5 Tips for Starting a Thriving WordPress eCommerce Site from Scratch

Everyone knows that WordPress makes it very easy and simple to create a new site. This is why it’s an extremely popular option for many individuals and businesses. There are more than a billion sites out there. The ease of creating content and launching the site on WordPress, without any technical or design background needed. So, it’s no doubt that WordPress is the way to go. Unfortunately, making sure that the site is successful takes more effort than simply creating it.

WordPress is now popular in the eCommerce industry due to the expansion of its capabilities into those markets and now allows for such things as drop shipping and automation. So if you’ve decided on launching an eCommerce site with the help of a WordPress platform, it’s important to do it properly to create a high-traffic site that will make your business money. After consulting with many other businesses and individuals who were in that same position, we’ve come up with 5 tried and true suggestions that you should follow to get great results for your business. All you need to do is follow these steps; make sure that you do each of these when starting out from scratch.

1. Get a web hosting option that is compatible with WordPress eCommerce

The first thing you need before building your site is finding the right web host – the foundation of any site. Take the time to research your different options for web hosting to make sure you’re getting the one that’s right for you. Determine what domain name you want to use and look at different web hosting solutions to find one that is reliable, meets the server requirements and customer support that you need for your business to flourish.

Look into WordPress hosting review sites to get started; you’ll get ideas about what solutions are reliable, which have the best customer ratings, different price points, and hosting plans. It’s important that you pick the most reliable foundation that you’ll be building your eCommerce business on so that it works exactly for your needs.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to the web hosting solution that meets your company’s needs, both now in the present and forecasted needs in the future, you will also have to get a domain name for your site that works for you. You’ll want this to be easy to spell for your customers. Make it brandable if possible, staying away from numbers, and which ends in either .com, .net, or .org. This is an important part of the process. You can’t change your domain name in the future. So, you want to think long and hard about what you’re choosing.

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2. Spend time doing product research

So you’ve followed the first suggestion and done some in-depth research into the best web hosting for your site. But the research process is not over yet. Now you have to turn your attention to researching the product process and drop shipping. You might not find this part too enjoyable. But rest assured it’s absolutely necessary and maybe the most important part of the process.

A common mistake made by new website owners is to immediately put up as many products as they can to make some quick sales on their new site. But this is actually not a good idea. The problem with this approach is that you’ll be wasting a lot of your time and cluttering up your new online store with products that aren’t selling.

Instead, you should consider a few things when you’re trying to think of what products to sell. Find out what the profit margin is for each of your products and set yourself a minimum % profit. Also, do your best to pick products that have highly ranked drop shippers, high-quality images and good customer reviews. Finally, select only products that will ship faster to keep your customers happy and loyal. These may seem like simple suggestions. But they’re almost guaranteed to increase your sales quicker at the start of your business. You should also be keeping your eCommerce store focused on one niche market to start with so all your products should be aligned with that.

3. Publish your WordPress eCommerce store and blog

Due to the popularity of WordPress with many businesses, it’s likely you’ll be using WordPress along with many plugins and features for your eCommerce store. It’s really easy to set up, as we’ve mentioned. Although there is still quite a bit to learn in terms of setting up your online store, processing orders, and keeping track of your customers.

Presumably, you’ll be using many of the premium plugins to help you with this. In addition, you should look at WordPress reference guides specifically designed to walk you through eCommerce site processes. You should be able to understand how to build your store, manage it, and understand the sales funnel concept. WordPress is a fantastic tool when used properly. It can make effortless for companies to publish content and products that build their relationships with their customer base.

The main thing to make sure your site is a successful one among the endless eCommerce sites out there is to have real brands and real products that meet a need or want that customers have. These are the sites that have put time and research into building their brand to make their customers feel like a part of a community or something bigger.

4. Research your competition to get a leg up

There is so much competition in the millions of websites, blogs, and online stores that exist today. So, it’s not enough to create your store and hopes you can make sales from it. It should go without saying that you need a successful marketing strategy for your brand and products. But more than that, you should be researching your competition. Look into what they are doing, how they are targeting their audiences and expanding to new markets to find out not only what they’re doing right and successfully. Also, try to figure out what they’re doing wrong that could be improved upon.

When you’re researching your competition, you should be looking for a number of different things, such as the products they are selling and the prices, as well as their ads on Google and Facebook. You should go in more depth than this, though, and also subscribe to their newsletter to find out about upcoming sales, see where their website and blog content ranks in search results, and more. Doing this regularly will help you develop your own site. You will know what you want to do to stay ahead of your competition. Start trying different ways to improve on what they’re doing, and the process will get smoother and smoother with time.

5. Turn your attention to SEO and remarketing

Once your online store has been up and running for a while, you’ll be getting pretty good information about your sales and customers. You can use this knowledge to invest your money in more targeted advertising to increase revenue. To do this, turn to two very popular platforms for increased sales and website traffic: Google and Facebook.

Google is excellent when it comes to search rankings and free traffic for your site. To use it to its full advantage you need to take the time to create great SEO content and backlinks. Facebook, on the other hand, is a fantastic tool for targeting the right audience due to demographic and interest information that’s available. They have a great self-service platform that has many remarketing options. For example, you can run advertisements on Facebook that will only be shown to people that have gone to your website and haven’t placed an order for a product. This is also a great time to look at how other brands are using social media and search engines for their eCommerce ads.

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Final Words

Do you want your WordPress eCommerce site to be successful? But you don’t know where to begin? Then, these five steps should help guide you. There are so many different moving parts to the process. But you should really focus on your product research and site structure. Once this is done, you can turn to the marketing side and look into different ways of controlling and improving your website traffic and the sales that you’re making every day on your eCommerce site. You should make sure to put emphasis on organic as well as paid traffic options.

There are so many eCommerce sites out there these days. So, you want to put as much research and time into yours as possible. Make sure it stands the best chance of success and stands out from your competitors.

This article is written by Michael Dehoyos. He is a web developer at the Ph.D. Kingdom, helps companies build their marketing strategies, eCommerce presence, and essentially start from the ground up. He also enjoys making a positive difference in people’s businesses.