Expanding or creating a website with e-commerce features has never been easier with the Strikingly’s Simple Store feature. After over a year of fine-tuning the beta - whether you’re an established business, or just starting out on adding a new store to your portfolio, we’ve kept all the best parts you liked, while adding new and practical features to help you create an online store that works for you.
Building your online store should not be hard, whether you’re starting from scratch or re-developing your own domain website. Regardless, here’s a few key pointers on how to build an online store:
- Consider your market - Your website should be created with your potential customers in mind throughout every detail. Put yourself in the shoes of your client and try to visualize the user experience that would best ensure returning customers. When you create your online store, it should essentially recreate a seamless transaction throughout your buyer’s journey - that which you can monitor through analytics that you can access. This way, your decisions throughout can stay informed by actual customer experience based on their behavior and preferences.
- Hype your online store launch - your online store is only one destination point of the buyer experience that comes after your online ad campaigns and social media marketing strategies. If you’ve been teasing your audience with a first-time product launch on your newsletter, for example, let them know that you’re working on this new project of an online store website to generate interest and traffic into your space.
- Keep your customers informed - if you’re branching out into getting ecommerce into your website, hyping your online store is only going to keep your customers at bay for so long before they might potentially lose interest. If you’re still figuring out your online store builder, you can add a temporary website under construction page as a placeholder that can drive more interest and traffic on your website while you’re still setting it up.
- Keep it simple and consistent - beyond just ensuring that your online store includes all of your brand assets for recognition and uniformity, sometimes learning how to build an online store from scratch can take a long time. If you’re in a rush to set up a store, you can always use Strikingly’s online store website templates to simplify the work for you. It saves time, and templates have already been tried and tested by many other users like you, so you’ll know your online store stays well-supported.
- App integrations - whether you’re starting out from scratch or a template, there are a handful of app integrations that you can experiment with when you’re making your free online store for the first time. Most of these features for starting out are part of the core basics but are enough for you to start a simple store for your products.
Fees - most website builders start out their service for free but once you’ve gotten to know your choice of an online store builder, you may want to experiment with more advanced features that come with a certain fee. This is also true for a number of platforms that would charge a fee when you’ve officially started doing business on their platform and choosing a plan can be tricky. Be mindful of your service charges while you build your website, and it’s always best to look at the fine print before officially partnering with a specific platform.
But for your consideration, Strikingly’s website plans often include breakdowns of what you would be paying for, depending on your choice of tier.
Specifically - you can sell one product under our Free plan, up to 5 products under our Limited plan, and up to 100 products under our Pro plan.
- Expanding for the future - there is always room for growth and what works now may be better supported with certain strategic investments for both the back and front-end of your online store. If your product list grows, conditions for certain transactions may need to be considered, and you’ll need the right tools to support your changing buyer experience.
When you’re expanding your online store, you need to remember what already works well for your customers and for your managing team. That said, just because something works does not mean there’s no need for improvement. This is why in Strikingly, we’ve continuously worked on developing and adding features to our online store builder to adapt the needs of the changing world. Here are a few of the new features you can expect to see when you create an online store with us today:
Improved Customer Experience
Some of the new things we’ve added to help improve your customer experiences include product viewing features such as enabling the product filter sidecar to stay open throughout searching, pop-ups, coupon usage, and showing sale prices when you have great deals up on your website.
We’ve also integrated improved customer checkout experiences through in-store pick-up features, payments through Alipay and WeChat, along with multiple shipping options and conditions - like offering free shipping over a certain order price and expanding covered shipping regions within the US, Canada, and China.
Globalization
In line with making your online store website inclusive across different geos, we’ve added a language switcher on all of our templates, with new Japanese and Chinese fonts available for your use while also allowing custom URLs that match the switched languages.
Management User Experience
For the team working on the backend with logistics and product management, we’ve also got a lot more features to make it easier to customize your online store. From general user experience like switching between Light & Dark Mode while editing, to what would be tedious product management tasks made simple through bulk importing, editing, and deleting, product duplicating, and setting pre-order conditions.
For managers, we’ve got team features that include role assignments and management that make it easy to add, find, or edit specific team members’ ability to access (or even change) certain pages and update your online store.
We’ve also made it easier to modify product histories for some members, and recently included digital products as a viable item to sell on your online store. When you’ve pre-set the conditions for what site members can access, you can even start selling online courses for the thought leaders and experts that offer them straight from your personal website. You can read the more broken down instructions of setting up your various courses for sale here.
Some additional features now support further customization that includes the “Buy Now” button, hiding the shopping cart icon, checkout form section and the specific fields, and pricing sections for site memberships, audience plans, and reseller programs.
Design and Developer Interests
For the design and analytics specialists in your team, they’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve also made improvements on the more nitty-gritty details of updating your online store website through including HTTPS options for free sites, audience analytics inside the editor, and adding even more design elements and templates to play with.
We even went through the past year’s web design trends to see what people have been gravitating towards that might also help to inspire any updates on the look and feel of your website. Some of these aesthetic improvements to support those trends include accessing the Google Font Library, increased font upload limit, new icons, relaxed spacing and sectioning rules, and more design layouts. We’ve got so much more to offer and will continue to do so to help support your business. Check out our updates here to stay informed on all of our latest announcements.
We’ve learned a lot since first releasing the Simple Store Beta version, and members of the Strikingly community have really made it their own while giving us valuable insight into their experiences. Take a look at these few successfully launched Simple Stores made with Strikingly and get inspired to make your own:
- Carica Road - features handmade backpacks made from denim and burlap coffee sacks, each made to inspire their owners to embrace their journeys
- The Guy Behind the Letters - known simply and only as ‘Josef’, the Guy Behind the Letters captures his clients’ essence through his typography and design work.
- Sandrine Dal Zotto - Italian designer Sandrine, designs functional and cutting-edge bags that can weather the urban jungles as well as their owners.
- Bookniture - a company that built itself on foldable furniture, compacted in book form.
With our top-notch customer service, you can ping us directly at support@strikingly.com to help you sort out any and all issues at the drop of a har. Your online store should help carry your best foot forward to the end with your customers and we at Strikingly are prepared to support you through thick and thin. Log in to your Strikingly account now to set up your Simple Store today!
