Tips for Successful E-Commerce Sites

E-commerce has irrevocably become a part of our lives. The catalyzing effect of pandemic conditions on the rapid movement of the digital world has caused radical changes in the way of doing business all over the world. Businesses are now trying to present their products or services in a way that will make a difference in e-commerce in order to meet customers in tough competitive conditions. Customers, on the other hand, prefer to complete their purchasing journey from e-commerce sites where they can easily get information about the product, trust that they can find solutions to their after-sales problems, and are familiar with payment and delivery systems.

If you want to stay and succeed in e-commerce, you should take care to build an e-commerce site with the goal of providing a perfect customer experience. In order to be one step ahead of your competitors and attract your customers, you should pay attention to important issues that play a role in expressing your brand correctly in every aspect. Here is the e-commerce success formula within the framework of some basic principles and tips in e-commerce…

In e-commerce, instead of working in an unfamiliar sector and field, continuing in the sector and field that you know or that comes closest to you can reduce the commercial risk you will face, so you will not waste time. Choosing a sector or e-commerce area where you keep up to date with the needs and trends in the market makes you stronger against your competitors.

Before creating an e-commerce site, it is important to prepare a road map that will take you directly to the roads you will target, so that you do not lose time, cash, customers and motivation. In doing so, it is critical to allocate a budget for research on your field, sector, market, competitors in the same segment and your target audience. In this way, you will have the opportunity to understand the dynamics of your market, what needs they create and how you can create a brand.

By grounding your research in analysis and data, you can build a brand. Of course, you need to make sure that this brand is highly authentic, in demand and preferred by a specific audience. For this research, you can get professional research support from research companies to be repeated at certain time intervals. According to the results, taking the pulse of your market, sector, competitors or target audience, you can clearly determine what you can offer to a target audience that you have predetermined and can define as well as possible through analysis methods. The data to be used in target audience analysis is data that can be obtained from user interactions over time thanks to properly used analysis and marketing tools. Brands often develop campaigns to obtain such data, refreshing their knowledge of changing customer attributes. You should try to make your target audience definition and customer categorization as specific as possible, not generalized.

When you have a good understanding of “whom” you will offer and “their” demands, preferences, needs or expectations, the products or services that you can emphasize become clearer. Then it is time to decide “how” you will present it.

After determining important issues such as your sector, your field, your competitors, your target audience according to research data, the branding process begins. Every brand has its own style, make sure that your brand also has a style. In this area, you can get support from brand communication and digital marketing experts.

Creating a brand identity and determining the directives required for the design of brand identity components is a strategic decision in itself and should be handled by experts. Strategically planning how a brand can be expressed, through which channels and through what kind of content; issues that need to be approached holistically and strategically, such as creating brand identity, brand personality and brand image; are also important building blocks that ultimately contribute to brand value. On the other hand, it is important to strategically determine the domain name (it is correct to consider it completely separate from the company’s trade name) in a way that will serve the brand value to be created, what kind of messages will be given, what visuals, colors or words will reflect them. All these details should be presented in a way that supports each other, in harmony and integrity. Since predetermining how to build a brand plays a critical role in determining the lifespan of e-commerce, every element to be worked on in this sense must be meticulously designed.

The best way to express the products and services you will offer on your e-commerce site is directly related to how you design an e-commerce site in terms of literary and visual aspects. The overall perception you will create on the customer side should overlap with the brand promise and the perception you want to create about your brand and what it offers. For example, a design full of feminine elements and colors on an e-commerce site that sells raw materials related to machinery can cause confusion in the image you want to express, while this type of design may be highly appropriate for a cosmetics brand. Therefore, be careful to choose the theme of your e-commerce site’s design in accordance with the elements that make it up and the messages you want to convey about your industry and your brand.

Do you have the right persona for your brand and does your brand identity reflect that persona well? While these issues may seem easy to determine at first glance, they are in fact highly detailed and multidimensional issues that require strategic expertise in their own right. The visual and literary elements that represent your brand, as well as the colors, typefaces, symbols and the holistic effect that each of them evokes at first glance, should be consistent with your goals and the spirit of your brand.

Colors affect people physiologically and psychologically. Research shows that the use of color is also effective in terms of consumer behavior and brand preference. Likewise, when we consider the fact that colors are also effective on consumption decisions and behaviors, it is necessary to strategically plan which colors and shades can be used in the design of your e-commerce site and how much their effect overlaps with your goals. The strategic use of the power of colors in expressing a business and/or its offerings ensures that it serves e-commerce goals. For example, it is no coincidence that a brand whose largest target audience group is women evokes femininity. For effective use of color in brand design, you can get support from visual communication design experts when choosing which one will lead you to success among the color palettes.

After determining your brand name and identity in a way that is compatible with your workforce and will attract the attention of your target audience, you should buy a domain name, create accounts with the same name on social media platforms that will provide advantages, and manage them regularly, systematically and sustainably. For example, providing effective and sustainable content on YouTube, one of the first channels that comes to mind when it comes to social media, is extremely supportive for your e-commerce management. You can work with a video content manager in this regard. In addition to YouTube, you can support your e-commerce sales through your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Tiktok accounts. In a multi-channel marketing management, for example, do not neglect to open a Tiktok account for a youth brand or an Instagram account for a design brand where visuals are at the forefront.

You can benefit from the management of panels that support e-commerce on social media channels and the opportunity to organize ads according to certain criteria. You should organize the ads in a way that you prefer advertising options that will directly reach you to a specific target. In the advertising management of all these accounts; It is important that the customer can reach you easily and quickly from every channel. Thus, it is possible to use your e-commerce site more efficiently and to experience the advantages of working with a multi-channel marketing system by supporting it with other channels.

Creating a blog on your e-commerce site on your sector, field and related or indirect topics can support your sales and customer communication. Since the content you create on this subject will play an important role in reflecting your brand’s stance, it should be created in an original way and should not be an imitation of other content. You should be careful not to use content taken randomly from the internet, which will cause plagiarism. In this sense, the support of a reliable expert can be useful.

One of the most important issues in e-commerce is secure shopping; make sure you have a secure (SSL) certificate and secure your internet merchant account (IMA). Choose a payment service provider (PSP) and get expert support for GDPR, terms and conditions and all other technical infrastructure. Related to this topic, one of the most crucial aspects of an e-commerce site is categorization. In a successfully designed e-commerce site, products and services should be placed in different sections in a way that customers can easily find them. Likewise, investing in the security of your e-commerce site is an issue that should not be neglected as it is critical to the sustainability of your commercial reputation. In this area, you should make sure that you can reliably store and retain your data with integrated cloud computing technologies. Moreover, you can use such solutions efficiently with other digital transformation systems that serve the effective use of your workforce, with integration systems tailored to your business.

Make sure you set up your financial system correctly. Create a shipping and logistics system by analyzing your business capacity and volume. Once an order is placed, you need to work out how to control the procurement process and logistics journey of that order all the way to delivery to the customer. Remember that a reliable payment system and working with reliable and fast delivery carriers are important aspects of maintaining a positive customer experience and contributing positively to brand reputation. For example, delivering an order long after it is needed can mean losing a customer. You should be sure of the service quality of the company you contract for logistics support.

On the other hand, how you systemize your supply process is perhaps one of the most important factors that determine your e-commerce life. While communicating with your suppliers, systematizing by taking advantage of technological opportunities can help you rise rapidly on the path of e-commerce. On the other hand, the problems caused by the lack of a system can cost more than your investment in technology. Regardless of the scale, you can provide a more efficient and fast-flowing communication with a server service and management system that meets the needs of your business, which you can choose according to your workforce. Thus, you can easily and automatically carry out business processes, perhaps the most challenging part of e-commerce, from a single platform with an integration system suitable for your business. In this way, you can also save on staff, time and labor, and minimize human errors and let things go with the flow.

In addition to content management, it is important to allocate a special budget for specialized areas such as campaign management, strategic planning, crisis management and advertising management. Thus, taking more successful steps in areas such as digital marketing and communication will enable you to increase your success momentum in e-commerce quickly and in a controlled manner, enabling you to be one step ahead of your competitors.

Another important element of meeting the increase in your customers and potential customers in a controlled manner and managing your customer communication and follow-up in different business models such as B2B and B2C in a healthy way: digital transformation support that provides systemization and automation for infrastructure such as collecting, storing and processing your customers’ data and digital data transfer. In this way, you can automate invoicing with electronic invoicing systems, for example, or in the burgeoning e-commerce scene, you can easily market your products in different marketplaces and expand to foreign markets. Doing so means setting up a fast and seamless business communication system for e-commerce efforts of all sizes. Digital transformation services include consultancy on which of these services can be offered in accordance with your business model and business capacity, as well as support for the implementation of this transformation.