Make your shop visible on the Internet is essential!

Offering attractive, well-priced products in an attractive, well-designed store is not enough to drive revenue. Like street shops, a shop on the web can only hope to prosper if customers know how to find it.

At the launch of your business, your brand, or the name of your store, is rarely known. For a traditional business, it is a handicap but its physical location allows it to benefit from a de facto catchment area. Passersby can indeed notice the stall and enter it. Of course, this area is more or less interesting depending on whether the shop is isolated or located in the shopping mall of a big city. On the internet, the address of your shop is lost among the billions of others of the Web: the visibility at least of a store with storefront does not exist. Your store can be left empty indefinitely if you do nothing to give it visibility. So you have to create it from scratch, and there are ready-to-use online tools that you can use.

Natural referencing

When a user searches for a product or service on the internet, it usually does so from a search engine. The most commonly used today are Google, Yahoo! and Bing. When you create a site, it is imperative that these engines know its web address and its content in order to refer potential customers. In other words, they need to reference your online store. Even if these search engines have computer programs (Webmaster Tools) to submit your sitemap.xml and locate the vast majority of new sites in a few days, better be sure to appear quickly by declaring yourself your shop. For example, on Google, go to http://www.google.com/addurl.

But existing with search engines is not enough. Indeed, few people who consult more than the first page of the results obtained during a query. In order for visitors to flock to your online store when searching for a product or service you are marketing, make sure your site appears on that first page. The first tool at your disposal is free. This is referred to as “natural” SEO, which includes placing the right keywords or terms in the right places in the code of your site. With these references, the search engines will make more or less your site in their pages of results.
Paid search

The second tool to improve the visibility of your online store is so-called paid search or advertising referencing. It consists of buying keywords from search engines. If these keywords are entered by Internet users, links to your store are then highlighted on the first page of the results of a search for your products or services. These “commercial links” are usually displayed at the top of the window on a background of differentiated color or in a column on the right.

Marketplaces (Marketplace)

When you want to shop in the “real life”, you often go to shopping malls or markets. On the Internet, there are equivalent places called market places or “Marketplace”. A site managed by a third party company thus receives the products or services of different merchants, with a percentage on the sales thereof. The system is attractive to customers because, on a single site, they have access to a multitude of offers that they can then compare.

Better, most market places such as eBay, PriceMinister, Amazon or more recently Google Shopping and Facebook, offer buyers secure payment methods that have the merit of being reassuring. A qualifier that does not always benefit a young online store. Being present in these marketplaces therefore makes it possible to reach a large number of potential customers and to benefit in a certain way from the “good” reputation of the marketplace. It remains to best use these spaces where anonymity is quickly lurking offers of products or services lambda.

Tip: Do not neglect sites like Leetchi.com, Groupon.fr, or any other sites offering the sale of services or products specific to individuals. They often offer a less saturated space depending on what you want to market.

Price comparators

To find a shoe to its feet, connected consumers mainly pass through the price comparators.

As their name implies, these sites help users compare the prices of products found at online merchants. In order for your products to be among those offered by these platforms, it is not enough to have an online offer or even to display the lowest price. You must be referenced at these sites. And obviously, this SEO has a cost. This is usually based on the number of visitors the comparator has brought you. This is called “cost per click”. In addition to this cost, it is also possible to pay a little more expensive if we want the virtual store to figure prominently in the responses to research made by users.