The most important steps necessary to manage your online store efficiently and effectively

We had explained in a previous article what is e-commerce ? How do you start from scratch? In another article, we mentioned four successful models of e-commerce from which we can draw practical inspiration from the steps to success.

Today, in this article, we take a step forward and teach you how you, too, can achieve success in the world of e-commerce through the most important steps and strategies that you must follow to successfully manage an online store.

We will explain to you how to successfully manage an online store, starting with identifying the products you want to sell, how to find them, and determining their classifications correctly, all the way to selling them and making high profits from them.

Why is it important to manage your online store?

Creating your own online store to sell your products or services is an essential step to entering the world of e-commerce, but in reality it is not enough alone.

You need to build a distinctive footprint in the e-commerce market, prove your brand, achieve profit and continuity. This task is a challenge, especially with the significant growth in the number of e-stores that are created every day and the presence of great competition in the digital world.

It is worth noting that when you build and host your own e-commerce website, you can sell your goods and services directly to your customers without relying on an intermediary party through your own website.

But this means that you are responsible for managing your store and customizing almost every aspect of your e-commerce site, but this flexibility can make the store management process more complex and difficult.

You can also rely on third-party e-commerce marketplaces like eBay and Amazon to make managing your e-commerce easier and less complicated.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, but whatever method is used in your online store, you must not overlook the importance of successful management of your store, which is a task that requires a lot of effort and perseverance and requires you to maintain your enthusiasm as an online store owner in order to keep your store at the forefront.

How do you manage your online store?

There are many platforms that you can adopt to build your online store, such as WooCommerce or one of the other alternatives. If you have not already started your store, you can use one of the freelancing sites that provides an online store development service so that you can then undertake the process of managing it in the correct way.

In this article, we will assume that you have prepared a plan for your store and built it using WooCommerce, which is considered one of the most popular e-commerce platforms that has many features that help you sell your products and integrates with many external tools to improve store management.

The first thing you will need in the beginning when creating a WooCommerce store is to set up categories for your store’s products, add products, and you also need to set up your store’s home page and payment page, customize payment fields , set up payment collection methods, shipping methods, privacy policy pages , returns policy, and so on. Then all your customers can start browsing your store and ordering products.

But things do not end here, as there are many additional tasks that he must take care of, follow up on, and take into consideration. In the following paragraphs, we explain to you the most important steps that you must take in managing the online store and the ways to accomplish them professionally and effectively.

Ten steps to successfully manage your online store

Whether you sell physical products or digital services, you must take care of several things, whether in your digital store or on the ground, to ensure that everything in your store is running well. The most important of these matters:

1- Manage product classifications

You need to think about product categories and manage them effectively. Categories are the best way to briefly introduce new customers to the nature of your store’s products and what you sell.

In fact, many online store owners neglect this step, and they may do it quickly and without thinking, and specify product classifications randomly while adding them to the store, which leads them to mistakes such as adding the wrong classifications or giving them an incorrect or incomprehensible name.

Also, some online store owners may add a lot of classifications to products, which may confuse customers and harm the experience of the user who visits your store for the first time.

When you enter a supermarket you know, the first thing you do is go to the place where you want to buy your product because you know where to find it. If you do not know its location, you will rely on the store signs that write the category of products sold in each section to reach the correct place.

The same can be applied to organizing products in online stores, as classifications are what help the user navigate your store and find what they need.

Therefore, you must pay attention to the classification of your products so that the customer is able to distinguish and understand the nature of the products that fall under a certain classification through the name of the classification, and try to determine the number of classifications in proportion to the size and nature of your store’s products.

If the number of products in your store is large and diverse, setting a hierarchy of classifications may help you organize things in the best way. However, if your products are few (less than 5 products), in this case you can use product tags instead of classifications.
You can read the following article to find out what are the differences between categories and tags?

As your business expands and you add new products or product lines, you will need to constantly go back to your product categories and reorganize them.

2- Inventory management

The process of managing and managing inventory (Stock or inventory management) is considered one of the basic tasks in managing any online store to ensure that the stock of products does not decrease such that the fulfillment of customer orders is disrupted or accumulated due to the lack of demand for it. Therefore, you must be careful to manage the inventory effectively and ensure its availability in appropriate quantities.

The WooCommerce plugin provides you with built-in features that allow you to manage your store’s inventory, update inventory, customize the display of out-of-stock items, etc. You can use these settings to make your online store compatible with your inventory availability.

In addition, we advise you as a store owner to enable the option to enable stock-out alerts. In order to send alerts to your email if the product stock is close to expiring, this makes it easier for you to track the stock if there are a large number of products in your warehouse.

You can also rely on WooCommerce add-ons that make it easier for you to manage inventory to make tasks easier for you, such as ( ATUM , Z Inventory Manager ).

If you secure physical inventory for a store yourself, of course, you must monitor the inventory on the ground and not just on site, as this requires you to find a suitable place to store your inventory, arrange the products in an organized manner, and bring out what arrives as soon as possible. You must also inspect the products and ensure that they are in good condition. There is no doubt that this work requires a great deal of work and effort.

If you do not want to expend your effort in securing, storing, and packaging the inventory yourself, you can follow the drop shipping method and deal with a reliable intermediary party that fulfills the requests of customers who shop from your store. Thus, you save yourself time and effort and ensure that customers receive their orders immediately.

This broker will store the inventory, take care of all its packaging and will put your own branding on it so that it appears to the customer that the order came from you.

When you receive orders through your website, you simply pass them to your dropshipping supplier who will handle them for you. Your gross profit will be the amount the customer pays minus the cost set by your supplier.

3- Managing payment methods

You must ensure that you provide several safe and reliable ways to collect payments from your store’s customers. There are several basic methods of payment in any online store, which are:

Payment on delivery. Here, money is collected manually from the customer when he delivers the product.
Payment via credit cards is one of the most common and direct ways to pay online.
Direct debit where customers can enter their bank account details and this method is equivalent to paying by cash or check.
Payment is made through digital wallets that the customer creates on the site, charges them with the balance, and then completes the purchase directly using his wallet balance.
Recently, some stores have begun accepting payment via encrypted digital currencies such as Bitcoin or any other encrypted currency.

After determining the methods you want, you must integrate integrated payment processing methods with your type of online store, and learn about the payment gateways supported in your country and their conditions.

Most payment gateways work in a similar way. The main role of the payment gateway is to link the customer’s payment information with the financial institutions that actually process the payment so that you can receive payments without problems. Whatever processing solution you choose, make sure it enables online transactions in a way that is easy for you as well as your customers.

It is also important that you gain the trust of your customers and use reliable and well-known payment gateways so that they do not hesitate to enter their payment details on your store. If you are targeting an international audience, it is best to offer multiple payment gateways and let your customers choose the payment gateway and method they are comfortable with.

4- Managing the process of shipping products and returns

If you sell physical products, the issue of shipping the products to your customers is a major matter that you must take care of in the process of managing your online store. Provide them with shipping options that deliver their orders quickly and at appropriate times and ensure their proper delivery to them in order to gain their trust and loyalty in the store and its products.

You can take care of shipping the products yourself, or entrust the task to specialized local or international shipping companies, depending on the shipping areas you provide to your customers. Therefore, you must contact the shipping company that you want to contract with to find out how to link it with your store.

You should also pay attention to the issue of returning and exchanging products in the event that the customer is not satisfied with the product, and include in your store a return policy page that clearly shows the customer all the terms of return and exchange and explains the mechanism and conditions for doing so.

You must also determine the shipping cost in your online store, as you can set up different shipping areas and specify a different shipping cost depending on the customer’s location. You can also specify different costs for customers based on the shipping method they choose. You can also use free shipping to increase sales in your store .

5- Technical support

You must provide your store customers with appropriate technical support, and provide them with several ways to contact you in the event of any problem or inquiry about your products and services so that they feel satisfied and confident.

There are several ways to communicate, such as communicating via email or by phone. You can also include a live chat option to improve communication with your store’s customers.

It is worth noting that no matter what level of quality you provide, there are bound to be unsatisfied customers. Here you must deal with customer complaints in an intelligent way, try to win them over, and use their negative comments to develop your performance and products.

Unhappy customers are the greatest source of learning

Bill Gates

If the number of your customers is large, you will not be able to respond to them yourself efficiently and quickly, so in this case you may need to appoint a technical support team for your store. This may require paying additional costs, but in return you will ensure that you build trust with your customers and increase your sales. Customer service is considered the most important reason for completing the purchase process. Most customers contact customer service before proceeding with the purchase.

On freelance sites, you can find freelancers who provide you with technical support and take care of your online store customers efficiently and at completely reasonable prices. And remember that the best promoter for your online store is the customer who is satisfied with your dealings and products.

6 – Analyze store data

Analytics provide you with the ability to track all the essential information about your store’s performance and tell you what is working and what is not, who is your audience, when do they like to shop, what are their buying habits, how do they get to your store, and which store products are the most popular?

If you use WooCommerce to build your store, you do not need to use an external tool to do this, as WooCommerce provides a built-in analytics module that generates basic reports that will help you understand your store’s sales pattern, such as the number of incoming orders for your store, total sales, returns, net sales, refunds, and shipping amounts that you can track.

However, if you want advanced analytical insights, you can rely on third-party plugins to learn more about your store.

For example, you can analyze WooCommerce store data by adding MonsterInsights , which links your site with Google Analytics, adding Sales Report for WooCommerce , or other additions that help you know the interests of your customers and improve your store.

Whatever method you follow to analyze your store’s data, you must not neglect this data as part of store management, and you must be careful to analyze and evaluate it correctly because this helps you make the right decisions regarding your store, such as determining the products on which selling strategies should be applied, such as the strategy for upgrading the deal ( Up sell and cross selling strategy.

Analytics also help you anticipate future shopping trends and anticipate the products that should be added to your store in the future, the products that should be permanently stopped selling, the products that should apply discount coupons … and other crucial decisions in increasing your store’s profits and avoiding loss.

7- Send abandoned cart emails

There are several reasons that lead customers to abandon the shopping cart and not complete the purchase from your store, such as if they were busy with something necessary before completing the purchase, or they discovered that they did not have a balance on their credit card, or other reasons..

As a store owner, you should not neglect these abandoned carts. Rather, you should prepare emails to remind the customer of the items in his shopping cart and urge him to complete the purchase.

But if you notice that there are many abandoned shopping carts in your store, you should look for the reasons, go back to your website analytics, and run some tests to find out the reason for this and work to solve it.

One of the possible reasons for this may be that the payment process in your store is confusing and long, or you may have imposed hidden fees that appear to customers at the last minute. These are possible reasons that make the customer abandon the purchase and you should look into them.

8- Use effective marketing strategies for your store

You can market your store in several ways, the most important of which is content marketing, where you can benefit from the online store’s blog to create useful content for your target customers. This will raise your store’s rank in search engines, attract additional potential customers to your store and generate greater sales.

So make sure to create a blog in your store and publish useful content on it regularly, and make sure that landing pages contain appropriate calls to actionCall To Action).

If you do not have time to regularly publish on your store’s blog, you can delegate this task to full-time content writers. On freelance sites such as Khamsat and Mostaqil, you will find many specialized bloggers and content writers who can provide you with content suitable for your goals so that you can devote yourself to taking care of other matters for your store.

You can also market your store on social media, as it is considered an essential marketing channel today. If you want your store to perform well, you must prove your presence there.

So create an account for your brand on the social media where your target audience is located, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others.

Also make sure to include follow and share buttons on social media on your website so that users can easily promote your store. When customers love your product, they will be better promoters of your products and services and will convince their friends to buy from you.

9- Manage store add-ons

WooCommerce provides basic functionality for managing an online store. There are also a large number of free and paid plugins compatible with WooCommerce that operate your store more efficiently and enhance it with additional functionality that is not available in it implicitly.

There is no need to download a lot of add-ons. Select the add-ons that you want to install in your store wisely so that the features provide you with exactly the functions that you want to add to maintain the performance of your store. Some add-ons may conflict with each other and affect the performance of your store.

So make sure to manage your store’s add-ons and only install the add-ons you actually need in your store, and delete every add-on you don’t need.

For example, if you need to customize the payment page fields in your store, use a dedicated add-on for that, such as the WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor , and if the default fields are sufficient, there is no need to download any external add-on.

10- Conduct regular maintenance for your store

You must perform comprehensive maintenance for your store on a regular and continuous basis by doing the following:

Make sure your WordPress platform is up to date, your WooCommerce plugin and any other plugins are up to date, and your store theme is updated regularly. Updates are important not just to provide new features but also to make your store more secure.
Scan your store to secure it from any security vulnerabilities, hacking attempts, or data theft.
Make sure to take backup copies of your store periodically, as the store contains a lot of important and sensitive information such as product details, customer data, order details, etc. The backup copy enables you to restore it in the event of any emergency.
Continuously update product information and deal with out-of-stock products.
Check and fix any broken links , replace broken images , and anything that will help improve your store’s customer experience and make the store look good.

Conclusion

Managing your online store is a process that requires a lot of effort and follow-up. There are many tasks and procedures that you must follow on a regular basis to manage your online store.

In this article, we reviewed for you ten important tips for managing a WooCommerce store effectively, and we advise you as a store owner to follow them in order to avoid bad management that will result in a bad user experience, which will ultimately harm your store and cause you loss.

If you intend to create an online store or you already manage an existing store, and you would like to share more tips and suggestions with us, or you have any questions regarding managing this store, we would be happy to share them with us in the comments. We wish you a successful job.