If you are a small manufacturer or maker, it can be hard to decide if you should sell your products online. There are many things that you need to think through before getting started and also later when you are actually running your web store.
First of all, you need to create a professional online shop. Nowadays, you can do this by yourself with very little effort, thanks to platforms like Shopify. One of the most important things to pay attention to is the usability and the design of the page, as many people consider visual appearance to be the most important factor when making a buying decision. Make sure that you have that sorted before you launch your web store.
Drive Traffic to Your Page through SEO
As soon as you have published the web store, you need to improve the ranking of your page in the search engines to increase the number of visitors. If are able to, hire a professional who can help you with creating SEO content for your page and do some keyword research for your target group to allow your page to rank higher.
Consider adding a blog to your store where you can blog about your products or publish news from your company. Make sure your content is interesting for your target audience and includes SEO relevant keywords.
Manage your Products Professionally
As a small manufacturer, you are probably used to doing everything by yourself. That might work well in the beginning, but as soon as your business grows, you will notice that you could easily lose track of your orders, inventory, and finances. Therefore, you should have software in place that helps you handling your business professionally. Additionally, it will save you a lot of time that you can spend improving the product itself instead of taking care of administrative issues.
When it comes to finances and inventory, you might have heard of QuickBooks, an accounting software package that was made for small and medium-sized companies. The software was designed as an accounting application that can help businesses accept payments, manage and pay bills, and organize the company payroll. It was originally made for financing but offers some basic inventory features. It is important to know that Quickbooks online inventory management has some downsides if you are a maker who needs more support for the manufacturing process.
Our tip is to use QuickBook as a financing tool and integrate a smart workshop software to bridge the gap of missing features of the inventory management built-in system. That will make sure that you won’t lose track of your production schedule, as well as real-time inventory updates.
Integrate a Bot to Your Web Store
One thing seems to be sure: Chatbots are an online trend that will stay. Not only can they help entrepreneurs to improve customer communication, but they also collect important data on customer behavior. This data can be used to create a better shopping experience for your visitors and to make decisions about new products. While business owners often don’t have the time to answer every question from a potential customer, a bot is available 24/7 and always happy to help.
Last Updated on February 3, 2021.
