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Five questions to answer before taking your shop online

If you are a business owner who wants to turn their business into an e-commerce platform, take a look at the following questions! Answer them before you go ahead and start developing the e-commerce platform. 

 

  1.  What's the vibe of your business? 

Is it high fashion and sharp, or chill and mellow, or rather professional and clean? Each shop has its own vibe, and this will help you and the website designer pick the appropriate theme colors and design elements for your website. This can be decided based on your brand's primary clients, their approach towards your shop, and how you want to make an impression. 

 

  1.  What are the product categories? 

On an e-commerce platform, it's important that your products are clearly labelled, priced and categorized correctly. A clearly stated list of all the available categories helps the user look for what sort of products they require easily. This also helps them understand if your shop is correct for them and prompts them to discover more products, they might be interested in.  You can also put up some special collections of products which might attract the users; for example, seasonal collections, essentials collections, quick-buy collections, etc. get clicked often on clothing e-commerce websites. 

 

  1.  What payment options are available? 

This question can be make or break for some customers! If the customer's preferred online payment vendor isn't available on the platform, they might abandon their carts. As an online platform, your shop should cover the maximum possible payment options. You can have a look at multiple available payment gateways that integrate readily with e-commerce platforms like CC Avenue, PayPal, Razorpay, Stripe,etc., Please read through the pre-requisites, policies and commission rates of these platforms and see which ones fit your shop the best. Apart from online payment systems, you can also have the option of payment on delivery. This option is viable if you manage the deliveries yourself or your shipment vendor provides this feature. This adds another option to the payment methods for users that are uncomfortable with or can’t perform online payments. But be careful before you go ahead and add this option to your shop as this involves risk and requires a lot of management for payment confirmation. Preferably, only go ahead with this if your current business model provides payment on delivery already. 

 

  1. How will you manage communication with the customers? 

Once an order is placed on your online shop, you need to communicate with your customers and update them with the status of their order. There can be multiple stages of processing that the order goes through like 'Order Accepted', 'Order Under Process', 'Order Shipped', 'Order Received', and even like 'Order Canceled', 'Order Returned'. Whenever the order's status changes, the customer needs to be communicated with. Now, based on your customer base and their general behavior, there can be multiple communication channels. All e-commerce platforms provide automatic email updates for the customer on the email that they have used while purchasing. For non-tech-savvy customers, SMS updates can be added to the platforms for short and quick updates. Services like WhatsApp updates can also be integrated directly integrated into the platform. For more personal and customized updates, you can also set up a call update service. 

 

  1. How will you manage cancellation and returns? 

You have to look out for order cancellation and return requests frequently on the platform! You will get a notification for such status changes from the platform and you will need to set up a standard procedure for the same. The primary requirement is to have a crystal-clear policy document for cancellation, returns and refunds. This policy page should have a prominent link on your platform along with your Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions pages. Many times, Returns and Refunds Policy Page is a requirement if you want to sign up for a payment gateway for your shop. 

 

Now that you are clear on these five questions for creating your e-commerce platform, you can go ahead and talk with an e-commerce developer and get going! 

 

Zerovaega Technologies has created multiple e-commerce platforms for various customers in different domains. We have the expertise to help you take your shop online smoothly and swiftly. We have a wide range of solutions for your requirements- websites, Android apps, iOS apps, delivery management apps, shop manager's apps built for platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart and Wix. 

 

Connect with us today for a digital transformation of your business! 

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