Setting Up An Ecommerce Store During Covid-19

We’ve seen new and varied businesses, globally, establish themselves quickly due to the Covid-19 outbreak. We have seen sneeze guard, hand sanitiser, and grocery delivery websites pop up almost overnight. There are a number of ecommerce platforms available which are geared toward getting a site online quickly but it still takes time and effort to learn the features and important components.


Payment Gateway Setup

Establishing your payment gateway can be fraught with delays as there are the inevitable ID verifications and forms which sit alongside their setup. It’s best to kick this off early off in the process. Stripe for payment is the quickest to set up.

Buy now and pay later options such as Afterpay and Laybuy can make a big difference to your sales volumes but there can be holdups in establishing these accounts. It’s worth getting these set up as soon as possible.

Begin With Your Products & Shop Structure

Configure the products in your shop before the site design as this will make it easier to layout the information component of your site. You’ll be needing to link images text links and buttons through to store categories and products.

Consider categories and filters that will make it easiest for customers to find what they are looking for.

There is an option to use the bulk importing to import products en masse. If you create the csv import as a Google Spreadsheet, multiple people will be able to work on it together – speeding up turnaround.

Google Rankings

Climbing upward in the Google rankings takes time and effort. The key to ideal rankings is to target very specific and sometimes niche phrases. Ensure each page of your site is mapped to relevant keyword themes and make sure headings, urls, links, buttons and body text all contain the keyword phrase.

Google Shopping Ads

For fast results, Google Shopping Ads is an effective way to position your products in front of active searchers. Google Shopping is a pay per click extension of Google Ads and you connect your inventory to this platform via a direct feed into Google Merchant Centre. Generally we have found these ads to have a better conversion rate as the results are visual.

Build Your Audience

Social media accounts are a way to connect with people and setting up these profiles is an ideal way to do this. Relaying your story engages people at a personal level.

We’d also recommend setting up Mailchimp ecommerce as this is a powerful way to connect with new and existing customers. Return on investment for email marketing is optimal. Mailchimp’s abandoned cart capability is also a great tool to recover those who have left the site with items in their cart but who have not completed checkout.

Recurring Subscriptions

Recurring revenue is the ecommerce dream. Do your customers buy the same product repeatedly and on a regular basis? There are many apps and plugins which you can add to your ecommerce store that allow you to sell recurring inventory online.

Video Content

A simple recorded video of your products or you telling your story will captivate people. These are especially effective on product pages so that the buyer gets a more tangible idea of what they are buying.

Next Steps

Once your site is set up and sales are beginning to tick over, you might like to make yourself a tea and head over to our other ecommerce articles.

Published on Wednesday, 6 May 2020 under eCommerce.