The Covid crisis has caused a paradigm shift in how households do their daily and even seasonal festive shopping. Gone are the days of throngs of people rushing to retail stores looking for the best deals and discounts. As awful as the Covid crisis is for physical stores, it has resulted in a major boost for online retailers.
After all, online stores are immune to the strain of these troubled times and don’t have to abide by social distancing or other restrictive practices. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday fast approaching, you can still set up or spruce up your online business with GoDaddy’s various tools designed to help you achieve more sales and provide a smooth user experience.
In addition to being the world’s largest and most trusted domain name registrar, GoDaddy also provides various services such as Websites + Marketing which can help you quickly put together a professional looking website without breaking the bank. Not only that, GoDaddy’s Online Store and suite of e-commerce centric offerings can help you turn your website into an online marketplace.
1. Add products
GoDaddy’s Website Builder lets you add as many as 5000 products to your website. You can also add as many as 10 images for each product. The Website Builder Dashboard provides an easy and intuitive interface that helps you manage various aspects for the different products without becoming overwhelmed.
For instance, you can provide material, size and colour options for your products. The drag-and-drop interface lets you rearrange the order of the different options and even define a default option. For instance, you can set Medium as the default size for a product.
Depending on the type of product on offer, you can also provide users the option to select add-ons such as choosing to gift-wrap the product, or specify a custom message. You’ll also be able to add a charge for such add-ons, so that the final purchase price would automatically get updated if the customer selects an add-on service.
You can also make your product images stand out further on product detail pages by selecting the Hero Image layout. This is great for showcasing beautiful product shots as the main focus of your product detail page.
2. Keep track of inventory
You can link your website with your store on popular marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, etc. The Website Builder Dashboard can also be used to keep track of all the inventory sold. Once the website is linked to the different marketplaces, the current inventory will automatically be synced across all the different connected platforms.
You’ll have to enable the track inventory option for each product. You can also define the number of products you have to begin with, and choose whether you want customers to be able to backorder products. This means that customers will be able to place orders even if the inventory for the product is zero.
If the product has options such as colour and size, you’ll be able to add the total inventory for each individual option.
3. Create product categories
To help visitors and customers quickly find products they are interested in, you can segregate your products into different categories. For each main category, you’ll be able to create two sub-categories. For instance, if the main category is Men, your subcategories can be Clothes and Accessories, but you can’t create Men > Clothes > Shirt > Casual.
You can also create a category especially for the holidays or special occasions to help your customers easily find products you have on sale during the holiday season. You can create a category for items that are specifically on sale and then rearrange the order of that category so it shows up at the top of the list.
You can also set beautiful images for each category as well as provide a description. This helps customers instantly recognize what you have to offer as they browse through your store.
In addition to adding featured products, you can also create featured categories on your online store such as New Arrivals, Best Sellers, etc.
4. Engage visitors with reviews
Social interaction is a major component of online businesses. Unlike physical stores where having a stranger offer comments on the look and feel of a product may be unwelcome, the anonymous and non-intrusive nature of comments and reviews of products online is welcomed by most users. In fact, poorly rated products might still attract buyers but products that have neither rating nor comments raise red flags in the minds of potential buyers.
The Website Builder lets you connect your website with external services such as Yelp, Yotpo and others. You can then enable the option to include reviews for the different products through the Dashboard. If your website is linked to social media platforms, you can also fetch comments from Facebook, Google My Business, and others.
5. Promote your products on social media platforms
Internet users spend little more than two hours daily on social media platforms. GoDaddy’s Website Builder and Online Store can help you integrate these platforms into your website. This allows you to promote your products on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others.
With your social media pages linked directly to your website, you’ll be able to directly sell your wares on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, without requiring customers to step away from their favourite social media hangout.
Another advantage is that your customers can follow your social media accounts, leave reviews and let their connections know about which sites they like, and why.
The Website Builder and Online Store also gives you the option to add like and share buttons for the different products. You can also allow visitors to email products on your website with their contacts.
6. Offer discounts
GoDaddy’s Online Store will also let you create Coupons for use on your online store. This is a great way to promote your products and increase sales. You can offer the coupons to users who register an account on your website, which is a great way to building your mailing list for email marketing campaigns, or hand them out to customers who buy products worth X amount.
You can generate coupons from the Dashboard. Each coupon must have a start and expiry date, unless you choose to create a never ending coupon. You can also choose to offer a discount by a fixed amount or percentage, or merely offer free shipping.
The coupons you create can either be applicable for all products and categories or only specific products, and you can also configure your store to only accept the coupon depending on the total value of products in the cart. The customers will be able to use the coupons during checkout.
7. Payment flexibility
The lack of flexibility in supported payment options can be a major hindrance in converting visitors into paying customers. Your business site needs to be able to securely accept payment from as many payment options as possible.
Websites designed with GoDaddy are equipped to securely handle payments from most credit cards, in addition to PayPal and Apple Pay. You’ll be able to connect your online store with Square and Stripe as well so that customers can pay using gift cards from these services, or even through Google Pay.
Even apart from all that, you can also configure your website to allow customers to pay through offline payment methods such as via cheques or cash, if you so desire. You can couple this option with your in-person shipping (see step 8).
8. Shipping flexibility
The GoDaddy Online Store lets you choose a variety of shipping methods for your online business. You can enable free shipping for customers who purchase products worth a specified amount. You can also restrict this option to specified countries/regions.
Another option is to deliver products yourself to local addresses. Once again, you can define a custom charge for the service and GoDaddy’s online store will also let you specify the flat rate per order. So you can have a delivery fee of say £2 for cart worth £15-£30 and £5 for cart worth £30-£60, etc.
You can also allow customers to pick up order in-person. You’ll have to specify the exact address for the pickup and provide additional instructions, if needed. The Online Store also lets you choose whether your products are available for pickup immediately after customers place an order. The alternative is to manually mark the order as ready for pickup so that customers receive the appropriate notification.
9. Create social media posts
GoDaddy’s Over service helps you quickly put together compelling social media posts for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Depending on the content on your website, GoDaddy’s Over offers a variety of customizable templates that make it faster and easier to create eye-catching visual content. You can choose templates based on the type of products or services you offer, or on holidays such as Christmas or even events like Cyber Monday. After selecting the category, you can use the intuitive interface to customize the social media post.
GoDaddy’s Dashboard will regularly prompt you to make social media posts, so you can also keep your customers interested and informed about the latest offerings on your online store.
10. Address cart abandonment
Cart abandonment is one of the worst problems for every online store owner. This occurs when customers add products to the cart but abandon the site before completing checkout. Online stores lose out almost 69 percent of sales due to cart abandonment. That’s nearly two-thirds of your sales just washing away.
One of the most effective ways to decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate is with an email recovery campaign.
GoDaddy’s Dashboard lets you enable abandoned cart recovery, which sends out automatic emails reminding customers to complete checkout. You can also configure how soon after the customer leaves your website should the reminder email be sent. The default is set to 20 minutes because research suggests that these emails have the highest conversion rate.
You’ll also be able to monitor in an instant the total amount of sales generated because of customer re-engagement with these cart abandonment emails, the total number of carts recovered and the number of cart recovery emails sent.
With GoDaddy’s Website Builder, Online Store and Websites + Marketing, you have all the tools you need to quickly assemble a professional web store. The responsive websites are tailored to provide a smooth experience irrespective of the device used, whether desktop or mobile, or the device’s screen size. As you start using these services, GoDaddy will also prompt you when you complete tasks such as adding payment methods, specifying shipping information and even prompt you with additional tasks such as making social media posts. All told, you can’t put a foot wrong if you decide to create an online venture with GoDaddy.
from TechRadar - All the latest technology news https://ift.tt/35zmpNG
