Get started easily. How to promote an online shop

Oise Trade company

Let's say you've set up an online shop for children's products. Don't try to promote products from all categories at once. Identify a few products that have the potential to generate the most sales and promote them. Focus on one particular source of traffic. This approach is particularly important if you have a limited advertising budget (most aspiring entrepreneurs do).

SEO promotion, contextual advertising, targeted advertising, social networking promotion - all of these can be used later. Without extensive promotion, it is impossible to achieve high website conversion rates. Remember that SEO promotion does not produce results immediately, but only after the robots have indexed your site, compared it with similar sites and assigned it a certain position in the search engine. SEO promotion is a long game. And when you are just starting out, you need customers now - so it is better to start with contextual or targeted advertising.

Promoting an online shop and the products it contains is the main task of a dropshipper. In a series of posts on the Oise Trade Limited blog, we will tell you what tools you should use to be successful. Let's start with general tips that will be useful for entrepreneurs who are just starting out in the dropshipping business.

In particular, today we will look briefly at

Advertising budget;
Unique selling proposition;
Website usability;
Customer base.

Don't spread your advertising budget too thin

Answer the question: why should the product be bought from you and not from your competitors? What makes your offer better than the competition's? If you can't answer this question, how can potential customers choose your online shop? Your USP should convince them that they should buy from you and not from another shop.

A unique selling proposition will help you stand out from the competition. Emphasise usefulness, uniqueness and specificity for potential customers. Avoid generic phrases: 'We are cheap', 'We are of high quality'. A well-crafted USP allows customers to understand how they will benefit from your offer. 'With us you will halve your costs in a month'. This slogan immediately tells them what will happen and in what time frame.

Create a unique selling point

An e-commerce platform should first and foremost please the visitor, not the shop owner. Otherwise, there is a high probability of failure: there is an online shop, but there are no sales. And all because your potential customers cannot normally use the site, because it is inconvenient, not adapted to mobile devices and the ordering process takes a long time. Under these conditions, your site's conversion rate will be close to zero.

Usability of the site

Collect information about your customers: email addresses, phone numbers, messenger contacts. These people have already bought something from your shop, so the audience is already characterised by a certain level of loyalty. How do you collect data? In the product order form, provide fields for the customer to enter contact information. You can use this data to remind them of you, for example, to inform them of discounts or exclusive offers. Remember: the cost of acquiring a new customer is always higher than the cost of retaining an existing one.

In future articles on the Oise Trade website, we will look in more detail at how to promote and advertise online shops.

Create a customer base