Guide: How to Turn Your Local Shop into an Online Business

Have you ever wondered if you could sell your products online? Don’t believe the myth that online stores are only profitable for big companies and follow this guide to create your own web shop!

Recently, online businesses are popping up everywhere allowing people to sell their goods not only to a local community but to everyone around the world. And the market is still not yet likely to stop growing. If you are a small manufacturer or maker who would like to give it a try, you can stop dreaming about it now and finally get started.

Follow these simple steps to launch a successful eCommerce!

Step 1: Create a Website and Integrate a Webshop
The most important thing before you can start selling online is the creation of an appealing website that presents your brand well. Nowadays, you can easily integrate a webshop yourself by using platforms like Shopify. You simply need good pictures of your products and write product descriptions that give the user a good impression of what they are going to purchase.

When launching a website, keep in mind that the majority of people use their smartphones or tablets to go online and 62% of eCommerce traffic in the US was generated by visitors from mobile devices during 2018. 

Step 2: Improve Your Ranking in the Search Engines
To have a decent website is one thing, the other thing is to drive traffic to it. A powerful way to do that is by improving your page for the search engines. Define a target group that you want to reach and do proper keyword research on it. Then you need to integrate the keywords to your website and make sure your content is interesting.

Step 3: Step up Your Social Media Game
Social media is a powerful marketing tool that can easily be used to drive traffic to your web store. Again, you need to do some research first to find out which social media platform your target group is using. After that you can start creating social media campaigns and try to keep your followers engaged.

Step 4: Handle Your Orders Professionally
It is important that you don’t underestimate the work of tracking orders, keeping your finances in place and making sure you are not running out of inventory. Therefore, it can be a good idea to implement software for your online store.

You might come across an application called QuickBook, which can help you sort out your finances and inventory. It was created for small and medium-sized businesses and can actually be of great help with accounting issues.

While QuickBooks also offers inventory management, we recommend that you read more on how to track inventory in quickbooks to see if the software meets your needs. As a maker who also needs support for the manufacturing process, it could be helpful to implement additional production planning and scheduling software that fulfills all your needs and is easier to use.

Step 5: Track, Analyse & Improve
Owning a web store means that you will have to work on it constantly. Look at the data from your website to learn more about customer behavior and find out how you can use it to improve your eCommerce.