When it comes to any business in any industry, not all businesses are created equal. The same can be said for Design and Marketing Companies. With that said, how do we define the best?
Business is not a finite thing, in fact, if business were a game, it would be an infinite one. There is no official way to measure who is better. Or is there? We have business awards, design awards, and a number of other ways to measure who is best in business, but these are still finite things within the infinite.
The best way to decide is by reframing the question – or adding to the end of it – Ask not “Who is the best Marketing Company?” but “Who is the Best Marketing Company for me? And my business?”
Truthfully, there is no one-size-fits-all company in any industry–which will be the best for you depends on your needs and circumstances. What’s your criteria for partnering with an agency?
One of the most important parts of teaming up with a company is working with people who believe what you believe. You can usually feel that in your gut. And from my experience, I would say trust your instinct!
Based on Google search results, below are five of the most visible design and digital marketing companies that do business in Invercargill, New Zealand.
Well, it’s us… Back9 Creative!
There’s no way of disputing it when you’re ranking number one on google for Best Marketing Southland! Especially when you have a featured Snippet!
At Back9 we’re a trusted agency in the digital marketing landscape of Invercargill, Back9 Creative was started back in 2011 by Phil & Alli Robinson. With the rise of digital technologies, they believed that without the huge budgets of global brands, the ‘traditional’ outbound way of ‘interruptive’ selling and marketing was no longer as effective.
As design-driven agency with a focus on Web Design, Custom Apps and Search Engine Marketing, Back9’s goal is to help is to help ambitious businesses grow and succeed by tapping into new technologies and new ways of thinking.
Market South Now Naked Creative
Market South was an award-winning marketing, communications, and graphic design company. A recent rebrand to Naked Creative, they still appear to be a full-service studio. This can include Branding, Web Design, Advertising Campaigns, Strategy, Copywriting, PR, Print, and more.
Market South was passionate about creating kick-ass brands and campaigns that drive sales and help their clients make more money! The new Naked approach is stripped back. Honest. Authentic. Naked Creative believes “Quite simply, our job is to sell more things, to more people, more often and at higher prices.”
As well as a full-suite of marketing and advertising services, they produce and own a range of products and publications focused on promoting Invercargill and the greater Southland region under their brand The Locals. Owner and Director Carla Forbes is a well-known Southland business personality and has held a number of roles on boards including the Southland Chamber of Commerce, where she was president. Forbes has also been the face of a number of local campaigns including, Stand up for SIT and The NZAS Tiwai Point Fight for Fairness campaign.
Market Elements
Market Elements offer Google Ads, Social Media Marketing, SEO and Web Design services. They have been providing marketing support and integrated marketing campaigns for small and small-medium businesses since 2010.
Market Elements say “It’s all about the relationship and the results for us. Most of our clients ask us to work with them well beyond their initial project, as they value the fact that we’re local and offer professional, independent advice and services”.
With team members collaborating from multiple locations, Market Elements do not appear to have a home base. However this can probably work to their advantage too. Lower overheads can mean more cost-effective pricing.
If you are a small or medium business then Market Elements are well worth touching base with to see if they can help you grow your business.
Digital Club
Digital Club, based in Invercargill, Southland, is a leading digital marketing agency dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes achieve their online marketing goals. Their comprehensive services include responsive website design, tailored SEO strategies, and targeted advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. With a mission to turn business aspirations into achievements, Digital Club focuses on guiding young entrepreneurs, revitalising existing businesses, and partnering with startups. Their transparent communication and client-centric approach ensure that each business receives personalised solutions to enhance its online presence and drive growth
Grow NZ Marketing
Grow NZ has recently shown up in Google for the Search query: Best Marketing Southland. They specifically say on their Landing page “We’re your Otago – Southland based marketing partner. Let’s work together to grow your business with strategic and savvy marketing”.
They may have over 20 years of successful experience with profitable marketing and to be fair they have managed to rank in Southland for this query. However the title in the google search result clearly says Bay of Plenty.
A quick search of the website shows they claim to have multiple locations and to be fair in the realms of digital marketing you don’t need to be in the same town these days – Or country… The question you need to ask yourself is. If this business is claiming to be based in Southland (and Otago) why do they not have an address here? And that being the case, how honest are they. If you don’t have a problem with businesses making misleading claims, then they may well be worth chatting to. If honesty and integrity are important to you, then you may want t give them a miss. Your call.
Who is the Best Marketing Company for me and my business?
So which design and digital marketing company that is based in Invercargill, is the best for you and your business? Well… That really depends on what you’re looking for.
At Back9 we strive to be the best digital marketing agency in Invercargill. Firebrand, Grow NZ and Market South aka Naked Creative, all aim to offer a full-service. From managing social media to building a brand new website they say they can do it. Netbranding and Market Elements appear to be more focused on the web side of things. That makes them good options if you are looking to go full digital and don’t need traditional marketing campaigns.
If you’re looking to partner with an agency for your marketing endeavours, it’s worth taking time to do the research! Check out each of these businesses and other Invercargill-based design and marketing companies. Look over their services and see if their style and tone match what you want for your own business. See how well their own efforts work. How well does their website rank? Do you like what they have done and what others are saying about them? At the end of the day, as marketing agencies, we all say we are experts. We all say that we can help your business succeed. Ultimately, the Best Marketing Company will be the one you feel most comfortable approaching. One thing is for certain, Taking time to find that right fit and work with credible, reliable businesses can save time and trouble later on. So it’s worth the effort!
Online ratings and customer reviews are one of the most important metrics to help first-time visitors decide to visit a company. Most review sites such as Google Reviews, Yelp, and Trip Advisor use a five-star rating system where 1 is the worst and 5 is the best. Something we’ve noticed, especially for local businesses, is that some satisfied customers are leaving low review scores, yet their review is nothing but praise. Some people have even admitted to never giving 5 star reviews. If you’re one of them, we hope this article will help change your mind.
A 3 star review is NOT a good review score. It means you were unhappy and that the business didn’t deliver on its promises and expectations. Even if you personally think 3 stars means a job well done, the majority of people see the scale a different way. Satisfied customers giving poor star ratings is frequent enough that we think that some people are misunderstanding what the star rating on some of these sites mean.
Happy customers giving those 3-star ratings could accidentally be harming a business they love. A couple of these for the same business could lower the online rating enough for people to not bother clicking in and reading more, all because satisfied or even regular customers rated it poorly. Are you one of them?
In late October 2019, a major shift happened with the way that Google comprehends search phrases known as the BERT Update. Google is constantly making updates, to the point that Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted that they make 3 updates a day on average. Most of the time, these are small, unnoticeable changes, but every once in awhile there’s a major shift that drastically shakes up the search results like new ways pages are crawled or new innovations like the featured snippet. BERT is one of these big updates.
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers–which sounds like they really wanted a specific acronym–an algorithm designed to better understand search terms. With the new update, approximately 1 in 10 searches were affected, and search engine results pages will have massive changes. This means that some pages that were ranking well fell sharply, while others rose. Is there anything you can do to make sure your site is helped instead of hurt by BERT?
What did the BERT update do?
The primary goal of BERT was for Google searches to understand “longer, more conversational queries or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning”. So what does that mean? As an example, if I was an American looking to move to New Zealand, I might search for “America move to New Zealand visa needed”. Previously, Google wouldn’t know how to understand “to” in the sentence so results would be a mix of articles about visa options for Kiwis going to America or visa options for Americans coming to New Zealand. Two very different sets of results. After the update, the results will only be the second option.
This is great news for the end user. While shorter, concise keyword searches like “best pizza” aren’t likely to change, longer searches like “Where can I find the closest doctor for a sprained ankle” may have new results. For these longer terms, search results will be more relevant and it will take less time to discover the right keywords or phrase order for people to find what they want. Everyone will start seeing better, more accurate results. It also means that many pages that are currently ranking high might not be anymore.
How can I optimise my content for BERT?
The simple answer? You don’t. Google’s goal has always been to provide the best, most useful search results to its users. Ideally, there would be no keyword confusion and your search would return several different helpful results you could go through to find the information that you want. BERT helps by having a better understanding of natural, conversational language and nuance. This means that Google will be better at understanding individual words in your search and how they relate to each other.
BERT and voice searches
Voice search as fluctuated in popularity over time, but is now steadily gaining popularity due to advancements in technology like SIRI, Google Voice Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. While BERT is still in the early days of release, changes to voice search are expected to be significant. The goal of BERT is to understand conversational language, and many people talk to their voice assistants more conversationally and in longer sentences; sentences that can now be understood better with the BERT update. This means voice search results should be more relevant and accurate now.
How does BERT affect business websites?
Overall, BERT is a great advancement for users. But what about your business? Do you need to change the content on your site? You might need to change your written content because of BERT; it depends on the way that you wrote it in the first place. The best practice is to write your content for humans, not to try and trick Google. Writing content because it’s helpful for users is basically future-proofing it against algorithm updates, especially if you write for the user and manage to rank well.
Writing for search engines, on the other hand, is an ever-changing game. Some people find exploits that trick Google by manipulating page layouts or by using other types of black hat SEO. And while these might seem to work short term, a major change to the search algorithm can cause all of those unhelpful, strangely-formatted pages to drop off the top results completely.
How can I improve my keyword rankings?
If you had some keywords drop in the results and you wrote the pages to be helpful, don’t panic right away! Take a look at your analytics and see if those pages were converting like they should. If you were getting high-traffic but few conversions or a high bounce rate, it could be because of terms that brought up your page that weren’t actually relevant. You might end up with fewer visitors, but those that come should be of higher quality.
If this isn’t the case, take a close look at your content and to see if it’s actually high-quality and helpful with those keywords in mind. The easiest way is to go straight to the source and look at Google’s EAT Guidelines for high-quality content. By following those guidelines the best you can, you’re more likely to have content that will rank well with BERT and future updates.
So how can you make BERT more likely to help than hurt your rankings? Make sure your content is high-quality and well-researched. Follow appropriate SEO guidelines. And write for humans! Of course, you could always contact the experts for blogs, copywriting, and other writing for your website and let us handle it for you and keep track of this and future updates. Get in touch now to get started.
When you’re out and about, you’ve probably noticed that it seems like people spend more time on their phones than they used to. And it’s true; the data backs it up. In the last four years, the amount of mobile data usage has quadrupled, and according to Google, mobile is now the go-to choice for browsing the net, and their mobile-first index is now in effect.
Yet, a lot of sites are still buggy or slow on phones and tablets. Speed is a huge issue. Nobody wants to sit around waiting for sites to load, and to help out, Google has created the AMP framework that anyone can adopt for their sites to load faster, but it has a few requirements your site must meet first.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and the goal is to make pages load lightning fast on tablets and phones. An AMP page is a simplified version of the code created specifically for mobile that is stripped down to optimise for speed. Pages using the AMP framework have a little lightning bolt next to them on the Google search results.
While this stripped-down code does come with some restrictions and limitations, for many business owners the speed advantage is worth the change. And for the most part, sites look and function the same as they did without AMP—only faster. AMP pages don’t allow custom JavaScript (unless in the amp-iframe) and have a size limitation for the stylesheet, and instead uses an optimised script that loads faster.
The AMP Logo
Are there other benefits to AMP pages?
The main benefit of AMP is to deliver lightning fast, amplified pages to users. But you might find that you get some other benefits as well, such as:
More likely to have a higher spot in Google when someone searches on mobile
Less load on your web servers so performance can go up
Potentially higher chance of display network ads being shown if your site has advertising
Chance to be featured at the top of Google results in the Top Stories Carousel.
AMP is great thing to implement on your site. Just keep in mind that it requires making changes to the code of your website, and it’s important to pay close attention to make sure it’s done right so your website keeps working. If you aren’t comfortable doing this or aren’t sure how to access or change the code, the team at Back9 has an experienced website development team that’s happy to help!
In the past, we’ve talked about how a website can be your hardest working employee. It works nights, weekends, and even holidays. As a point of reference or even a place to purchase products directly from, your website can make a substantial, measurable difference on your sales. When it’s well maintained and works properly of course. Website maintenance ensures that your website will continue working for years to come.
Is your site loading right?
Proper page loading is an essential part of having a functional website. Pages that aren’t working or redirect to a 404 page (Page not found placeholder) don’t provide any value to visitors. It can erode trust, especially if they encounter multiple broken pages on the same site.
Loading speed is another crucial thing to check for. People don’t want to wait around hoping that slow pages load anymore. Instead, they’ll be more likely to leave and do a Google search on the topic to find the content they’re interested in. A Google study says that over 50% of people will leave a site where the page takes 3 seconds or longer to load. So it’s important to check your pages regularly.
But just checking briefly on a desktop isn’t enough. Most people access the internet through their mobile device these days. Therefore, don’t neglect fast loading on mobile. Are the pages loading correctly? And what about the photos? A giant grey box isn’t going to appeal to most people. If you’ve spent the time and effort to get good-quality photos, it’s important that they get seen!
Keep your content up to date
If your business is still doing the same thing it’s been doing forever, it might not seem like there’s any point in updating your content. But you might want to take a closer look.
Have you hosted or attended any events lately? Did you talk about them on the site? Then make sure it wasn’t for one that happened several years in the past. What about your staff? Have you hired new people you want to talk about on your site? Can you upgrade your years of experience?
Checking your content for accuracy is important—both for your users and for your visibility online. Some websites go so long without updates that their About page still shows an old business name!
Refreshing or adding new content also signals to Google that your site is active, which can help boost your rankings. Ideally, aim to add new content every few months. At the very least, review your site occasionally to make sure nothing is outdated.
If you spot old or irrelevant info, it might be time for a bit of website maintenance. A few updates can go a long way.
What if my site has a complex issue?
You don’t know what you don’t know. And if you don’t know that your site’s having performance problems, how could you know how to start fixing them? To keep you in the know, we recommend giving your site a performance review every 6 months. This is much like you probably do with your staff.
In your review, track your site’s performance. Is it doing what it should? Are you getting the kind of sales that were projected? If you aren’t, there may be a bigger issue at play. If this is the case, you might want to check in with your website provider. They can see if there are any issues that they can make right or tell you how to fix. For more complex issues, you might need the help of professionals. However, if it helps get your site performing how it should be, it’s a good investment!
Shopping online is becoming less of a bonus and more of an expectation these days. While mega online stores like Amazon and eBay aren’t as popular here in NZ as they are in other countries, they won’t stay that way for long. With many big NZ chains already having online stores and Amazon AU now open to New Zealand, online shopping is becoming massive worldwide. COVID-19 showed us how convenient shopping online and having products delivered straight to our door can be. Now, it’s almost an expected feature. So how can you start to sell products online?
Why sell products online through your website?
Not long ago, it was common to find many businesses that list their products online but have no prices or options to buy on the site. The idea was that people would see a product they like, drive to the store to buy it, and maybe pick up a few other items while they’re already there. It might seem like a solid idea, but now it’s an outdated one. Websites can suggest great pairs of products right there while you’re shopping. And while a lot of people were resistant to shopping online, the COVID Pandemic forced it upon them–and a lot of people found they preferred it. In the US for instance, online shopping rates doubled compared to the 2 years previous, and the trend continues to go strong.
This means that when possible, businesses should be considering adding e-commerce options–options for purchasing products directly from the website–to make sure that customers can find what they’re looking for and can buy what they want easily. Having an e-commerce option lets visitors decide they want something and buy it on the spot. Without it, you could be missing out on people on the final stage of the Buyer’s Journey, the ones ready to buy now. If you have shipping options, you can also reach people across the country who would never come into your physical store. If you don’t sell online, you could be missing out from people from all over who want what you have to offer!
How to sell products online
Once you decide to start online, how do you get started? We’ve got you covered; simply follow these 9 steps to start selling products online!
Decide what items you want to sell online and choose an e-commerce platform.
Decide on and purchase an inventory management system.
Choose and purchase a payment gateway.
Build the website and integrate inventory management and payment gateway systems into your site.
Write out descriptions of all your items, take/upload images and videos, and publish them to the site.
Sort out a shipping option (if having items delivered).
Customise your checkout process to fit your ideal customers.
Preview and test your new online store and ensure that everything is working.
Refine and update your processes based on how customers buy products and use the site.
In this article, we’ll briefly cover each of the 9 steps. We’ve also covered each of these in more detail and we’ll link to the full article with more information at if you want to know more about any one of them.
1. Choose an e-commerce platform
An e-commerce platform is the place your website is built and how it is stored. Each e-commerce platform has its own ways of adding and displaying products along with advantages and limitations. Some platforms are designed specifically for certain industries or business sizes. Others are more general purpose.
The right choice for you will depend on the number and type of products you plan on selling, how comfortable you are with technology, your budget, and who you want to build your website.
Who will build your website?
For most businesses, budget is the most important factor for the website. Your budget determines who builds your website and how much money you have to invest in it. If you have a small budget but a lot of time, you’ll probably want to use a platform like Shopify. With these platforms, you choose a templated site and simply change the elements like the logo and pictures to fit your brand. These are relatively easy to use; however, you’ll be limited in customisation and features. Getting found on Google through SEO will also be more challenging without added plug-ins, most of which are on a paid subscription plan.
If you have a higher budget and want a professional to build your website for you, a custom option like WordPress with WooCommerce will be better. With these sites, your website design will be structured around your brand and how your customers use the site. This means you’ll likely have higher conversion rates and the site will feel more natural to your users. A professionally-built custom site takes longer to make but it will be unique to you.
While you might be able to try to keep track of your inventory with a notebook and a pen, it’s a lot of trouble that can be automated away with an online inventory management system. Depending on your business size, a simple database manager may do the trick, or you might need a comprehensive digital suite to make sure everything is handled properly.
Using an online inventory management keeps track of how many of each product you have left and allows you to quickly change prices for sales. Many will also automatically track sales numbers and create reports comparing month-to-month performance. A solid offering will also integrate with your in-store stock so you don’t have to try to coordinate stock manually. There on many to choose from, we’ve covered some of the best inventory management systems in NZ in a quick comparison below.
Multiple currencies, full sales and costing analysis, vehicle industry special features
Inventory Management Systems in more detail
Want to know more about inventory management systems? We cover some more of the basics about these systems and go into more detail about each of them in the above table in our article Best Inventory Management for Selling Products Online.
3. Choosing the right payment gateway
If you decide to sell products on your site, protecting sensitive customer information is one of the most important things that you can do. While website maintenance can protect some of your customer details, financial information should never be in a position to be compromised, and using a decent payment gateway makes sure hackers and data thieves shall not pass through.
There are many different payment gateways to choose from, each with different upfront and per-transaction costs. But there’s more to consider than simply cost. Some offer better service or incentives, while others aim to provide the service for the lowest cost, but have minimal customer support or extras. To help with your decision, take a look at a quick comparison of some of the best payment gateways in NZ.
Customisable checkout, API Integration, Batch Processing, Subscription Payments, Direct Bank Transfer, Phone and PDF payment options
More about payment gateways
Payment gateways can be confusing at first glance. Why exactly do you need one and what are the benefits? We cover how payment gateways work and more information about the ones we listed above in the article Best Payment Gateways for Selling Online.
4. Building the website
Once you decide to sell products online and have chosen an e-commerce platform, you need to build the website. As we mentioned above, you need to decide if you want to build the site on your own or have someone do it for you. Depending on your chosen e-commerce platform, building it on your own may not be the best choice. Platforms like Squarespace and Shopify focus on simplicity and ease of use. In contrast, WordPress offers greater versatility, but you’ll trade some user-friendliness to get it.. While this makes it more challenging for a standard user, a professional web developer has many more options with this route.
When possible, we recommend having an expert build your site. They simply have the experience and skills to ensure the site functions properly. Your site will also be up and running faster. Some website building companies also include ongoing updates like adding products or optimising for SEO. Of course the more services you choose to include, the more the site will cost. We go over basic website costs and what causes them to increase in more detail in our article How much does a website cost?
Having a professional build the site isn’t for everyone. For some, the initial investment is simply too high. Others like full control of all content on the site. If you aren’t sure which option is best for you, our article When should I hire a professional to build my website may help.
5. Product description, images, and videos
This part of the process is where many people trip up. Depending on the number of items you plan to sell, it can frankly be overwhelming to create the content for it. If you are a reseller with thousands of products for instance, how can you possibly take the time to write out a description and upload high-quality, relevant product images for each of them? Doing this for all products might seem like an endless task. Even some of the major retailers in New Zealand have trouble doing this for every product!
How to handle large inventories to sell products online
There are a few ways to overcome a large inventory to sell products online. One is by using a growth-driven design philosophy. With a traditional website building process, you’d build every page and add every product before making the site live. Then every couple of years or so, you’d do a major site upgrade such as changing the entire design.
With a growth-driven philosophy, you start out by publishing a functional website and continually improve it over time. You might start out with a limited stock of your most popular products and add more over time. This will allow people to buy online sooner, then you add more products when you can. With this method, each product can have an excellent, thorough description and high-quality images. You can even add a video demonstration when applicable too, as product demo videos are the most effective way to convince people to purchase. You can find out more about growth-driven design in our article How Growth-Driven Website Design Works.
Another option is that some inventory management systems allow you to import this information directly from suppliers. This can greatly simplify the process, especially when you have a massive inventory. While this ensures that your product information is accurate and added quickly, it will also make it the same as any of your competitors that do the same thing.
Professional content creators
Finally, you can have professional content creators help do this step for you. Professional copywriters can help give you compelling, unique descriptions and combined with product photography can help you have a consistent look, tone, and feel for your products. For some of your best products, a product demonstration video can be extremely powerful. You can also have some of your products updated by content creators while others are imported automatically.
No matter which method you decide to do, having a solid product inventory to accompany your website launch will help your customers make informed decisions and increase your sales percentages too!
6. How to handle shipping
Shipping can be extremely complicated. As a store owner, you have to do a lot of planning to make sure everything goes smoothly. New Zealand makes this even more challenging with different rates depending on the island and rural vs urban delivery. Because of this, some e-commerce sites in urban centres choose to avoid shipping altogether. However, this also greatly limits your reach to people nearby. Plus, most people expect home delivery when buying online these days.
If you do decide to have products ship, there are several things to sort out. Among these are choosing a courier company (or companies), product packaging and labelling, emails and tracking information that goes to customers, and of course the price.
Finding the sweet spot for shipping might take some time. You may not get it right when you launch the site and might need to adjust it to cover your costs. Or if it’s too high, you may need to lower it to entice customers to choose you. Many studies show that free shipping is best incentive a customer can get. But a business owner, that may not be practical or even possible if you want to make a profit.
Nobody likes long, convoluted checkout processes. Unfortunately, this is the default option for some website templates. If you have a customisable website, however, you can change this.
Ideally, you want your site to be as easy as possible to use. What makes the site easy depends on the type of customers you have and how they use your site. For instance, having something like Apple Pay on an individual product so a customer can buy a single product and complete an order on the product page might make sense. Or having an option to make an account where customers can reorder the same products with a few clicks might increase sales.
Including special business pricing or the option to pay by invoice might be ideal for B2B businesses instead. There are limitless features you could add, but choosing which ones you should add depends on who is using your site and how they are using it.
These kinds of steps can be addressed when making your business plan or when developing buyer personas. A process like a digital marketing roadmap can help you identify your actual customers and how to best reach them.
8. Testing and reviewing your site
Before you publish your site and make it live to the world, you need to make sure all the processes work as expected. For site builders, most of the functionality will be built-in. Just make sure that purchase order emails etc go to the right place and you’ll probably be good to go.
If you’ve manually connected your own inventory management and/or payment gateway systems, you’ll also want to run through various scenarios and test purchases. These systems have fake credit card details you can use to test purchases without them actually going through, so do as many as you want! Ensure that everything works as expected and all of the emails, tracking information, and everything else goes to the right person.
Once everything is all good, make your site live!
9. Updating and refining the site
The easier and more intuitive your website is to use, the more likely a potential customer is to make a purchase. A good website is like staff--and can even be your best salesperson! And like staff, a performance review can help show your website’s strengths and areas where it can improve.
Your website is an investment. While it might seem like a relief to publish it and not worry about it anymore, there’s still a lot you can do. With a data-driven approach, you review the data of your website and make changes based on what the numbers show. And with websites, there is a ton of data.
Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can how many people visited any page or product on your site. If you’re running Google Ads and have it connected properly you can see your cost vs revenue at a glance for all of your campaigns. Then if one isn’t performing as expected, you can adjust it until it does.
Website Audit tools
A website audit tool can help make sure your site doesn’t have errors like broken links or products with no prices. Facebook Ads has Insights to show you which ads are bringing in visitors. You can even use a tool like Hotjar that shows you an image snapshot of each page and where on the page people keep their mouse the most and what links are most clicked.
It’s a bit of work up front, but having the option to sell products online can open you up to a whole new segment of the market! So once you’ve looked through everything you need to do to sell online, then what?
First, make sure you have a business plan, especially if you’re a new business that doesn’t have a customer base. We cover some other startup items in our article Selling online – Where to Start with eCommerce? From there, if you want to build the site on your own, follow the instructions from your chosen e-commerce platform. Most of them have guided tutorials to help you get started and walk you through the essentials. If you want to have a professional build a site, many marketing agencies combine website development and ongoing marketing in one place. Our article How to choose the right marketing agency for your business can help you see what to look for when searching for your team.
Start with a plan
If you’re unsure about doing any of these steps on your own or would rather have an experienced team handle getting your store ready to sell products online for you, we can help. We recommend starting out with our guided digital marketing roadmap where we cover your goals and help you make a plan on how to achieve them. We’ve helped several stores get online, from small local businesses with a few products to working with stores with massive inventories that ship throughout the country. And we can help you too! Many of our e-commerce stores have seen their sales increase over 100% in a year.
Selling online takes planning, time, effort, and funds to get started. But it helps you bring in new customers, increase sales, and provide more value to your website visitors.
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