Just as your blog has a brand, a web store needs a face too. A unique brand keeps your site in the mind of users when they want to buy a certain product. The Snorg Tees ads have supplanted that brand into my psyche. I’ve seen it everywhere. So how can we begin to build a brand for a new e-commerce store?

The branding begins with the domain purchase and naming of the store. If you can find a domain that clearly marks your store’s product territory they you are on the right track. A site with the name af84goods.com probably won’t cut it. There’s two ways to go with this. One way focuses on SEO and requires you to lock down a domain with a specific keyword in the title, like beachtoweloutlet.com. The other approach focuses more on the brand, than the product, like Balamba.com. The ultimate way to go would be to mesh the two methods and to secure a domain that features both the branding and the keyword, just as Snorg has done - Balambabeach.com or Balambabeachtowels.com.

Logo for the Site

Once you’ve chosen a domain name, then you also need to consider your site’s logo. Your store’s logo should be prominent, but not obtrusive, memorable, and well designed. It’s best to consult professionals for this. Even though I know my way around Photoshop, I’m no logo design expert. I also don’t work in Illustrator and I like to have logos as vectorized images so I can resize them to cover the wall of my office building someday — (you know, Boom HQ).

The web has turned the logo market upside down. While it used to be rather expensive to have a quality logo designed, you can actually find logos for fairly cheap. This doesn’t mean the results are cheap looking — they can actually be quite nice. The Jason Boom logo is a prime example. Get your own today!

Once you have a sleek new logo, you can begin buying up large amounts of ad space. Well, not necessarily. Of course, advertising will come into play. It’s a necessity. First though, a new business should brand its internal materials. This means creating emails off the domain, setting up letterheads with the company logo, and adding a signature to all outgoing emails. The point of all this would be to keep your sites name in people’s faces.

Head On Apply Directly to the Head

The commercial for Head On pain reliever has quickly become annoying and supplanted in my head. While I steer clear of annoying tag lines, I do realize the benefit of a catchy one. When considering your site’s tag line, there’s a lot to think about. For the most part, the tagline should embody the business purpose. Why not do an exercise to capture the perfect tag line?

On a sheet of paper write ten verbs that embody your business. If you’re a web designer then you would have verbs like copy, paste, crop, sheer, resize, etc. Now on the other side of the paper write down ten adjectives you believe a customer would like from your business. For instance a customer would want quality, timeliness, trustworthiness, honesty, integrity, etc. Now that you have two lists — take one word from the left side and write a tag line using an adjective from the right side. You may come up with some interesting variations. The best you can run by your trusted associates. Never make a decision about a tag line on your own!

Branding as an Expressive Outlet

We can have fun with branding. We might have a unique ad we place on websites or we may find a way to cleverly represent our brand in the real world. Most of all we should be proud of our brand, confident in our approach, and more than just satisfied with the images the brand brings to mind. Choose something powerful, imaginative and catchy. The rest will come in time.

When in doubt, Google it. Google has become the end-all-be-all of internet information. This means when we create our new e-commerce store, we need “The Google” to find us. We need a framework to begin with that makes Google finding us that much easier. We need an SEO friendly solution and a marketing plan for the first months after development.

In the world of online marketing, the main goal should be to convert visitors to customers. Traffic definitely bodes well, but conversions tell the tale. So let’s start with step one, building the site so they will come.

Choosing an E-Commerce Solution

An e-commerce solution wasn’t as readily available or trustworthy in 2000 when I first looked into them. The consumer opinion on buying online was just starting to change. Ebay was moving at great strides and consumers started to turn to the internet for shopping. Quite rapidly its become a global sensation, with many e-commerce solutions presenting themselves. One of the first, and my favorite project is the osCommerce solution. There are others, but I’ve mainly focused on the one, as it can be daunting to the learn the code behind each and every cart solution.

There are others out there. Joomla has various extensions you can use to facilitate a sale online. ZenCart is also a viable solution.  SquirrelCart, digiShop, Interspire, among hundreds of others. Each one probably has its difficulties. While deciding on a cart to base your site, consider how well the solution does the following.

1. How easy is the template to use?

2. Does it have a healthy support forum?

3. Does it provide a solution for your merchant account?

4. Does it support SEO friendly URLs?

5. Does the community offer addons for the cart to do specialized things?

There’s a lot of planning to be done. Selling something online may mean tailoring the site to do specialized things, like calculating quantity via attributes, offering digital downloads, or adding fields for custom text imprints. The product dictates how the cart will function. Once you’ve found a cart that will work for the product you’re selling, then it’s time to develop the design.

Designing the e-Commerce Store

I use the osCommerce solution, so my first steps in designing a new store are to write out all the contributions the store will require. I make a list and prioritize them. If I have developed a similar store, recently (meaning with any updates, etc.) then I may copy over the base of the store and start at least a few hours into the coding. If not, then I get to work adding functionality like the STS template system, which makes designing the store so much easier. Then I add contributions that affect many pages, like the QTPro contribution, which makes it possible to calculate quantity by attribute. I also beef up the site’s SEO functionality, using various contributions.

At this point in the process, you may need help or you might do it yourself. Either way, you should be on your way to creating a store. In my experience, a store evolves over time. After creating the base, the design takes shape and you begin to hammer out details like payment modules, template tweaks, and filling pages with products.

e-Commerce Products

We want to sell our products. It’s why we made a store. So we need to showcase those products in a very favorable light. This doesn’t mean we wax poetic about the product, but we do need to describe it in detail. This even goes for shampoo we might sell. Everything should have some sort of description, preferably between 100-200 words, depending on the product of course. If there’s not much to say about your product, like if it’s a beach towel, then you can create a bullet list describing its qualities.

• Cotton
• Imported
• Measures 33×66″
• Two ply front
• Vibrant colors

You get the idea. Think about the qualities of your product, identify them in a unique way, and do it uniformly for each product. Your presentation means a lot to buyers. Having a mish-mash of descriptions, buttons, or functionality can lead to confusion and buyers retreating to other sites.

SEOizing Our Product Descriptions

Is SEO dead? I don’t think so, but I think for the most part a proper description of an item will net the best results. We could emphasize certain keywords, like beach towel over and over, but keyword density aside, it takes away from the user experience. We’re not selling to search engines, but to people.

The best thing to do would be to create bold informative titles on a product page, have healthy descriptions that do not stray from focusing on the product, and high quality photos of our product. Don’t ever underestimate the power of a good photo. I know I have seen some photos that make a good product look second-rate. The photos should also have the product information in alt tags. Who knows — your beach towel may be listed high in the Google Image Search.

Conclusion

If you’ve got this far on your e-commerce store, then you’re prepared for the grueling work of marketing said store. I’m still learning the ropes of marketing an e-commerce store, but I hope you’ll all join me in the journey. I’ll be writing the second parts of the Marketing an e-Commerce store story over the next month. Feel free to let me know what software you’ve used, how you describe your products, and of course how you market your e-commerce store. It’s a win-win, right? Unless you’re selling beach towels too. Then we’re in trouble.