Online store website

Why read this? : We share the key skills you need to set up and run an online store website. First, the marketing skills you need to bring in visitors. Then, how to manage content, style and functionality to improve your store’s customer experience. We also look at the pros and cons of the 3 most common e-Commerce software platforms. Read this for ideas on how to get the most out of your online store website.

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Online store website - where to start

First, think about why your store exists. What’s its purpose? What does it need to do for customers? How will it meet their needs? You set the goal first, and this sets the direction for your strategy. It helps you focus on what your online store website needs to do.

For example, how you handle key areas of the customer experience like content and style. What will it say? What will it look like? How do these support your brand identity? And, how do you use these to build engagement with the customer?

What about the site’s functionality? It needs to do what it’s supposed to do. It needs to take orders. Manage payments. Connect to your order to delivery system. It’s the front-end of your online selling experience. If it’s not right, customers won’t buy from you.

You also need it to capture data. You use the insights it generates to manage and improve the experience. Your online store website needs to be dynamic and respond to feedback and changes in shopper needs.

These are the types of questions to ask and answer as you set your goals and define your strategy.

Strategy and requirements

As per our online store strategy guide, setting up your own online store works better when you follow a “full” rather than a “fast” approach to strategy and planning.

You can launch a store quickly using a template system. But if you don’t think through key elements like who it’s for, what it needs to do, and how it’ll work, it won’t be a great experience for customers.

You have to answer these questions so your online store has relevant content, looks good, and works efficiently.

This means making decisions on strategy, brand identity and customer experience. The better your strategy and planning, the better the shopping experience for your target audience. Great shopping experiences drive sales.

The role of the online store website - Experience

From the online shopper point of view, the online store website is where they go to buy the product.

Nice and simple, right?

They want a website that lets them easily find what they need and makes it easy to shop.

It delivers on their needs for ease and convenience, range, pricing and any other services that matter.

But for you as the online store website owner, there’s a lot of work to to deliver that experience for the target audience.

The online store website plays many roles. It needs marketing and creative skills, as well as the more obvious functions of e-Commerce to work well.

Online store website - marketing hub

First, your online store website acts as a hub for all your e-Commerce marketing activity.

Your digital media like search and social media should point towards the website. It’s where you want shoppers to go to buy your products. The online store website is how people find you online to buy your products.

You need to build a digital media plan to drive acquisition.

Acquisition in this context means persuading online shoppers to come visit your store website to check out what you have to offer. This is usually done via channels like social, search and display.

Social media channels

Social media is a great channel for e-Commerce to create impact for your online store website.

Most platforms work with visuals, so you can show the products you sell easily.

And the content is shareable, so if you put out good content, you can generate positive word of mouth among your target audience.

Most new online stores start their advertising with social media. It’s easy to access, relatively easy to run campaigns, and helps you be very targeted in your audience selection.

Channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter help you find your audience, and build interest in your online store website. (also check out our review of other social media channels you can use).

You can create, post and boost content relatively quickly and cheaply with these channels. This helps you test and learn what works with your audience and what doesn’t.

Test and learn with social media

For posts that get positive reactions, try to work out why. Use that learning on future campaigns. Posts that bomb with your audience, again, try to work out why. Avoid those issues on future campaigns.

So, look at response rates to straightforward product images, for example. Compare them to images which show the product being used, or in a lifestyle setting.

Which style works better?

What about if you show video content, or create a carousel of images? Does this make a difference to response rates?

Test out different advertising copy. If you’re not sure which of your features or benefits appeals most to customers, run adverts side by side with different messages. See which ones generate the better responses.

Try out different sales promotions. What about promo codes and price discounts for example? Or, what about limited time offers (e.g. 20% off until this Sunday) or limited availability offers (e.g. last 50 units left in stock)? (see our advanced e-Commerce selling techniques article for more ideas like this).

You can test out these type of offers relatively cheaply and easily. A budget of A$10 on Facebook will reach about 600 people currently. This is a good test number to see if your social media advertising gets a reaction, before you decide to spend more.

Tagging

Finally, we also highly recommend making sure you have basic knowledge of tagging and data and analytics. If you run multiple campaigns, tagging adds a piece of code to each advertisement, and lets you identity people who responded to that specific advert, and what they did when they came to your site.

So, it helps you identify which advertising brings in the most traffic, for example. And it can help you identify which advertising brings in the most sales.

Search

The next area to focus on in your online store website marketing is search. Make sure your website is search engine friendly.

This usually starts with making sure your product page content is optimised for search. You need to apply key principles of SEO writing.

Run keyword research to see which terms customers use for category and product descriptors.

Use these terms in your brand name and product descriptions to help them show up in search results.

Make sure you fill in all the relevant metadata like the page title, focus keywords, slugs and the meta description. Check your H2 and H3 titles relate back to your focus keywords.

For e-Commerce search, it’s also worth registering for Google Merchant Centre. This helps your products appear in search on the Google Shopping channel. It works both for organic search and for paid search. You have to input data about each product and maintain this information on a monthly basis, but it’s a great way to make your online store website more visible. There’s a great article on the process here.

It’s also worth using standard organic and paid (search) advertising to boost traffic to your site.

Display advertising

You should also think about more traditional communication channels to drive traffic to your store.

Your advertising, packaging and PR can all be used to make people aware of your store. If you advertise your brand, make sure you include the online store website URL, and add clickable links to online adverts.

Display advertising is where you place ads on third party websites to highlight your products or store. It’s usually set up through agencies, but can be bought directly from the advertising site.

You can also advertise your store directly on sites, where your target audience are likely to be shopping online anyway. For example, look at online marketplaces like ebay or pure players like Amazon as an advertising channel to drive people to your store.

Online store website - selling hub

Secondly, and more importantly, your online store website is where you influence and persuade people to buy from you.

It’s where you bring your e-Commerce positioning to life and where the actual ‘sale’ takes place online.

This influence and persuasion by your online store website is brought to life in a number of ways. It’s in the way you show your brand identity.

It’s in the way you showcase your products. And, it’s in the selling experience you create.

Your online store website has to show all relevant information the customer needs to make a decision.

What the product is. What they product does. How much it costs. If it comes in different sizes, colours or formats. And, if it’s currently in stock.

It needs to show price, discount and payment options. Do you offer a volume discount? What about subscription offers? Or a loyalty discount for members? What if people want different options to pay? It needs to handle all of these possibilities.

The online store website also needs to show delivery options and costs. Do you offer express delivery or free delivery if you order over a certain amount? Do you deliver to all areas? Or are there some areas you won’t deliver to?

What if the customer has questions? Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) help. But, you’ll want to add Contact Us details if their question is more specific. You also need to include any relevant terms and conditions for the sale. These protect your rights as a seller. They make it clear what to expect, and help build trust in the website.

User experience

You need to work out what the online shopper wants when they visit your store. But different shoppers want different things. You need to map out and develop different ways to navigate through through the site.

Some online shoppers will know exactly the product they want. Others may well be “just browsing”.

For those who know exactly what they want, make it as easy as you can to find that product. Make sure you have on-site search built into your store. And work out how to name and organise category and sub-category classifications to make them easy to navigate.

For customers wanting to browse, or look at a range of options, make sure you share relevant and appealing content. Include “how to” guides or “inspiration and ideas” type content if relevant to what you sell.

Practical extra content like comparison tables, customer reviews or links to relevant external websites can all help with the online shopping experience.

There’s many tools you can use from customer experience to improve the way you set up your online store website and the overall D2C experience.

Tools like the customer segment profile help you describe your ideal customer for example.

You can use a journey map to identify the touchpoints they interact with on the way to buying.

You then use these insights to make the move from awareness to consideration to trial easier for shoppers.

Remove e-Commerce friction points

Ideally, you want to create the minimum amount of clicks required to complete a purchase. In general, the more ‘clicks’ to complete a purchase, the more likely a shopper will give up and abandon the purchase.

These extra clicks are “friction” points for the shopper. You should try to eliminate friction where you can.

For example, you’ll want to capture information about your shoppers so you can re-target them in the future. You might decide to not allow guest check-outs and force a membership or account sign-up to complete the sale.

But that’s not always what the online shopper wants.

Recent research shows that for online shoppers, guest check-out is chosen about 20% more than the logged-in check-out, when both options exist. So, you should make membership or account sign-up optional, not mandatory, unless you want to lose some sales.

As per our how to get more sales online guide, there are options like subscriptions and CRM programs where you can offer added value or convenience. These can help remove friction from the buying process.

Test out your store with actual online shoppers. You never know what to improve until you get feedback. Users who visit the site ‘cold’ can often give you the sharpest e-Commerce insights. They’ve no bias, and they replicate the experience most online shoppers will have with your store.

Define what your online store website needs to do

To help manage the complexity of setting up and running an online store website, the terms “front of house” and “back of house” are sometimes used.

These terms come from restaurants and retail, where “front of house” is everything the customer sees and experiences.

And, “back of house” is everything else that needs to happen to make the operation run smoothly. But, which the customer doesn’t really see.

So, the content and the style of your website for example, is front of house. The online shopper sees those things. But, the connected systems like the payment gateway and delivery tracking, are all back of house.

Content, style and functionality

As per our website planning guide, all websites have some basic tasks to do. They need to link different systems together.

Your digital media like search, social and display drive visitors to your online store website. They let shoppers know your store exists and what it sells.

But for those shoppers who visit your online store website, what do they expect when they get there? There’s three basic experiences you need to build in to your online store website. These cover content, style and functionality.

Online store website - content

Your online store website content is anything the online shopper reads, watches or interacts with on your website. For online store websites specifically, your content needs to work at three different levels – product, selling and brand.

Product content

As per our how to get more sales online guide, each product page at a minimum needs to include the product name, product imagery and product information. This helps the online shopper identify which product is right for them.

From an online store website set-up point of view, there’s a few more technical considerations which go with setting up these elements.

Product naming

Firstly, you should make sure the product name becomes part of the page URL. You should also makes sure it’s set as a focus keyword. This helps with your SEO.

Then, you should also think through the naming hierarchy of products on your site. If you’ve many products, you should consider grouping them into relevant categories. This makes them easier to organise and navigate. You can have high level categories and sub-categories to make it easier.

So, for example “Men’s” might be one category and “Men’s T-shirts” might be a sub-category.

Set-up product images

Next, make sure the images you include are well set-up from a technical point of view. You will most likely use .png or .jpg images that you’ll upload into your online store website Media Library or your product information management system. These should be cropped to the size of the template where they will be used.

They should have alt-text added to their meta description to make them more readable by search engines.

The images should be high enough resolution to produce a quality image on a decent size screen. Ideally, you’d show the product from multiple angles and let the shopper zoom in on the image. So, it needs to be high enough resolution to support this.

But really high resolution images create bigger file sizes. And bigger file sizes take longer to download.

So, you need to find the sweet spot of big enough file size / resolution to look good, but small enough to download quickly. In our experience, below 150KB is usually OK, and ideally below 100KB is great.

You should also consider using graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to make the pictures look more professional and appealing. Use these tools to crop and manage image dimensions, add effects or combine images to make new images.

Consumer and search friendly product descriptions

Finally, your product descriptions also need to be both shopper friendly and search friendly. To be shopper friendly, they need to be clear, simple and readable. They need to tell shoppers what the product is and what it does. The font size needs to be easy to read, so keep it big and keep it simple.

The basic product information supplied with most products is usually a good start. But, if you’re dropshipping, or buying and selling products, bear in mind the manufacturer’s standard blurb will go out to ALL websites selling that product. You won’t stand out with just that standard text alone.

It’s usually best to add and extend the product copy to make it more appealing and distinctive. Use the techniques we cover in our guide to sales copy for example to pull out features and benefits. Try to get your product descriptions beyond 300 words. Anything below that is usually ignored by search engines.

(Also, check out our articles on what makes a successful product page and prouct pages to sell high ticket items).

Selling content

Next, you need to refine your sales copy and build in sales promotion materials and content that helps drive the sale. These come out of your store strategy and positioning.

Pricing and payment

This could be, for example, related to pricing and payment options. You could offer discounts or free delivery for purchasing more items, or spending over a certain amount.

You need to include what payment options are available. (credit card, Paypal, After Pay etc). Make it clear what, if any extra fees you charge. Online shoppers hate finding “hidden” fees when they check-out.

Delivery

Include details of how the delivery system works and how much it costs. You need to give an estimate of how long it’ll take to arrive. If your supply chain set-up means you can guarantee delivery times, then push this as a benefit. But in most cases, online shoppers expect a delivery window. So, between “x” and “y” days delivery.

Trusted pages

As part of your selling content, make sure you have sections like “About Us”, “Privacy Policy” and “Terms and Conditions” on your site. Though these may not directly drive the sale, they provide a lot of reassurance to the online shopper that the store is genuine. These types of pages help to build trust and credibility.

Consider including a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section about the products, and about your online store website service. This again, helps build trust. And, it saves you the friction of having to respond to every customer question.

Think also about any extra selling content you can include on the page. As per our advanced e-Commerce techniques article, there are many ideas you can use like online exclusives, loyalty programs and targeted offers.

(See also our article on 52 tests for e-Commerce websites for details on how to validate these experiences on your online store website).

Brand content

Finally, think about how you’re going to brand your online store website.

Your product content is the stocks on the “shelves” of your store. Your selling content is what persuades them to buy.

But, your brand content based on your brand identity makes everything else work better.

It helps create an “ambiance” and environment which make it easier for the online shopper to buy.

This can be as simple as making your brand logo prominent, consistently applying the brand colour palette, and including other relevant tangible brand assets.

You also need to build in intangible brand assets like your essence, values and personality. How can you bring these to life on your online store websites? You want it to feel like a holistic and integrated branded experience for the shopper.

This impacts for example the tone of voice – how you write your product, sales and branded content. It impacts on the layout and style of the pages. And, it impacts on the overall customer experience.

Style

Your brand content and brand identity then links to the overall style of the website. Review each style element of the online store website, and make sure it’s consistent with your brand identity and style guide.

So, for example, you’ll have a brand colour palette as part of your overall style. But, you’ll need to consider how you build that in to your website style. You’ll have a preferred use of typography. But, you’ll need to work out how and where to apply that on the online store website.

Where to start

Start from the top of the page, and work through all the key elements.

On your main navigation bar for example, can you use your brand colours to help show when you hover over a drop-down versus making a selection in a drop-down? What about when you put hyperlinks in the text? Can you use one of your brand colours to make links stand out? All our linked content for example is in the red or blue of our brand colours.

What about borders round specific blocks of content? Or call to action buttons? These are all opportunities to drop in your brand colours to reinforce your branding.

What about the typography you use in your headlines and your body copy? Can you make this consistent with all your other communication materials? Think, not just the font style, but also the font size and the font weighting. You want to make sure from a style point of view, that your online store website is easy to read.

Think about how you use photography, video content and illustrations on the site. These are all ways to bring your brand identity to life.

You can adjust photography settings, like hue, saturation and brightness, so you have a consistent style for example. You can include advertising or product demonstration videos, so the online store website feels more engaging. And, you can use icons and diagrams to make it easier for the online shopper to move around the site.

Functionality

The final area to consider on your online store website is the functionality. In other words, what it does. This specifically relates to when the online shopper interacts with the store. When they press a button or complete a form for example, they expect something to happen. You need to make sure the right systems are connected so the desired action happens.

That might be a simple call to action button such as “learn more” that takes you to more content. Or “contact us” that sets up an email, or messaging link if they have a specific question.

But it also includes any email sign-ups, and of course any actual purchases. When a customer shares their personal data via your website, you’re obliged to make sure you use it properly.

If it’s an email sign-up, say to hear news of special offers, or new product listings, you need to make sure your CRM complies with data privacy and legal considerations. We cover these in our guide to digital data.

For payments, your site will need to connect to a payment gateway, as per our functions of e-Commerce guide. This is an online portal which securely manages transactions between buyers and sellers. They charge a small percentage fee per transaction. In return, the gateway makes it easier for the shopper to claim refunds. And, it makes it easier for you to prevent fraudulent transactions.

Payment gateways - hosted or embedded

You’ve a choice of hosted or embedded solutions when it comes to payment gateways.

With hosted solutions, when the online shopper gets to the point where they enter their payment details, they’re taken to a secure online page, separate to your website.

There, they add these details, that page validates the details and then returns the shopper back to your online store website.

With embedded solutions, the code from the payment gateway site is embedded into your check-out page.

The details are taken and validated without the need to go off to a third party site. To the shopper, it’s one integrated page.

Embedded solutions are preferable to hosted solutions in most cases. You risk confusing shoppers with hosted solutions as they have to go to another website midway through the check-out.

With embedded solutions, it feels like one integrated check-out.

However, embedded solutions can be more technically challenging as they need to “fit” into however you have set-up your check-out page. Payment gateways will normally provide “how to” guides for both options.

What happens once payment is approved?

Once the payment is approved, it triggers actions in other systems. It needs to send the order to the supply chain system to process the order. To make sure the product is taken out of the warehouse and sent to the shopper. But this system also needs to synch with the inventory system to make sure you don’t run out of stock.

Every sale reduces the number of items “in stock” number, so you should have minimum re-order quantities set up. When the stock level reaches this minimum number, it should automatically trigger an alert to order more stock.

The delivery also need to synch with any systems the delivery company use to track deliveries. If they offer a tracking code for example, so the shopper can track the progress of their order, the number needs to be picked up from their system and sent to the online shopper.

You also need your online store website to feed into your marketing data set-up. This might be as simple as Google Analytics to track performance on the website. But, there are many ways to track and measure performance.

You can add tags to advertising for example. These track which adverts lead to the most sales. You can add pixels so you can re-target shoppers who visit but don’t buy.

You’ll need supply chain and IT skills to set up and maintain these types of systems. Check out our D2C challenges article for ideas on how to get those teams on board.

Build your online store website

You have many options when it comes to which software system to use to build your online store website.

Which you choose depends on your business context and your expertise and budget. Some are easy and cheap, but have limited functionality. Others are sophisticated and offer more features, but are often more expensive.

Below, we’ll cover the 3 most popular options – WooCommerce, Shopify and Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento).

WooCommerce

According to Wapplyzer, WooCommerce is the most common e-Commerce platform with about 45% market share. Much of this is down to it being part of WordPress which dominates the Content Management System sector. Many businesses find it makes sense to use a platform that’s already set up to connect to your website. (our shop is on Woocommerce for example, because our website’s built on WordPress).

Where your hosting service offers you a WordPress site downloaded from WordPress.org, it often comes with WooCommerce attached.

WooCommerce comes with over 8,000 plug-ins available through WordPress. These are additional functionalities you “plug-in” to your website to improve the online store.

So, for example, you can add payment plug-ins for Paypal and other payment gateways. You can add delivery tracking functionality, and set up printed invoices and delivery slips. And, you can add design and experience elements like Customer Reviews, Wishlists and delivery date and time scheduling.

Shopify

The next one to consider is Shopify. This system has been set up to be an accessible online shopping specific platforms. WooCommerce and WordPress is more of an all-round solution, while Shopify is focussed on e-Commerce.

Shopify packages come at a basic cost of USD29/month. There’s a more advanced option at USD79/month. And, a much larger scaleable version of the platform at USD299/month. It comes with an App store, the equivalent of the WooCommerce plug-ins, which has around 3,000 online shopping apps to choose from. These help you manage content, adjust the style and improve the functionality of your online store website.

Because Shopify is a dedicated e-Commerce platform, many online stores choose it for its focussed approach. It’s very user-friendly and designed to be set-up and run by non-technical people.

They have a good choice of customisable templates to set up your online store. You can find apps that help you add customer reviews, email shoppers who abandon carts, and set up promotional codes.

Even on the basic level you get technical support and can certainly get a serviceable online store up and running, quickly.

Adobe Commerce

Finally, there’s also Adobe Commerce. (Formerly known as Magento). This is a more powerful e-Commerce platform, mainly used by bigger businesses.

It’s much more customisable than either WooCommerce or Shopify. If you’re a large existing business that needs to integrate an online store into your SAP set-up for example, Adobe Commerce is likely a good option for you.

But this means it’s less friendly for beginners. It will require some IT support or technical knowledge. Because it’s part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, it easily integrates with other Adobe products such as Experience Manager and Campaign.

If you need to customise front of house or back of house content, Adobe Commerce gives you the most flexibility, where WooCommerce and Shopify both rely more on pre-set templates.

However, Adobe Commerce charges much higher license costs and fees, and because of the need for technical support, it’s usually only used by bigger, more advanced online sellers.

Each software systems has strengths and weaknesses. Which you choose is down to your business needs and budget. You can read a more detailed comparison of the options here.

Online store website requirements

With your online store website, you have to think about the other “basics” which go with creating a website. So, you need to make sure you have a safe and secure hosting service. You need to make sure there’s regular maintenance on the website, and the latest version of the software is installed.

You should test regularly for bugs or issues. Check security access levels at least once a year. If the site goes down, you should have clear contact points and service level agreements from hosting service to fix it quickly.

You’ll need to set up a URL for the store. Make sure you use HTTPs, the secure and encrypted version of HTTP.

Data security

Customers have to share some quite personal information when they buy from you. For example, their home address, email, phone number and credit card details. Make sure you manage these details securely.

These details normally sit in a “Orders” folder in the software system. But, you may also want to consider linking them to your CRM database to track contacts and transactions. Because this is relatively sensitive data, you should make sure only authorised people in your business can access this data.

Where you take credit card details, you also need to make sure you’re PCI compliant. This is a set of rules and guidelines designed to protect the privacy and security of online payments. There are different levels of strictness depending on how you manage payments.

If you manage payments through a payment gateway, and the payment gateway is PCI compliant, this takes away a lot of requirements. They’re compliant on your behalf. For example, the credit card data is partially hidden, so your team never have direct access to it.

Keep improving the online store website experience

It can be a challenge when you start out to build your online store. It’s complicated. You need to regular test your online store to make sure it delivers a great shopping experience.

But if you keep looking at the data and using it to improve the customer experience, you soon start to win over online shoppers. Keep looking for ways to improve.

If you find you have large bounce rates or lots of abandoned carts for example, use your site data and analytics to work out what’s going wrong and fix it. When the shopper comes back, they don’t remember what it was like before anyway. Most successful online retailers evolve their sites on a regular basis to improve the experience.

Every store has to start somewhere. It’s worth checking out where some of Australia’s leading retailers started off their websites selling online to see how hard it is to get started. Check out how Australia’s biggest supermarkets started out selling online for example.

Woolworths website from 1997

Coles website from 1996

Your online store website is at its worst

There’s a saying in e-Commerce that your site is at its worst on the day it launches. Because, the best online store websites constantly look for ways to improve the customer experience they offer.

As you can read about in our articles about online grocery or high ticket product pages, most sites follow some standard set-up and layout principles which deliver consistently. Basics like clear product names, appealing product images and compelling product information will always raise your chances of a sale.

But, there’s so many more areas where you can refine your online store website experience. From closer links to advertising and media to links to your brand website, for example.

And all through the order to delivery process, there’s a lot you can build into the online store website to make this interaction run more smoothly and more efficiently

Your aim with the online store set-up is to make sure it meets customer needs. The improvements you make, the tests you run, the functions you add or remove should all be run with the customer in mind. If you can’t explain what it’ll do for the customer, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

You’ll capture a large amount of valuable and interesting data about the online shopper when you run your own online store website. Make sure you use that to your advantage, by eliminating what’s not necessary. Use it to build more loyalty. Push hard on the activities that work the best.

To achieve maximum impact, you’ll need to be able to create or outsource key skills like photography, video and writing skills. You need the technical expertise to make any changes in the back-end quickly. And, also the underlying marketing and sales skills to connect with consumers and drive sales.

Drive your D2C experience

Making sure your online store website works and delivers a great D2C experience is an on-going challenge.

In fact, it’s not just one challenge it’s many challenges :-

Refining your insight and positioning.
Driving reach and engagement with relevant digital media and social media campaigns.
Delivering a great customer experience with optimised content and interactions and a smooth order to delivery system.
Driving loyalty with your CRM program and great customer service.

Check out our D2C experiences article to read about how to overcome these challenges in more detail.

Conclusion - Online store website

Your online store website is a hub which links together marketing and sales, with back of house functions like payments and delivery. It’s your main opportunity to drive a sale with your target audience. It gives you lots of ways to influence the buying decision. Content, style and functionality all play a big role in driving choice.

Your online store website needs to capture data, so you can work out how to keep improving the customer experience. It’s an on-going challenge to find new ways to attract online shoppers and keep them coming back to spend more.

Three-Brains and e-Commerce

We’ve worked on many e-Commerce projects and have good experience across strategy and planning, working with online retailers and building D2C stores. We know how to connect these expertise areas back into driving your brand marketing and growing your sales.

Contact us if you want to know more about how we can support your e-Commerce to grow your business through our coaching and consulting services.

We can coach you to reach the top of your e-Commerce game.

Downloadable D2C status dashboard

Setting up an online store needs you to define your strategy and plan, work out the sales and marketing and also set up the whole operational side of the business including the finances and the delivery / supply chain model. It can be complex to manage.

That’s why we’ve used this project dashboard to great success in the past to have a simple one-page summary of the key actions require to set-up and manage a D2C online store. Download it here or from our resources section.

Powerpoint and Keynote versions of this document available on request.

Online store website

Online store website

Ready to test your knowledge?

Online store website - where to start

Strategy and requirements

The role of the online store website - Experience

Online store website - marketing hub

Social media channels

Test and learn with social media

Tagging

Search

Display advertising

Online store website - selling hub

User experience

Remove e-Commerce friction points

Define what your online store website needs to do

Content, style and functionality

Online store website - content

Product content

Product naming

Set-up product images

Consumer and search friendly product descriptions

Selling content

Pricing and payment

Delivery

Trusted pages

Brand content

Style

Where to start

Functionality

Payment gateways - hosted or embedded

What happens once payment is approved?

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