The Secrets to Quick eCommerce Success
Whether you’re just embarking on your eCommerce journey or have been around for a while, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and overloaded with apps, tools, details, and ideas that you incorporate with the best of intentions but that ultimately distract from the task at hand AKA getting people to buy from you.
My pure little minimalist heart just loves paring things down to the most minimally viable product, a concept co-opted from the product development realm where it refers to the idea of putting out a version of your product that has just enough features to satisfy early adopters, who will, in turn, provide feedback for future iterations.
Put simply, it’s finding the Goldilocks version of a product -- one that lives in that sweet spot between “not enough” and “too much”. So, when it comes to eCommerce, what’s the sweet spot? What are the bare minimum things you’ll need to get crossed off that to-do list in order to get you to launch day?
The Keys to Success: Launching Quickly & Focusing on The Essentials
As I’ve mentioned before here, one of the biggest mistakes new online sellers make is trying to go too big from the start. In doing so, they lose time that they could be selling working on nitpicky things that don’t really matter. I say the key to success is launching fast, even if it’s not “complete”. To get to launch day fast, select a great template, and then complete this quick checklist of the most essential eCommerce tasks. Get these taken care of and you’re off to the races; the rest you can work on later while you watch the first sales from your early adopters roll in.
1. Product Info
I mean, you have to have the details of what you’re selling, right? Depending on what that is, this may be more or less complex, but at minimum, you’ll need to have the following attributes organized for your core products. These are your “best sellers” - or the things you think will be most popular or profitable if you haven’t launched yet.
Product Name
Product Description
Price
Product Photo(s)
Product Variations (things like size or color)
Inventory count for each variation, if you’ll be tracking inventory
Shipping dimensions and weight (See #3 below on how to skip this one!)
2. Money Info
All of this means nothing if there’s not a direct connection between your website and your bank account 🤑 When it comes to getting paid, you have “traditional” or more “mainstream” options like Stripe, Square, or Paypal, but options Afterpay that provide deferred or multiple payments (or that are accepted in more countries worldwide) are becoming more popular and in demand.
3. Shipping Info
Shipping is usually any new online seller’s Achilles heel. Seriously. It seems easy but can get really complicated super fast. This is why I recommend either offering free shipping or setting up flat rate shipping. (Bonus, this also gets you out of needing to come up with the shipping size and weights of all your products from #1, above.)
To set up shipping, you just need to know these basic things:
Shipping origin address (where you’ll be shipping from)
Any limits you’d like to have on where you’ll ship to (i.e. only certain states/provinces or countries, etc.)
Which options you’d like to offer: free shipping, flat rate, or others. When in doubt, don’t overthink this: just offer free shipping. Make it simple. People like free shipping and you should price your products to account for this cost. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that shipping costs are too high and that you need to nickel and dime your customers in order to make up for it. Also this is the perfect excuse to pull my favorite Drake meme out. And because I know you’re wondering, yes, I do have this image saved to my desktop. That’s how often I have to refer to it.
4. Tax Info
Thinking about taxes are usually the last thing on any online seller’s mind and rightfully so as setting up and collecting sales tax online is confusing at best and maddening at worst. Trying to understand all the rules, which ones you have to comply with and which ones aren’t applicable and then setting things up correspondingly is a literal nightmare. And that’s coming from someone who does this for a living.
To me, the best solution is the automatic one. Let the tax experts do their thing.
Getting to Launch Day Faster by Focusing on The Essentials
Ok, good news? By focusing on just the four areas above, you can go from zero to launched in no time at all. Will there be more to work on in the future? Sure. But you’ll be up and running and have something viable to build on. You’ll have the bare basics without sacrificing one iota of user experience. And that, to me, is the first step towards success.
