Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been completely revamped and updated in August 2022 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Although eCommerce and online purchases have been booming, many businesses hesitate to adopt online sales. Typically companies think that eCommerce brings challenges like complexity, the necessity of constant optimizations, and difficulties with customer support. Even if there’s a truth in these concerns, it is not as challenging as it used to be in the past. Today, there are open-source solutions like Magento which make the entire venture much more accessible. Learn how to use Magento to immediately boost your eCommerce sales.
Ecommerce Hosting And Set-up
One of the key concerns about eCommerce is initially setting up an online shop. In the case of Magento, it is really easy to get started on the spot. You don’t even need dedicated hardware anymore. Website hosting companies like Cloudways or Nexcess offer very cost-effective packages with one-click installs of Magento.
That way, at the first level you don’t need to worry about your e-shop’s reliability anymore. Support both for the hosting server and for the Magento installation itself can be covered for you at a reasonable price.
Initial Online Shop Improvements
Once the site is up the challenges continue. The new online presence will attract little traffic at first but that is to be expected. A possible solution, if you own a physical store, is to run promotions targeting existing customers either online or offline. Like that, you can make your existing customer base aware of your new online presence.
In any case, whatever little traffic comes in at the beginning, you must use it to the fullest and with a minimum budget (as this new sales channel will not have revenue initially).
One smart idea for this is to use Magento extensions to address cart abandonment – they use automated messages with the right content to bring customers back to their cart to complete a purchase. For instance, Optimonki is a useful tool that can help with cart abandonment, cross-selling, upselling to increase cart value, etc. Additionally, for early days when traffic is low, it’s free – so it’s a win-win arrangement for all involved.
Online Sales Management
When an online sale takes place, the Megaventory Inventory Management Extension for Magento enables the staff in the warehouse to automatically (and without potential errors in data entry) get all the necessary information to ship it. Read here how to use Megaventory with Magento.
Furthermore, when offline sales take place site visitors will see reduced availability, and that way it is ensured that the same product isn’t sold twice!
Advanced eCommerce Features
Once early challenges have been addressed, you can also sort more advanced problems. Optimization is constantly necessary to generate more sales, achieve better performance, and enjoy higher security.
The Magento marketplace is full of extensions that can supercharge an eCommerce effort.
For example, the onestepcheckout extension of Magento, which is extremely modular, allows merchants to shape the checkout and create a superior theme design of their preference with minimum resources and development skills. That way they can enjoy improved conversion rates and better sales figures.
How To Use Magento For Your Benefit?
Magento enables you to sort things out with the technical implementation of putting together an eCommerce channel. Certainly, it is not at ease of use levels of ‘point and click’ but it is much more approachable even by non-technical people too – even with only a bit of help from a part-time developer for example.
Do you want to know more about the exact benefits Magento can bring to your online shop and what features it has? Read our article on that topic here.
After all, services such as Zapier can allow for connectivity of Magento with other apps without any development work.
Yes, for a wide array of other things, a specialized Magento development company or a similar professional on retainer may be needed.
In any case, putting together, maintaining, and expanding an online sales presence is not out of reach with Magento these days.
Do you have any questions about this?
Book a free, no strings attached chat with us to learn how the Megaventory team can help.
Dimitris Athanasiadis oversees Operations and Customer Relations in Megaventory.