Your website’s ready to shine in the digital world!
It’s designed well, all the products are there, and you’ve set up all the necessary functionalities. Even when you think you’ve done it all, there’s always that feeling that you’ve missed out on something. Down the road, you might find an essential that you didn’t even know was important.
It’s alright, it happens to the best of us.
To help eCommerce owners avoid that dreaded, “did I miss something” we’ve compiled an eCommerce checklist. We would highly recommend you going through this checklist in its entirety.
Even if you’ve already compiled a checklist, it’s best to skim through the article. Who knows, you might find something that you didn’t even think was important. So, to avoid the FOMO, here’s ten things you need to do before you launch an eCommerce store.
Table of Contents
1. Have You Set Up A Presence on Social Media?
If you’re running an eCommerce store, it is absolutely imperative that you are active on social media.
Social media (particularly, Facebook and Instagram) are the major places through which stores generate traffic and sales. This is also the place where users will find out about your products.
Creating a compelling social media profile or page that has the same username through all social channels.
Instead of going through particular channels, it’s best to adopt a multichannel social media strategy. This involves creating profiles and being active on all popular social media channels.
While it is tough to manage multiple social media accounts, it’s best to span out your social media efforts to make it as effective as possible.
Sure, you can’t be active everywhere all the time but having a branded name can save you lots of trouble if you find out that a particular social media channel offers more traffic than the one’s you’ve already selected.
Lastly, it’s best to have customized profile pictures and cover images. This helps in making the brand stand out from the crowd and is an essential part of your social media marketing strategy.
2. Do You Have Backup If Things Go South?
We cannot emphasize the importance of having a backup of your site.
Regardless of whether you have a WooCommerce, WordPress, or even a Magento website, you need to have a backup in case things go wrong.
How can things go wrong?
- You might decide to make some customizations to your site and you tweak something that causes the site to break.
- Your site might get hacked and you decide to revert it to an older version. If you had backed up, you will have a working copy of your site available.
- You decide to switch hosting accounts and want to ensure a smooth migration so you back up.
Among others, these are some of the reasons why you should have a backup tool on your website. If you have a WooCommerce store, it’s best to download a plugin like BackWPup or VaultPress to ensure smooth backups.
3. Have Your Established Shipping Options?
You’ve established the payment options, but have you considered shipping options?
Shipping is detrimental in ensuring the legitimacy of your store. Your customers can exit your store if you have an expensive shipping gateway. Worse, they might switch to a competitor offering the same product with reduced shipping charges.
If you want to ensure a smooth conversion rate for your store, it’s best to offer lower shipping charges or a flat shipping rate. You can even go the distance and absorb the shipping expenses at your end to ensure customer conversion.
So, before you launch your store, it’s best that you establish a shipping strategy that offers significant value to the customer and entices them to purchase.
4. Have You Performed That Second Audit?
You’ve performed the necessary site audit and everything is looking good. You’re ready to launch your site and display it to a digital audience.
But wait! Before you take it live, it’s always best to be vigilant and perform an in-depth site audit. Since you won’t get another chance like this, it’s best to do it before you take your site live. Make sure everything is alright to the smallest detail.
As a primer, here’s what you can do:
- Check that all the web copy is accurate and without spelling errors
- Check whether or not the links are working correctly
- Check if your product page content is compelling or not
- Have you added accurate contact information?
- Are their links to your social media handles and do they direct properly?
5. Are Your Monitoring Your Site?
Once you’ve taken your site live, there’s just one important thing that you need to do.
Set up Google Analytics.
It’s a performance measurement and analytics tool that gives you tons of information related to your site. The level of traffic, the number of people coming in and going out, and more.
It’s free and easy to set up. All you have to do is set up an analytics account and paste a tracking code to your site’s code – that’s it! Once you’ve done that, you’ll be well on your way in measuring the performance of your site at every level possible.
We cannot stress its importance enough. Down the road, it’s going to be an important tool in your woocommerce b2b. Because of this, it’s best to have it installed beforehand.
There are plenty of great, and in-depth tutorials available online. Be sure to check them out for more information on how the platform is run.
6. Do You Have a Newsletter?
There is no denying the power a newsletter has in gaining conversion and retargeting existing customers.
The importance of email marketing is two-fold. Not only are you able to retarget your existing customers with new offers and discounts, but being in your customer’s inbox regularly also is very effective in creating a brand image.
While all that’s very fine and dandy, you should never forget the cardinal rule of email marketing, which is to not spam.
Tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact are two powerful WordPress plugins that you can use on your WooCommerce store to power up your email marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Your WooCommerce store is your digital identity. Because of this, it’s imperative that you don’t take any chances with it before you’re about to launch. In this article, we just went over some of the considerations to look at pre-launch.
While they may look less in number, you will find that once you start performing audits and checking the site for errors, you’ll identify more bugs in your website.
Lastly, we just have to say that it’s best to stay vigilant for all your site efforts.
Author bio:
Nabeel Al Ahmed – Being a Passionate tech Savvy and WordPress community expert at Codup.co actually helping people to take guides from my case studies, savvy I always love to share my knowledge and tech experience for ecommerce development agencies playing with the analytical data and digging into useful insights is his most favorite thing to do. Besides work, passionate about contributing to the communities and helping others.
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