E-commerce business has grown rapidly over the last few years. With the growth of online shoppers, more brands have expanded their retail business by allowing their customers to shop their products online.

If you are thinking about starting an e-commerce website, here are some tips to keep in mind:
1. Invest In Your Brand
If you’re serious about being a successful e-commerce business, you need to look the part. A self-made site with a cheap logo is probably not going to convince the customer that you’re a legitimate and trustworthy business. A professional web designer will understand how visitors interact with your website and how a design can affect your online business.
2. Make Your Website User-Friendly
Understand that people are logging onto your website to find products and buy them. Make it easy for them. The less the customer has to think, the more they can focus on their shopping. Having simple and consistent navigation and easy-to-manage account facilities are very important features.
3. Update Your Website Daily
Keep things interesting and your customers coming back by updating your website on a daily basis. This could include daily tips, editor’s picks, special offers, coming soon products, etc. The more you update, the more regularly your customers will return.
4. Send Newsletters Regularly
Send out an e-newsletter at least once a week. Even if you have nothing new to advertise, you can highlight products that are coming soon, editor’s picks or create special offers for subscribers. This ensures customers don’t forget about your website, drives traffic to it and allows you to promote special offers and sales. Make sure you invest in a good email marketing service and a well-designed template.
5. Stay Ahead Of The Competition
In this fast-paced age of technology, your website should stay up-to-date and adopt new technologies. This may involve refreshing your website slightly every so often, or a complete makeover over a longer span of time. Make sure this is factored into your budget as part of your overall business strategy.
6. Manage Your Site Full Time
Running a successful e-commerce website is not a part-time job. Treat it as you would a proper business, and hire an e-commerce content manager to manage your web strategy. If they get it right, it won’t be long before you see a return of investment.
7. PR Is Vital
This should be part of your e-commerce content manager’s job. Part of their web strategy should involve spreading the word about your website by getting it featured on blogs, buying ad space and being featured on news sites, and offline advertising. Building strong relationships with blogs and news sites aimed at your target audience can be very useful. Your e-commerce content manager should also be up to speed with pay-per-click advertising as it can be very effective.
8. Have Great Customer Service
Nothing puts a customer off like a bad shopping experience. Make sure your orders are delivered promptly, and that any enquiries or complaints are dealt with quickly and positively. Chances are, if a customer has a good experience with you, they will happily spread the word.
9. Install Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to monitor your stats, see where your visitors are coming from, which pages they spend most time on, track conversions on sales and more. By analysing these stats, you will be able to determine what you’re doing right and wrong. Don’t forget to take note of how website updates and sending out newsletters affect your analytic trends.
10. Don’t Rely Solely On SEO
Good SEO is effective but manipulating search engines into awarding you a high ranking is not a method you should rely on to generate business. Relying solely on SEO to generate a bulk of your business is risky, as Google can decide to significantly drop your ranking any time.

Redfire specialises in custom design E-Commerce websites including Magento E – Commerce, WordPress E-Commerce, Joomla E-Commerce and VirtueMart. Our process is about integrating great design, functionality and simple to use content management systems that make it easy for you to manage and also easy for customers to shop.