own online store.
Things You Need To Know About Online Store
As you know you can create some special pages on social media sites and there you can upload your products, and start selling your products online. The concept behind online stores is a lot like this, but eCommerce stores are much more advanced and offer lots of features that will make your business successful.
Ecommerce stores are specifically built to provide a user-friendly experience, automated order booking, payment collecting, shipping procedure, and much more. Further, the online store has more abilities to get a better ranking in Google search engine listing and that provide your organic traffic to boost your sales for free. But getting a good ranking in Google search pages is a little bit difficult, and you need to optimize your store to get indexing and a good ranking.
So, let’s talk about what you need to start your own online store, and set it to start selling your goods online.
Buy A Domain
What is a domain? The domain name is a sign of your business like you have a physical store in New York City and its name is Cookie Fresh, So, when you want to bring your physical business online you need a specific name that represents your business. A domain name consists of three items, the first being the protocol, e.g. HTTP://, HTTPS://, or www. These codes are used for certain system calls and can be ignored at first.
The second part of the domain represents your business, imagine your physical business name is “Cookie Fresh” you can assign your domain name to such a business name. It looks like https://cookiesfresh .com
The third part of the domain name is called extension. Extensions such as .com, .net, .co and local country-based extensions are also available. Local extensions indicate the specific country in which your business operates. If you operate your business from the US you can use the US extension or if you operate your business from the UK you can buy your domain name with the .uk extension. So after sorting these all of things your domain name looks like that HTTPS://”businessname”.com
Buy Host Or Server To Store Your Online Store Data
The second essential thing you need to buy a hosting service to store your online store date. In the market, many hosting service providers working and providing different types of hosting services start from $5 to $100 per month. But you need to start your online store, so you can buy a minimal-cost package to start.
We use Siteground hosting to serve our data to our customers, its top-rated web hosting service in the market. We know a common question in your mind, why do you use Siteground? We prefer to use the Siteground hosting service because our website pages load in less than 3.0 seconds, which is Google’s recommended speed for SEO. Another factor we use is Siteground hosting because of its advanced technology, fastest speed servers, SSD storage, quality of services, and competitive price.
What You Need In Your Online Store
- Responsive Layout
- User-Friendly
- Easy To Navigate Important Pages
- Mobile- Friendly
- Easy Checkout
- Automated & Secure Payment Feature
- Shipping Procedure
Check this infographic, I hope you can understand it easily.
Online stores need all these things to sell products online, but you will also need some information that represents your business, such as your location, contact information, and email to be able to reach you. The second thing is that you clearly state your Privacy and Return Policy, Return & Exchange Policy, and Shipping Policy so that your website visitors can shop with trust at your store. Here’s what information you need to provide your visitor to build customer trust.
Be More Responsible
- Terms & Conditions
- Privacy Policy
- Payment Policy
- Shipping Policy
- Return & Exchange Policy
- Location
- Contact No Or Email
Use CMS To Make Your Online Store
Many things are changing nowadays since web developments are not an easy task and only specialist developers can do it. Because of the many coding involved to make web structures and layout. But now if you have a little bit of knowledge about webs you can make a simple pre-build website easily. But, if you want to set up a modern website you must hire a web developer because they know how to develop a website with proper configuration, user interface or make it responsive and mobile-friendly.
If you want to build an online store, you need a good web developer. Because online stores need to configure many things and normally people haven’t advanced knowledge about configuration and online stores also need more optimization to get better ranking in Google search results. A properly optimized online store can get good sales organically. So, it will be better for you if you develop your store from professional web developers.
Hire A Developer To Make Custom Made Webstore
If you don’t want to use a premade CMS or need some more advanced or customized features, then you need to hire a professional web developer. Web developers can design your store layout as per your requirements, further if you need more advanced features in your store they can develop it for you. Many big online stores need inventory systems to be attached with online stores and need some other feature like customized products, multiple payments integration, or setup shipping or tracking services to be more responsible for customers.
Upload Your Product & Details
So, your store is live now, and yes you can upload your products to your store. If you don’t know how to upload products on a website, there are many videos related to how to upload products on online stores. But make sure you find content related to the CMS you are using. Use a good quality image that clearly represents your product and fill in all information regarding your products. Check the market price, If you are selling at more than the market price then you have to think about your price. Be responsible, your customers don’t wait much time, so deliver it on time.
Promote Your Business Online With Ads
At the start, may your online store doesn’t make enough sales, or may your audience circle is too small. So, you need to promote your online business, you can promote your business in your city, in your presence, and also in your country. You can promote your business on various methods, people commonly use the Pay-Per-Click method and all social media platforms provide services to promote online business. So, if you want to get good results and want an ROI (ROI) return of investments that you have spent to promote your business online you must hire a digital marketer. Google ads, Bing ads, are top-rated Pay-Per-Click advertisement display networks.
Final Words
Today, people have less time for shopping, online shopping. This is why online stores are a great way to improve business and increase sales or a successful business. Logic Wavers have been working in this field for 10-years and develop many online stores for our local customers. Now we want to expand our business internationally. We provide Web Development, Software Development, POS, (Point Of Sale) online and desktop-based, Custom software for School Management, Hospital Management, Business Management, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Content Writing, and more service to our clients. Success in your online business relies on timely steps and the right decision. So, start your online business with us. We guarantee to make things simple for you.