How to design your online store in 3 steps

Designing your online store and entering the world of e-commerce is one of the best investment ideas to make at the moment. As digital investment is witnessing a huge revolution, the Arab world is no longer far from it. Accordingly, the volume of e-commerce in the Arab world is expected to double during the current year 2021.

Two reasons why you should design your online store at the moment

First: The continuous inflation of the volume of e-commerce in the business market, including the Arab world, where every day many electronic stores appear with profits of tens of millions of dollars. As a result, there is an unlimited amount of opportunities that can be exploited.

Second: The relatively low cost of designing an online store, especially when compared with traditional stores that are financially and physically costly, as they require important elements that electronic stores do not need, such as: providing a shop for sale and storage, obtaining licenses and administrative procedures, and they also require a greater amount of operational expenses such as: Water, electricity, internet and other bills.

Now, how to design your online store in 3 steps

1. Select the products that you will offer in your online store:

The first step before designing any online store is to know what kind of products you will display in that store. The identification of products is an important element that directly affects the success of the project from the ground up. The last thing you want is to open an online store that no one buys from. The market does not need the products offered by your online store. But with millions of goods and products, how can you determine the right products to sell in your online store?

In the beginning, you should take the time to research the target audience you want to reach, find out their interests and the products they need. It is preferable that you have an initial idea about these products, there are many factors to consider when choosing the type of products such as:

Your ability to provide it and the rate of your customers’ demand for it

You should make sure that you choose the products that are less available in your area of ​​activity or that they are far away in another area, as these products are a good opportunity to start with them because the consumer is looking for them, especially when they are in urgent need of their presence in the market.

You can start to find out by doing research to find out what products consumers are looking for by looking at the lists of the best-selling products in supermarkets. Some of the most important tools that may help you with this are:

Google Trends: You can type a number of products and specify the area in which you want to be in a certain period, then the search rate will appear on each of them to choose the most needed by consumers.

Price and profit margin

Determining the price is one of the most important factors that result in the continued success of your online store. If the price of your product is very cheap, it will be difficult for you to achieve a great return on investment. If your product is too expensive, you will find it difficult to convince customers to buy. Therefore, it is necessary to choose products with an appropriate price.

You can also add some offers or discounts from time to time, or provide free shipping, and it is important to make sure to calculate all costs and add them to the product price, in this way you can determine an appropriate profit margin.

It ranges between 30 and 35%, depending on the type of commodity and its availability in the market.

2. Choose a brand name for your online store

One of the most important steps in designing your online store or even starting a business or service is choosing a name that is appropriate for your brand. Choosing a brand name is the first thing your customers see about you, and the first thing your competitors see as well. It is important that the name is associated with the services you provide to your customers so that if those services are satisfied with them, they will remember the name of your online store even if they have not heard it before. Remember that there are many examples of online stores that chose meaningless names and yet achieved widespread success and popularity.

However, there are some criteria that you should take care of in your brand name such as: easy to pronounce, easy to write, relevant to your target industry.

You can read this article to learn more about the steps of designing a distinctive business identity

3. Design your online store

To be able to learn how to design your online store, you must have technical knowledge. And join the e-commerce market on your own, so you will have two options to build your store. Either you hire a professional web developer, or you use one of the tools dedicated to designing online stores.

Hiring a web developer

Hiring a web developer is a preferred option for many as it gives them more flexibility. They can request that the site be customized as they want, and they will have complete control over the details of building the store, and the technology used to build it. This is not available in the tools dedicated to building electronic stores, but the price of this flexibility and control is that the cost is greater. To ensure the developer’s mastery of his work, it must be ensured that he is within the entity and management of a distinguished company. It provides integrated services for online stores, from brand identity design, store design, e-marketing, or even field marketing for your products. In sponsoring an advertisement we are proud to include the best developers, designers, and marketers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Choose a ready-made platform to design your online store

E-store design platforms are websites specialized in building electronic stores. You do not need technical skills or knowledge of programming and development. In all cases, online store-building platforms offer the advantages of hosting an online store and associating your chosen domain name with the hosting. With the provision of a security certificate to encrypt financial transactions and protect personal data for store patrons.

To choose the right platform for your needs, some criteria should be taken into account such as:

Price: Any platform offers many price options due to the multiplicity of packages, be sure to read the advantages of each package and know the difference between them before choosing the right price.

SEO: The platform you will choose should provide SEO benefits, such as: link optimization, ease of navigation, site speed, mobile responsiveness, and be easy to use to provide a good user experience.

Customer Service: One of the most important points that must be ensured that the platform is available before choosing it, is the availability of customer service to help you if you encounter a technical problem, or a malfunction that occurs in your store as soon as possible.

The ability to customize the design: Most platforms offer ready-made templates and designs for your online store. But the platform should also offer the freedom to customize your store and modify its design if you want.

Security: Protecting the data of your customers is not optional, as customers enter many data from their first geographical location, for their payment data, so a high degree of security must be provided.

Help you grow: As your business starts to grow, you’ll need new, more advanced features. Verify that the platform provides this for you.