Genome Blog / articles / Working in the e-commerce sphere: what new businesses should know
Jan. 5, 2021
Recent years have shown that moving your business online at least partially is something that will be beneficial for your company. It’s lower maintenance fees, fewer employees to locate in the office spaces, and more customers you can reach online.
E-commerce is one of the more successful examples of this, with lockdowns making people go online for shopping. We’ve elaborated on that in Genome’s article “2020: the year of change for banking and e-commerce”. But what if you are a new business, and want to sell your products on the internet? Well, we at Genome gathered some of the most common issues you should pay attention to when entering the e-commerce scene.
How to start an e-commerce business
Know your clients’ wishes and turn-offs. There is one unspoken rule to setting both retail and online shops: you want this place to be unique, recognizable, and convenient. But the way you achieve this with e-stores is more specific, you need to consider many variables. For instance, what customers like and dislike about online shopping.
A survey among American consumers from 2017 pinpoints the reasons people usually abandon their orders. For instance, 40% of surveyed changed their minds because the shipping costs were too high. Meanwhile, 35% of respondents tapped out because of too long delivery times, another 22% cited high service costs as the reason.
Considering all this, the logistics and delivery of products is something you should invest lots of effort into: from researching the time and costs to get the purchase to the customer within the particular city/country, to find the optimal delivery scenario. Sometimes it’s more convenient to use the delivery company services, on other occasions it’s cheaper to deliver goods yourself.
Besides, there are cases when you need to get creative, using local mail services, or even taxis to make it. Tracking the products is crucial, and make sure your clients can look up their purchase location at all times, so they won’t have any doubts about receiving their order on time.
How to set up an online store
You can either create your website and stylize it the way you see fit, or use a platform or a marketplace to sell your products/services. In the second case, you will usually need to pay fees for using the website.
Side note, you can still use Genome’s services, if you join one of these platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce PrestaShop, OpenCart, OXID, Magento, and Drupal. All you need is to install a free plugin to complete the integration, more on that in this blog.
If you decide to manage your website, please don’t cut expenses on hosting. You see, if your online store will fail to load due to multiple customers visiting it at the same time, you won’t earn anything, and ruin your reputation. Mind the loading speed of your website. If it is too long, the customer is more likely to leave. Ideally, it shouldn’t take more than 2-3 seconds.
Make the website as descriptive as possible
Presenting your products/services in the most detailed way is crucial when you sell online. Your customers won’t be able to touch, feel, and test the purchase until it reaches them. Hence you should provide as much information on the product as possible, alongside photos. Your clients should be 100% sure that the product will be as seen in the picture.
Establish the shipping and refund policies
This applies to the refund policy as well – not only in describing the policy clearly will prevent unnecessary chargebacks, but will also show the customers that you are a reliable seller.
Make sure that all your shipping and delivery policies are clear – the customers should know how much time will it take to deliver their purchase.
Keep a list of all the payment methods available
Another important thing your website should contain is a list of payment methods available. We advise you to consider alternative payment methods (APMs) relevant to the countries you market your products to.
Better yet, find a payment service provider like Genome, which offers over 25 alternative payment methods, among which are Alipay, WeChat Pay, Skrill, Paysafecard, etc in addition to traditional ones like Visa, Mastercard, and Diners Club International. You can find out why the APMs becoming more popular among customers in recent years, check out Genome’s article “Are alternative payment methods the new banking king?”.
E-commerce merchant account and security
Lastly, but not less important, you should pay attention to your website and customers’ data security. Genome’s team provided a whole detailed article on how to securely accept payments online, but the main thing you should draw up from it is 3D Secure 2.0.
3DS2 protocol is used for multi-factor authentication, which makes it easier to detect fraud. Merchants need 3DS2 to comply with the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), so if your business operates within the EU, chances are you already know about 3D Secure.
Another crucial thing is finding a payment service provider, which provides both smooth and secure banking services. For this, look no further than Genome. Our clients’ payments are protected thanks to Covery – one of the top fraud solution providers of 2020.
As for banking services, Genome combines it all: you can start personal, business, and merchant accounts with us, transfer money, accept payments on your website, and use other tools for banking – all of it online and any time you want. Recently we launched a pre-order for our virtual and physical debit cards, which will be available for personal and business clients. Find out more about Genome on our website, and feel free to write us an email.
