With the rapid increase of the eCommerce market, productive store management has become integral to the success of your online business. Online store management is the set of methods or techniques used to run your online business and market it to new potential customers. It deals with the user experience of your website and the value provided for performing different fundamental tasks like viewing a product, adding it to a cart, paying the money, etc.
What is Store Management?
As the word suggests, store management means handling the operations of running a retail store. This involves checking the inventory, daily and monthly sales records, customer satisfaction and feedback, etc. Every business’s primary objective is to provide the best possible customer experience and satisfaction by improving its products and services. These few pointers describe what is store management.
- The inventory available is more than required
- All running sale items are always in stock
- A healthy work environment for the employees.
- Protection of the inventory and prevention of shoplifting
- Marketing your brand and customer satisfaction
An Analytical Guide to Store Management
Retail store management involves several departments working well to run the business successfully. From a salesperson to a CEO, everyone has to play their part. Departments like customer service satisfaction, online business management, social media marketing management, etc., are all essential for the smooth running and growth of the business. There is a lot of literature available on guide to store management with varying steps and methods. Every store management guide involves the following basic steps to ensure its smooth running, as stated below.
- Keep your staff motivated.
- Actively monitor sales and purchase operations.
- Understand the supply and demand of the market.
- Use analytics to update and improve productivity and profit.
- Apply effective marketing strategies to increase brand value.
The main idea is to guide how to run an online store successfully. Now, let’s look at the components of this store management guide.
The Main Components of Online Store Management
Online store management is one of the critical components of store management nowadays. After Covid19, the eCommerce businesses have seen a rise like never before. Before starting, make sure to have a consistent brand, futuristic marketing strategy, and defined objectives for your business plan. To run a successful eCommerce store, you need to understand and apply the following eight basic components of store management online.
- Create your brand image
- Develop a user-friendly interface and ensure easy navigation
- Apply effective copywriting
- Develop and apply futuristic marketing strategy
- Take care of your customer service, reviews, and feedback
- Develop a seamless payment procedure
- Ensure safety and security of the website
- Use analytics to upgrade and improve
1. Create Your Brand Image
Brand identity is essential to market your products and services. The most effective way to market your brand and make people identify your brand is to create a perfect brand logo. The color schemes and drawing patterns used in the logo should match your business identity. Creating a catchy tagline also helps a great deal in attracting massive eyeballs to your brand. The logo and tagline should coincide with the imagination of your target audience. Creating a successful brand image is the number one step towards online store management.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Develop a User-Friendly Interface and Ensure Easy Navigation
The visual representation and user-friendly website experience are key to user retention and sales. Your website should be highly responsive, easy to use and navigate, and customer-oriented. The website design and its user experience play a key role in the productivity and popularity of your online store. There are thousands of website themes and templates available in the market, yet the best way is to customize the design which best represents your brand. According to research by bluecorona.com, 48% of the customers relate website design to the credibility of the seller.
As physical store management involves a great deal of organization, cleanliness, brand theme-oriented interior design thus, effective website design is equally important for online store management and marketing. You must choose a website development platform that makes creating a website easy for you. Gone are the days when the only way to build a professional website was to pay hefty amounts to an expert web developer or programmer. You can use ready-to-use templates nowadays to create appealing web pages and save the time and cost of building your web design from scratch.
If you build your site here on Strikingly, for instance, you can select a template that’s specially developed for building an online store. It comes with web page layouts suitable for creating product pages, checkout pages, and connecting your site with suitable payment gateways.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Apply Effective Copywriting
A salesperson can effectively help the customer to choose the product and generate sales at a physical store. This is not possible at an online store. Here’s where effective copywriting comes in. Copywriting is the art of writing product descriptions and other related information so that it amounts to enhancement in sales generation. So, copywriting replaces a salesperson in online store management. The best is to provide detailed and concise product information to gain customer satisfaction.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Develop and Apply Futuristic Marketing Strategy
To generate sales, you need to market your business as much as possible. Marketing your brand helps create its brand image and popularity among the masses. In this digital age, the best way to market is to use digital mediums for marketing purposes. The critical thing to focus on here would be your marketing strategy. Would you be pragmatic or futuristic? Take help from the customer feedback that you receive. You can do this by encouraging your customers to write product reviews or conduct surveys about your ideal customer needs and likes.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Communicate with your customers in the style they enjoy, and your sales will skyrocket. Social media, emails, phone numbers, blogs, and information designs are great tools to market and realize productive store management.
5. Customer Service, Reviews, and Feedbacks
No store management system is complete without customer feedback and satisfaction. The customer is the king. Authentic product reviews are great drivers of more sales and customer satisfaction. Incorporating customer feedback into your website design and product sales procedures are vital to creating customer loyalty and retention.
If you choose an appropriate and feature-rich website builder to create your eCommerce store, it will have the tool available that lets you allow your customers to publish product reviews after their purchase. On Strikingly, you can enable the product reviews feature by requesting your customers to write reviews on the products they buy from your store. You also have the option to choose which of the reviews you receive should be displayed on your product pages and which ones should be kept hidden. Having positive product reviews published on your store helps build trust among the rest of your site visitors and convert more website visitors into customers.
Image taken from Strikingly
6. Develop a Seamless Payment Procedure
A typical payment procedure would include adding products to a cart, filling in the required information, choosing the payment methods available, etc. The key is to make the customer experience easy and satisfying. Develop easy checkouts, auto-registration after filling the forms, auto-saved purchasing history, and provide multiple options for payment methods.
Strikingly offers several payment gateways for you to select from to ease your store management process. We can connect your online store built on our platform with Paypal, Stripe or Square. You can allow your customers to pay directly through their debit or credit card. Providing multiple options to customers in terms of the payment method they can use helps create a convenient checkout experience for them.
Image taken from Strikingly
7. Ensure Safety and Security of the Website
As a physical store is vulnerable to theft and other physical damages, online store management can involve scams, hackings, and other forms of cybercrimes. The safety of website information and the security of online payments is crucial to your brand’s success. There are several steps you can take to ensure your website’s security.
- Ensure all the plugins or software you’re using are updated to the latest version.
- Choose a secure web hosting service provider.
- Set up all the required passwords properly.
- Get an SSL certificate for your site.
At Strikingly, we provide free HTTPs and SSL to all our users. This means any website built here on Strikingly will automatically have its SSL enabled.
8. Use Analytics to Upgrade and Improve
Like every other business, analytics play an essential part in understanding and evaluating your brand’s position in the market. They are also crucial for effective store management. To enhance your online presence, use tools like Google Analytics to see the customer trends, retentions, purchase patterns, etc. This is a great way to set your future goals and create productive store management methods according to the latest trends.
For a website created here on Strikingly, its analytics and statistics can be viewed directly from the dashboard by clicking on ‘Stats’. This graph and data will show you the number of people who visit your website every day. If you want a more detailed look into how your visitors interact with your site, you can select ‘Audience’ from the left panel of your Strikingly editor. This audience list gives information about your site visitors who engaged with your website in one way or the other. They might have entered their email address in your newsletter subscription form, sent in an inquiry about your products through your contact form, or purchased from your online store. This data is precious in building your email list and growing your business further.
You must have realized by now that store management can be easy if you’re using a suitable and user-friendly platform to create your online store. If you haven’t yet, hop on to Strikingly to register for a free account on our platform today.
