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If you run a physical shop, you are probably already well into your strategy for maximizing on the extra money people like to spend in the run up to Christmas. Whether you are having Black Friday promotions, or beginning to think about your general Christmas special offers, or you are already stocking your shelves with seasonal gear, you know that this period can be something of a golden goose in retail, and you want to make the best of it.

However, what you may not have considered in your strategy is that you could increase sales even further by branching into ecommerce. It may sound crazy, but if you start implementing a Magento ecommerce store now, you could be selling your wares to a much larger audience via the internet in time for the traditional festive shopping season.

But Isn't There a Lot of Planning and Set Up Involved in Going Into Ecommerce?

If you are not currently selling anything, and ecommerce is going to be your entire business venture, then yes, there is a lot of planning and strategizing to do. However, for bricks and mortar retailers a lot of this work has already been done. You already know your products and your target customer profile, your pricing and a lot of the other things that a new retail business would need to work on. For you, ecommerce is simply a diversification and a new way to market, so it is not as complicated as it may seem. In terms of technological set up, it is also very straightforward, because you can use a product like Magento which lets you build and manage an ecommerce site without any coding experience, and handles things like secure transactions.

What Do You Need To Do To Be Ready To Launch?

Cropped Image Of Aged Santa Holding Credit Card Stock PhotoIf you already have a website with a domain and hosting, then you need to look at adding ecommerce functionality to this using a platform like Magento. If you don't have a site at all and your web presence is mostly things like social media accounts, then your first step is to get hosting and a domain, which you can do in minutes. Then, you can start building your site. How long this will take depends on how many products you want to offer online. You'll need photos and descriptions of them all, which may seem like the biggest job of all, but you can hire copywriting companies to write product descriptions who will be able to whizz through your stock pretty fast.

Advertising

Once you get into 2016 you can start thinking about your long term marketing strategy, but to pounce on the Christmas period, a good thing to do is start advertising on Facebook. You can very accurately target people on here to see your ads, and it can get you the initial burst of traffic you need to kick off some sales.

Going into ecommerce opens up a whole new audience of sales possibilities, and there is no time like now to do it if you want to make the most of the biggest consumer spending time of the year.


DJ

He's an avid gadget geek and spends most of his time reading or writing.

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DJ

He's an avid gadget geek and spends most of his time reading or writing.

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