The New Year is upon us and this means a fresh start for your business and website.? The team at WP EasyCart has years of eCommerce business experience, and we wanted to share a few of our key tips with you as you start the 2018 year.
Working as much as we do in the field of online eCommerce, we have several tips & advice to offer new and existing website retailers.
Tip #1:? Keep It Simple.??People like to browse and browse fast.? Keep your theme straight forward and keep your navigation simple.
Tip #2:? Focus on Product.? Customers like to get to the point, and the product you offer is likely where your focus should be.? Your company is great, but focus on your product first.
Tip #3:? Don’t shoot from the hip.? Develop a marketing strategy (adwords, emailers, local advertising, social media) and stay consistent so customers become acquainted with you.
Tip #4:? Be personable.??Try to email/phone or support customers in a timely manner.? We are all human, try to avoid robot conversations when possible and keep a pleasant tone with future customers.
Tip #5:? Don’t be cheap.? We live in a free app world, but invest in your business web hosting, WordPress theme, shopping cart, and advertisements.? A small investment goes a long way, but try not to get stuck on only free software.? Support and extra features in many plugins and themes goes a long way.
We also wanted to share with you the top 5 components of a good eCommerce solution that may help your business.? If you need any consults with eCommerce, please feel free to contact us through email or social media.
Looking forward to 2018, the WP EasyCart Team
The #1 component to start your eCommerce year off with is your web hosting.? Good web hosts provide fast stable platforms for your wordpress as well as many other services such as email, SSL security, and reliable support.
Stay away from FREE or extremely cheap shared hosting.? WordPress does require a good service to run smoothly.? We have had good success with?BlueHost VPSservers as well as?WP Engine?for larger business websites.
Be ready to spend a little extra money such as $25-$100 a month for really good, reliable WordPress Hosting!
With good reliable web hosting, the next step is to choose a reliable platform.? WordPress powers over +25% of the web’s websites and with a reliable platform and steady development, the platform is more powerful than ever.
With a large base, you can ensure there are plenty of themes and plugins to fit every business need.? And with a no-cost platform and open sourcing, it becomes one of the cheapest and most reliable solutions to run a website.
WordPress is Free to use, install, and customize…? But if not a tech savvy person, expect to receive help from a web designer or developer should you need it.
The next step in getting a good ecommerce website is to choose a theme.? Choose wisely because a great theme will make all the difference in the world when it comes to customizing and making your business look top notch.
There are a huge amount of free themes available for WordPress, but we recommend you spend a little extra money here and get a highly configurable and well developed plugin so that it plays nice with all the plugins and extras you will be adding to WordPress.
We really like popular themes such as the?Enfold theme by kriesi.at?or?EasyShop by theme by CrunchPress.? Pick a theme with lots of support and from a reputable developer and you will save countless hours on creating a nice looking website space.
Expect to pay between $40 and $60 dollars for a good quality theme.? It is a cheap investment and will save countless hours and support is worth it for non-designers.
Click here for our theme collection that we use for many projects.
A good shopping cart & eCommerce plugin is the next recommendation in our eCommerce guide to 2018.? From product creation pages to a shopping cart & checkout system, the shopping cart is your largest and most complex plugin necessary to sell online.
There are a variety of plugins to choose, some free, some paid for.? WP EasyCart offers the most comprehensive feature set and at a low cost.? More modular systems such as WooCommerce and others require modules, so the cost can be upwards of a $1000 dollars to develop a well rounded solution.
WP EasyCart offers a free version to get small sites running, but for $99 or $149 a year, you can get 30+ payment gateways to choose from, live shipping rates from UPS, USPS, FedEx & others, plus coupons, gift cards, promotions and nearly every feature we create in one plugin that is owned.
Expect to pay $99 or $149 a year for support & updates.? Premium users get quickbooks, mailchimp, shipstation, stamps.com and other extensions at the $149 level.? Consider this a cheap investment in your company to get valuable components that help you sell and market your business… all for the cost of a dinner and a movie!
Last, but not least, the next component you will want to acquire to sell online is a good payment gateway.? Gateways are the transaction companies that will actually process your payment during checkouts on your website.
Sound complex?? don’t worry… EasyCart already offers 30+ integrations so all you need to do is input your credentials and start processing.
PayPal is the most well known solution and respected world-wide.? WP EasyCart also offers the ability to process credit cards directly on your site with 20+ gateways such as authorize.net, stripe.com, FirstData, eWay, Payment Express, SagePay, and many others.
PayPal and Stripe.com are minimal expenses with no monthly fees.? Authorize.net, FirstData, and other gateways require transaction fees + monthly fees, so expect to pay $10 – $30 a month on gateway fees.? We highly recommend Stripe.com for it’s no monthly fee and low transaction fee similar to PayPal.
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Click here to learn more about what Payment Gateways WP EasyCart offers
