Growing your on-line business is especially important right now. I am a big advocate for having an online business. Yes, you can also sell to stores but with the current buying climate impacted by the Pandemic and brick and mortar stores suffering you really need to have a website that people can buy from. At the very least you have a way to create sales that are not reliant upon a third party. Let’s face it, this method of selling fashion has been growing in leaps and bounds. Even if sales are not equal to the amount you sell wholesale the margins are greater.
In order to build this business you must do several things to optimize your success. Keep the following in mind as you create your e-business.
- Make sure your website is easy to understand and operate. The easiest way to get someone to leave your site is to make it hard to find things they are looking for. The navigation should be simple to use and self-explanatory. A simple site is the most effective. Dan Veltri, co-founder and chief product officer of Weebly, advised limiting your top-level navigation menu to five clearly labeled tabs with related pages organized under them.
- A good website should also have quick load times. You don’t want someone to fall asleep waiting for you website to open. Abandoned rates increase dramatically if a page takes to long to load.
- Ensure that it is mobile friendly. This means your regular website shrinks down to be small enough to display on a mobile device. Your load times need to be fast here as well. Business Insider Intelligence predicts m-commerce volume to rise at a 25.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019 to hit $488.0 billion, or 44% of e-commerce, in 2024. And there are two key devices driving the m-commerce revolution: smartphones and tablets.
- Good photography is key to success. Have you ever seen of photograph of food and you wanted to eat the food immediately? You salivated from looking at the picture. Or maybe you saw a dress that looked stunning on a model and you wished you could look exactly like her. In fact you bought the dress in the hopes that it would make you look like the women in the photograph. Perhaps you saw a photo of a jacket made of luxurious leather that made you wish you could touch because it looked so soft. It could be a scarf that the color was so vibrant you just knew you had to own it. That is what good fashion photography will do. It will entice you customer to purchase your product. Don’t skimp on this because bad photography means low sales.
- Develop a consistent social media presence that is attractive and engaging. Social media is a wonderful way to build your audience. It helps you create an emotional connection to your customer. Inject personality into your posts. You want to develop relationships not just followers. Considering this is a visual business. No matter where you’re posting, photo and video content that is interesting and visually appealing will get the best results.
- Use Google and/or Facebook and/or Instagram ads to drive people to your site to buy. Ads is one of the is one of the most cost effective ways to advertise your product while growing your in-line business. Social media platforms provide a multitude of services to aid advertisers in their efforts to reach users. You can target consumers as widely or as narrowly as you’d like. Then you can create the right message for the right person. A/B testing allows you to continually refine your ads till you get the best ROI. Studies have shown that this method of advertising creates sales.
Just remember that marketing your website is without a doubt necessary to building your business. It’s like opening a store in the basement of a building. If people don’t know your there they won’t come in.