Why an e-commerce website becomes more important than ever before?
Coming up with a business idea and launching your business can be a difficult process. However, build an e-commerce website to sell your products online is usually economical!
Why travel agencies need to have an e-commerce website?
General e-commerce platforms are quite user-friendly, and often offer key necessary elements such as payment getaways, shipping system and marketing automation. Needless to say that small and medium tourism enterprises face many of the same challenges that more customers have been transferred to online world due to the ongoing pandemic. How they seize and retrieve the customers becomes more important than ever before.
Today’s travellers are more mobile-connected both locally and internationally, they expect travel agencies to be more instant, interactive and flexible. An e-commerce platform helps your business expand faster and larger, gaining customers from every aspect online. You will be no longer static but participating in the new world of tourism.
Interested in learning more? Our guide to building an e-commerce website can help you generate some basic ideas about establishing your e-commerce website. Start embracing online world today!
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the
formula for failure. It is: Try to please everybody.
– Herbert Bayard Swope
How to build an e-commerce site as a travel agency?
Step 1: Get your brand a name and have a domain for your e-commerce site
A brand name, obviously is what identifies your brand, represents your brand story and differentiates yourself from similar brands with a category. A domain is your website address, appears as a URL. This is your “home” on the internet, and this is the place where the first impression is made when visitors come to your site.
Choosing a domain name can be very time-consuming and difficult. If your product is quite unique, it might be easier for you to create a differentiated name, which includes both brand characteristics and image. If your product is more usual, you might want to consider having a quite “strange” name. For example, you are selling organic juice, you can look for names that include “veggie”, “greens”, or some fruit-related brand names.
If you brainstorm enough and finally decided your name, you are good to purchase a domain for your online “home”. There are many places that you can get a domain from GoDaddy, Google Domains, ATA Web Hosting, or many more domain registrar services. Remember, when you choose a domain, it is better that you stick with a .com suffix website domain, since it is the most common and trustworthy usage.
Step 2: Plan and build your e-commerce site
A complete and good-looking website often requires enough content, internal links and creative visuals. To achieve that, you might want to prepare these content in advance.
The initial and basic step is to have the logo and brand dominant value. You will want to decide what are some colours used in your logo (better to have less then 3 colours), some meanings you want to embed in your logo, and general shapes that can represent your brand. To balance among these 3 points can be hard, having a professional design team to assist you with that is quite important.
After settling down your logo, you will want to start building up your brand image by regulating brand dominant tone for the website. And also to firstly have some visuals template selected for your website, for your homepage banner, product detail page image, and more.
Step 3: Import your shop data, product images and details
Generally, product information includes product image, product description, price and other additional info.
Product photos: If it is a physical product, you might want to upload photos from every angle of a product. Make sure the first picture of a product is captured in front of a white background, and attached with more feature-related secondary images.
Detailed product description: Create a detailed description will increase your product conversion since customers will gain sufficient product information and make a quicker purchase decision.
Product options: Most e-commerce platforms will let you create your product variables such as size, colour, or flavour, etc. A complete product option makes a better user experience.
Step 4: Brand story makes your website more reliable
Believe it or not, building up a brand story is your chance to connect with potential buyers. The “About Us” page on your website really is not invisible. Share your career story and expose some stories behind the brand can be very fulfilling and trustworthy for customers.
Step 5: Customer service pages
Be prepared with bunch of inquiries and questions popping up on your website. To deal with that, you will need to have a fully supportive customer service robot. You can set up automatic replies to deal with frequently asked questions, such as shipping rates and times, returns and exchanges, privacy policies.
Step 6: User-friendly navigation
Both main menus and footer menu are important to help users navigate on your website easily. Users will be able to rapidly navigate from all the pages and locate to the one they need to visit. Moreover, it is also necessary to gather the information of frequency of page visit, so that you can see which part of your website need some optimization and which is having the highest conversion. Data analysis of the pages is essential.
Well, there are more to learn on your way to build up a website. Stay current and read more related website establishment lessons, you will be able to grasp all the information and practical skills to attract your customers.