Are you looking to take your current brick and mortar business into the e-commerce world? Are you wondering what is needed to get your business online and specifically sell your products?
Well, Delta Decisions is here to answer all your questions and to make the transition as smooth as possible.
The transition from selling in your store to selling on a website is absolutely frightening for some people. They are nice and comfortable selling to people in person, making the sale to a real live person. However, you realize that you are limited to your general area and that you are missing a huge opportunity to sell your products to anyone in the world with an e-commerce website.
You ask yourself, “Where do I start?” Here is the answer for you
You got a great Ottawa business selling great products. Let’s assume you don’t even have a website (yes it is still true today, that even an informational website for some people has not become a priority).
Step 1 – Get yourself a domain, hosting and an e-commerce website. We will come back to getting those items setup in another blog post later.
Now that you have your Ottawa e-commerce website up and running and Delta Decisions has built you an amazing storefront, it’s time for the real fun to take place.
You first need to decide if you are going to load all your store products, perhaps just a subset, or perhaps just a handful to start. Either way, we will be able to get you up and running in this area.
Remember in general the more products you have, the more information your site contains, and Google will generally like your site more when you have lots of content (products and categories).
Step 2 – Shipping and Taxes: There are many options when it comes to charging shipping to your clients. Our Ottawa ecommerce solution has the ability to have manually entered rates, or you can connect your website to real-time shipping rate calculators from Canada Post or UPS. Regardless, now is the time to think if you want to sell and ship your products in your country or abroad. If you feel that there may be too many problems with shipping, you may start with Canada only for example and expand from there.
As for taxes, always best to check with your accountant for their recommendations. Obviously in your brick and mortar store when you have a customer come in from Vancouver for example, you will charge him the Ottawa standard HST rate of 13%. The question then becomes for the online Vancouver shoppers do you want to charge 13% or not. Generally we recommend that you charge 13% to all provinces on sales since the business is in Ontario.
Step 3 – Add products/categories. This is where the fun begins. Our custom e-commerce solution will allow you typically within one or two clicks to add a new category, a new product, edit an existing product, add a new image, change the price and a ton more general e-commerce features.
Step 4 – Turn the site live and let the world know about your great products and great prices. What we recommend once the site is up and running is to start a basic promotion that gives 10% off the customer’s first purchase for example. This is a good way for people to come and see what your site has to offer. We can help setup this promotion (again in 1 click) and then your job is to promote it to friends and family and of course regular store customers. We also want to take advantage of social media feeds to push that out to everyone possible. We will discuss that in another great post titled “social media marketing for my e-commerce website”.
Looking for some great Ottawa e-commerce websites:
