Ecommerce has three basic steps:
- Building your store
- Processing orders
- Maintaining and promoting your business
This article introduces you to each step and some considerations you'll want to mull over as you get started.
1. Building your store
Running an ecommerce business has a lot in common with running a bricks and mortar retail store: You'll need to organize and display your products, announce sales and specials, and promote your business to attract new customers.
At the same time, ecommerce has distinct advantages over a physical place of business: You don't have to perfect every aisle before you open. Instead, you can open your store with just one product or one shelf of products for sale. You also have the flexibility to reorganize your products and change the look of your store whenever you like.
- Designing your store—choosing the interior
Don't over think your initial design. As an online retailer, your goal is to start selling your products. That means you don't want an "Under Construction" sign up for months at a time. At the outset, choose a basic look that meets the criteria below:
- Focus on content: When you're just starting out, much of your credibility as an online merchant comes from your product descriptions, information about your business, and customers' actual experience with your business.
- Choose colors that match your business: Look at other sites in your industry. What do you like and dislike about those sites? Can you take any inspiration from their designs?
- Upload a logo if you already have one or consider hiring a graphic designer.
- Wait to fine-tune your design until you have attracted real customers and learned about their actual preferences. Then you can make informed decisions about design changes that will fit your audience's needs.
- Get expert assistance: If you want to focus more on your business and less on store-building technology, consider hiring a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer.
- Adding products—stocking the shelves
- Start with top sellers: You do not need to put hundreds of products online to open for business. You can start with just a handful of top selling products and then add more inventory as you go.
- Consider your product categories: Categories and subcategories (also known as sections) allow you to organize your products as you would divide them into departments, aisles, and racks or shelves. For example, an Apparel site might have categories for Men's and Women's clothing, with subcategories in each for tops, bottoms, shoes, and accessories. If you sell fewer products, you can set up fewer categories at the outset of your business.
- Display featured products "up front": Your store's home page is very much like the front door of your business. Make the most of this high-traffic area by displaying top sellers and changing the content regularly. Learn more about specials.
- Use images to sell your products: Online shoppers want to see what they are buying. It's important to use clear, detailed photographs to market your products. If you are not manufacturing your own products, you may be able to get stock photos for products from your supplier or the manufacturer.
- Adding store information—posting your policies where they can be found
Build your credibility. Online shoppers want to know whom they are buying from and how to reach you. Your online store should clearly display the following key information:
- Your company contact information (including email addresses, phone and fax numbers, mailing address, and (if different) business location – especially if you accept walk-in business at a bricks-and-mortar place of business.
- Shipping information: Customers will want to see what shipping options you offer, shipping times, tracking numbers, and other order information to help them follow their order in transit.
- Refund or return policy (if any): Do you accept damaged or unwanted merchandise for refund, exchange, store credit, or other terms? To avoid disagreements, clearly state your return policy on your web site and also on any receipt you include with a customer's order. This information typically appears on the About Us (Info) page, or a separate page created just for this information.
- About Us information: This page of information typically describes your company's history and mission, explains why buyers should purchase from you, or provides more information about your services. You can also use this page as a lead-generation tool if you include company contact information and solicit requests for more information. Learn more
- Privacy policy: This page clarifies how you use and protect customer information that is transmitted over the Internet. Online shoppers may be particularly interested in any security methods that you use to protect your online store. Learn more.
2. Processing orders
- Adding payment methods—setting up your registers
This is where the true ecommerce starts! There are several ways to process customer payments on your web site. You must add either a PayPal account or a merchant account to your web site to open for business. You can enable both payment options for added customer convenience, or start with PayPal and add a merchant account later.
Which payment option should you choose?
For most businesses that are starting out, PayPal offers the fastest and most affordable option to start processing payments. With a PayPal account you only pay transaction fees and do not pay a monthly fee. However, depending on the average price of your products and your expected sales volume, it can be cost-effective to pay a monthly fee for a merchant account with lower per transaction fees.
- Open for business quickly with PayPal: The fastest way to open for business is to set up a PayPal account. With PayPal enabled, shoppers on your site can use PayPal to process credit, debit, and bank transfer payments to pay for your products. PayPal does not have monthly fees associated with its accounts. You only pay a transaction fee for each sale.
- Apply for a new Paymentech merchant account: You can apply for a merchant account within our service and, if approved, your account is automatically connected to your checkout with no additional effort on your part.
- Use an existing merchant account: If you're already set up to process credit cards and your merchant account is compatible with FDMS Nashville, you can use that merchant account with your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions online store. You can also process transactions offline, via your existing merchant account.
- Setting up sales tax rules
With Yahoo! Merchant Solutions you can set up your tax rates in advance so that sales taxes are calculated and collected automatically with every transaction on your store. Before you begin, you'll need to determine which sales tax you need to collect. See our help section for more information on setting up sales tax rates.
- Setting up shipping methods
Which shipping carriers do you want to use to ship your products to your customers? Will you give your customers the convenience of a choice of shipping options? Your online store can support shipments with major carriers such as the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, as well as other carriers of your choice. Will you calculate shipping rates based on weight, order total, or other variables? You can use the Shipping Manager to set up your shipping options so that they will be displayed to your customers at checkout. See our help section for more information on setting up shipping methods and rates.
3. Maintaining and promoting your business
- Promote to get traffic
After you open for business, you need to attract customers. With so many businesses on the Web, you will need to make an effort to promote your business to prospective customers. There are many free and paid marketing options that can help promote your business.
- Explore free marketing options. Free marketing options include submitting your site to search engines, optimizing your content for better natural rankings in search engines, and investing in efforts such as a business blog or "tell-a-friend" campaigns that can build word-of-mouth awareness of your business.
- Consider paid marketing options. One of the most effective ways to promote your business online is to advertise in search engine rankings, where prospective customers see your advertisement after searching for keywords that are contextually relevant to your business. To get the most out of these programs it's important to bid on keywords that are highly relevant to your business and to monitor the performance of your advertising campaigns, to ensure that they are delivering a return on your investment. As a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions you have access to discounts on many top online marketing services. To learn more about online marketing options, visit our Promotion help section.
- Increase sales with merchandising
Just like a brick and mortar retail business, how and where you display and promote your products on your online store can have a huge impact on your sales. Your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions store includes a variety of tools to help you convert visitors into paying customers and to increase the size of each customer's order, so you make the most of every visit.
- Display featured products: Your store homepage will receive the highest amount of traffic of any other page of your site. Promoting products on this page will help increase the sales volume for those items, while also drawing visitors deeper into your site. Remember to rotate your homepage promotions frequently so customers have reason to return to your site to see the latest special offers.
- Automate your merchandising: Yahoo! provides several tools in Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional that automate key merchandising functions like cross-selling, discount offers, and upselling. These tools are all available in the Store Manager.
- Cross-selling is the process of offering related products for sale after a customer adds a product to the shopping cart. For example, if a customer puts a camera in their cart, you could cross sell batteries to go with the camera. Once you've set up the cross-sells, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions does the selling for you.
- Discounting includes temporary price reductions as well as selling 2 items for the price of one or similar incentives to purchase.
- Upselling refers to suggesting a higher-level version of the same product with additional features and (usually) a higher price point.
- Gift certificates. With the Merchant Standard and Professional plans, you can offer electronic gift certificates for sale. Recipients will be sent the gift certificate electronically and can redeem it at your store during the checkout process.
- Attract customers with coupons: You can create coupons that are redeemable at your store for a specific dollar amount, percentage off, or free shipping. Then use these coupons in advertising, email campaigns, or on-site promotions to attract and retain customers and to encourage customer to purchase more often.
- Track and revise
After you open your store and start to generate sales, it's important to monitor how your customers use your web site. Are some products selling better than others? Look at where you've displayed these products and how you've promoted them. Can you apply this learning to slower sellers? Or does this tell you something about who your audience is that you did not know before you started selling online? Perhaps this customer information will have implications for your web site design or your product descriptions.
As an online business owner you have a great deal of flexibility to respond to trends, shifts in the marketplace, and changing customer demands. But it's up to you to dig into your information and put it to good use. To help you monitor your store performance, your Store Manager includes the following reports and graphs:
- Store sales reports and graphs show number of items sold, orders, revenue, inventory levels and more. Use these reports to view your data over several different time periods and identify trends.
- Page view reports show what pages people visit on your site and how much they purchased from those pages. These reports can show you which pages drive the most revenue and which pages may require some design or merchandising improvements.
- Referring URL reports show how people get to your site and the sales that are attributable to each referring site. This information can help you evaluate your search engine listings, advertising programs, and affiliate relationships.
- Repeat customer detector groups together orders that appear to have been placed by the same customer. Over time you'll recognize your high-value customers and be able to develop special reward programs or communications to keep them coming back to your site.
Also, Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional feature the following enhanced reports:
- Click trail reports show the paths taken by individual visitors through your site when purchasing a product. These reports offer great insight into how customers navigate through your site and how you might want to guide visitors to certain pages to encourage them to make a purchase.
- Search topic reports let you know what people are looking for on your site. This can shed some light on product areas that interest your customers, or what products need to be displayed more prominently on your site.
- Shopping search reports show you the most popular search terms on Yahoo! Shopping. This can help you refine your inventory or make decisions about terms for key word advertising.
Further Resources
The topic of ecommerce is obviously bigger and more complex than can be covered in a few pages. The purpose of this document is only to give you a brief overview of ecommerce to help you understand what stage you are in as you begin to build. Fortunately there are many resources available to merchnats getting started--both general ecommerce resources and ones specific to Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.
General ecommerce resources
Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Resources