Sales website: The internet, in its constant evolution, provides agility to several products and services that are within reach of a few clicks. Several entrepreneurs are looking for the best solution to migrate their services from the physical environment to the digital environment.
One of the services that do the most success when migrated to the internet are virtual stores. A virtual store, or e-commerce service (sales site), works like a physical store. The customer has the possibility to browse the virtual catalog as if they were browsing the store’s physical stock. The customer has the possibility to use his virtual cart, linked to his account, to select the desired products. At the end of the process, you just need to provide some personal information from the user and the purchase will be in your customer’s store in a few days.
This is a type of process that many people, even the most lay users, are used to. However, there are several factors to create a sales site that is successful. From choosing the niche to choosing the infrastructure to maintain your website. In this article we will analyze what actually makes a sales site successful, what is the best use.
Sales site #1 – Your virtual store
1. Choose a type of product to sell.
If you already have a physical store and want to migrate to the virtual world, you will not need think about it a lot. You can migrate your physical catalog to the website that you will use to sell the products.
Now if you are willing to venture into this venture, and it is your first trip in this world, try to choose a type of product. After choosing a product and putting together your catalog with a diverse range of products of the same type, you will be able to win over customers who are used to consuming it. Although several successful retail stores, such as Amazon, have an extremely diverse range of products, these stores do not have their own stock, but a third-party stock. The service itself is just a logistics service. The case here is a niche sales website.
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2. Create your marketing strategy together with your customers’ persona.
Your website isn’t even live yet. But it is already worth thinking about the type of approach that your virtual store (sales site) will have with its customers. The first step is to define a persona for your customers. Persona is a digital marketing concept, a persona is a fictional person based on the personality of your customers. She has an age, hobbies, a social and cultural preference.
After you have your persona defined, start building your store’s visual identity based on it. Imagine that you are creating an online clothing store for an audience between 15 and 25 years old. If you use more serious marketing strategies like Inbound Marketing, less vibrant colors and ways to get in touch that your customers are not very adept at, your store will not reach your target audience. This can be a big loss.
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3. Define your domain.
By hiring a hosting service you can register a domain. A domain is a virtual address that represents the IP of the server where your website is hosted. Choose to choose domains that represent your virtual store, using the name or acronym of your store is a good option.
Try to hire a corporate email, which has the domain from your store to your email address. From there you can send emails and lists to your customers. This gives your customers a more professional image and prevents your domain from falling into blacklist.
4. Upload your stock and start operating!
Finally, just upload your catalog to your store’s website and define means of delivery to your customers. In addition, it is important to define a whole range of means of payment, which are safe and prevent later headaches. It is interesting to use corporate email to send copies of payment receipts. Corporate e-mail has a record of messages sent and received, in addition to having a backup of these messages, in case any of them are lost by accident.
Sales site #2 – The hosting
Although we mentioned the hosting above it Deserves a topic dedicated just to her. The reason for this? Quality hosting is always a determining factor in the success of your internet sales operations.
What is hosting?
Hosting is a service hired to store your website on a server and keep it online 24 hours a day. The internet works through connections between various computers and machines. The server is one of those machines. It is connected 24 hours a day, receiving requests and sending information to its customers. It’s what makes your website load on your customers’ computers, it’s what makes purchase and payment forms processed so that you can receive everything correctly, as well as send the products to your customers.
Choosing the right hosting makes these processes described above occur virtuously and quickly. Let’s do a case analysis, comparing two stores, one store will be called store A and the other will be called
loja B.
The choice of accommodation.
The store The decided to opt for the cheapest possible hosting choice. The service did not offer any type of corporate email, which has already impacted the store’s image for customers. The servers have shared storage, which means that only several websites are stored on one machine. The owner of store A thought this wouldn’t be a problem, because the product catalog isn’t that big.
A store B chose a more reliable service, hiring a fully dedicated server, a machine to store the entire store.
Both stores are a huge success, and compete with each other. However, store A ends up falling down, or going offline, several times a day, in addition to being very slow during customer access. The store B has an uptime rate (percentage that evaluates how long a site is on the air during a year), of 100%. This store works with surprising speed and can handle several simultaneous accesses.
A store B is coming out with an advantage, why? For better hosting. A shared server receives multiple hits from different websites. A large number of simultaneous accesses to these sites causes the server to be slow and not work properly, and may even crash and go down. A dedicated server, on the other hand, was made to withstand this kind of situation.
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See our article on the Main advantages of a dedicated server for the project.
Storage on SSD
In the cheapest service, used by store A, the server stores the information on a HD. A Hard Disk is a medium for storing information. It is considered a mechanical means, as there are mechanical parts to perform the magnetization of the disks present in the HD. Due to this factor, sending and receiving information becomes very slow. The slowness of the store A website makes customers end up migrating to other e-commerce sites, in addition to being penalized by the ranking and indexing of the Google, which prioritizes faster sites.
The website of loja B is hosted on a dedicated server that runs entirely on SSD storage. SSD is a completely electronic means of storing information. The speed of data recovery and treatment is extremely superior to the speed of a HD. Customers at store A noticed this at store B, and migrated from service.
The SSL certificate
The SSL certificate is a digital certificate that proves that the website you are currently on uses the HTTPS protocol to send and receive information. HTTPS uses encryption logic between your computer and the server where the website is stored. This makes the information exchanged, if stolen by a hacker, intelligible, having no use for the hacker with malicious intentions.
A loja A opted for hosting without SSL certificate. This caused some customer information to leak, causing legal problems for store A, in addition to users cutting off the service completely.
Already store B has an SSL certificate. Purchasing and exchanging information are completely safe, without generating any problems.
It is worth remembering that after creating your sales site, it is essential to be aware of promotional periods, such as Black Friday for example. Therefore, see how to prepare your site for peaks of access to promotional events, click here to check our article.
Conclusion
Opening a sales website is an entrepreneurial approach that generates many positive results. That’s if the site building and maintenance strategy works properly. The choice of hosting is the most important, due to the fact that it is the heart of the website, the part that will keep it running. Always choose the best service possible, as this choice will bring all the positive results you expect for your business! We work with dedicated servers, so your website is always up and your business continues to grow! In addition, we have a support team 24 hours a day, every day, to help you with any problem. Contact us to learn more about our services and solutions!
