How to speed up your webStore Time-to-market?

Trying to be perfect - is one of the most common pitfall small businesses fall into when it comes to kickstarting their new webStore. Follow this simple strategy to kickstart your online store fast and we will explain why start selling fast is critical to your success too!

Got 1000 products? Don't try to put all at once! here's why!

Let's assume you have an inventory of 1000 product, and you will need to snap all the products pictures by yourself since the lousy suppliers didn't provide any! This can be a very tedious task which might easily take a few months! Even if you are well-prepared with red bull, this can be a real energy drainer!

Luckily, there's a better way to do it.

Rule of thumb, when you are just starting up, input 5~10% of the total inventories (Eg 50 out of 1000 products) which are unique, hot selling or highly sought-after (means people actively searching for it).

Notice from the simple illustration we draw, eventually, the total timeframe to input ALL products will be almost identical (we assume about 3 months). But if you put up some products first, you start 2 months earlier in promoting your webStore and it can gives you a real traction in boosting your sales!

 

Focus on the 7 Key Actions to Start Selling Fast

Also, don't try to be perfect on the design, because it can never be. It's not like we are saying good-look doesn't matter, it does. Thus, webShaper Stores come equipped with nicely done, ready-to-used ecommerce templates at no extra cost, and we have clients running million dollar business just using our standard look!

Bear-in-mind, spending too much time on tweaking your look without "courting customers" is useless. What really matters is they 7 key must-do-now actions below:

1. Put up 5~10% of your total products offering.
2. Setup your payment methods.
3. Setup your Shipping Calculation (webShaper supports shipping calculation by Quantity or Weight)
4. Explain the way you do business.
   - Privacy policy, Shipping policy, Top 10 reasons to buy from you, bla bla bla...
5. Run test order on your webStore.
6. Start Marketing the webstore.
7. Continue your remaining products upload (Consistently)

Launch it Fast & The Real Benefits

Getting up fast can offer you great advantages to your operation, marketing, and even search engine ranking for your webStore! Here's how:

Operation: You don't need to stack up Red Bull or 100 plus. The moral of the team is high as you see your hardwork transformed into a full-fledge webStore in just weeks!

Marketing: You can market your webStore earlier, get feedback earlier, rectify what-not-work earlier, get more traffic earlier, get your 1st sales earlier and customer base growing much faster! A virtuous cycle starts! Essentially, you buy a lot of valuable time and stay ahead of the competition!

SEO: When you start promoting your webStore, search engines will start crawl it. (for new webStore, submit your webStore to search engines following the SEO Guide) If you consistently upload more new products (these are treated as fresh content), you will "train" the search engines to come back and crawl your webStore more frequently and thus your web page indexed get refresh more frequently, and it is one of the factor which will help you rank better in organic search results.

See how this simple strategy can give your small business a headstart!? And don't forget to checkout the must-see SEO Guide for webShaper Stores too. Hope to see your webStore up and running soon!