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Today, eCommerce is everywhere from buying new clothes to purchasing electronic items or ordering food online. Ecommerce websites have made it quick and easy for customers to order anything and everything from anywhere anytime. Thanks to its tremendous growth, over 2.14 billion people around the world have purchased from eCommerce websites.
If we talk specifically about Australia, eCommerce’s user penetration rate stands around 75%. Also, as per Statista, the eCommerce market in Australia will touch the mark of US$35 billion in revenue by 2025. With such kind of growth curve in the country, it’s an enticing choice to start up your own eCommerce website and grab a piece of the pie for yourself.
But the only problem here is you have no idea where to even begin with. We take it that starting up a new business can seem puzzling and hard at first. But not if you have a handy guide with you.
Ecommerce Website Success Checklist for Australia
Starting a new eCommerce website is always complicated and messy, especially if you are new to this market. But you can relax, as we have got you covered. This guide walks you through all the essential checkpoints one should consider if you want to start a successful eCommerce business.
1. Finalize What You Plan to Sell and Who Your Target Audience is
The first thing you should decide before starting up a new & elegant eCommerce store in Australia is what you want to sell? What your eCommerce store is about? Think about the business model and plan for what you are going to sell in the Australian market. Do you plan to target other businesses or just the general consumers of Australia?
For the B2C business model, home appliances, groceries, and fashion items are the most in-demand categories of products in Australia. So, selling products from these categories will help you earn a good amount of money.
The thing here to focus on is who do you plan to sell these items to rather than focusing on what to sell. This is the most common mistake many entrepreneurs make before starting up their eCommerce website. And in all that midst of coming up with the product or service, they forget to mold their offering for their target audience.
So, while choosing your target audience look for the key factors. Dig a little about your target audience, their demographics, their spending habits, etc.
2. Register Your Business and Domain
After you have identified who your target audience is and what products you want to sell, come up with a business and domain name for your eCommerce website. Secure the domain name and register the business online. Choose a domain name that suits the products you wish to sell in the Australian market.
Also, it would be better if you register a domain with a .au extension. It would be best for starting an eCommerce website specifically for an Australian audience. You can even choose a .com extension domain if you have plans to scale your business in other parts of the world.
3. Choose the Right Platform to Build Your Website
This is another important step of the way to start a successful eCommerce business in Australia, which is to choose the right eCommerce website development platform. If you are a beginner and don’t know much about how to operate a platform, then you must go for user-friendly platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, or PrestaShop.
Magento is solely built for developing and operating eCommerce websites. Popular brands like Samsung, Ford, Coca-Cola, and other over 200,000 websites use Magento. WooCommerce comes as a plugin to extend WordPress’s functionality as an eCommerce platform. The platform is flexible and the interface is user-friendly & offers tons of customizations.
PrestaShop on the other hand is also a good choice if you want to build your website on an extremely easy-to-use platform.
4. Develop Your eCommerce Store
By now, you must have chosen the eCommerce platform to develop your website. If not, then consult eCommerce experts if you feel confused about selecting the right platform. Once it is sorted, next thing is to design and develop your eCommerce website. For the same, you may have to hire an expert team of developers.
Hiring an expert eCommerce development agency can make the task easier for you to come up with an impressive and conversion-centric website. How you present your website to your audience can greatly impact on your conversions and sales. And the team of expert developers will ensure that your website is highly interactive, user-friendly, and properly optimized for customers to engage & purchase what you have to offer.
5. Come Up with 360 Marketing Strategies:
Once your website is ready to accept orders, the next thing you need to do is put in place a 360-marketing strategy. Prepare and implement a marketing and promotional strategy for your eCommerce website to be successful with a holistic approach. You can start by optimizing your website for search engines to rank high using relevant keywords, meta titles, descriptions, etc.
You can also use social platforms to gain traction and boost your website traffic. There’s a provision of paid ads using which you can instantly increase traffic for your website. Marketing is a vital aspect of running an online business. It is not a one-time thing, so you must continually spend some time, resources, and efforts that help gain desired results.
6. Integrate Payment Methods:
When your marketing efforts start to pay well, people would come and purchase items from you more frequently. And for you to take that order successfully, you need to offer your customers a way to make payment. Offering the right payment method can help maximize the conversion rate for your eCommerce store.
The right payment gateway speeds up the transaction process allowing customers to checkout faster improving their user experience overall. But choosing the right payment gateway depends on your target audience, products you sell, security requirements, & ease of doing so.
For instance, credit cards, mobile payments, & cash on delivery may be suitable for the online food delivery business, but these choices may vary if you offer only downloadable products.
7. Plan out your Logistics:
Now the customers have purchased the product and paid you for it, the next thing in line is to deliver the products your customers have just ordered. Logistics and delivery of the products is the final piece of the puzzle you need to sort out for starting a successful eCommerce business. If you don’t get it right, forget that there will be any orders from customers next time.
You can build your in-house distribution team or partner up with a logistics agency to outsource the delivery of the products. Remember whatever you decide, make no mistakes in delivering products to your customers on time. Find a logistics partner who will take care of packaging as well as delivering the products on time. Among others, Estore Logistics, Pack and Send, and Trans Direct offer great logistic and delivery services.
Final Thoughts
In the end, we want to say that starting up an eCommerce website is not that hard a thing to do if you know all the bits and pieces about it. Australia is a great place that offers equal opportunity to new-age entrepreneurs to start & thrive in their domain. And this eCommerce website success checklist perfectly delves deep into providing valuable information entrepreneurs have to keep in mind while starting up their business.
Want to develop an eCommerce store for the Australian market? M-Connect Media can help you build your dream eCommerce website that attracts visitors and converts them to your loyal customers for life. Contact us right now to discuss things further and kick start your eCommerce development project with us.
