Why is making a website so important?
Most people ask this first because it seems like a lot of work for very little payoff. There are several reasons why it’s important to start building your own business website even as you use online retail platforms.
Your own website gives your business credibility in the eyes of potential customers, suppliers, and wholesalers you want to work with. It changes the idea that you are just a listing on a platform or a faceless online store among thousands of others on the retail platforms.
Suppliers and manufacturers like to work with dropshipping businesses that have a well-known website. Even though you are just starting out and don’t have many customers yet, it shows your suppliers that you are serious about being in business and not just another dropshipping business looking to make a few quick bucks and then close up shop and move on. When you talk to new suppliers, they will look you up online to see if you have a website. Your website helps you build trust and a relationship with your suppliers.
Your competitors are another important reason to set up your own website. If a dropshipping business wants to be seen and do well, it needs its own e-commerce website. Competitor analysis is one of the most important parts of e-commerce, and not having your own website can hurt the success of your business.
Getting started
Not everyone is good with technology, and not everyone is excited about setting up their own website. You need a website design that is made for e-commerce dropshipping and has as many features as possible. This will make it easy to run your website and help customers get around it without getting stuck on bad website design.
You can choose to have professionals design your website based on your specific needs. You can do a search on the Internet to find the right templates and designs. There are a lot of good templates for making websites that will work for your niche and have all the features you need and want for your own site.
Setting up your website will depend on how much money you have, but most of the templates will have free options. These free templates are simpler, but you can still use them if you don’t have much money.
To get started, you need to set up your website hosting. Most people who use dropshipping extensions and plugins choose WordPress website hosting. Choose design templates and choose a domain name that fits.
Website Hosting
It is very important that you choose the right and best web hosting service for your dropshipping business website.
When you’re just starting out, it can be hard to keep track of everything you need to know about the best type of hosting and what to look for in a web hosting service.
People often just give up and choose the first web host they find when doing a search so they don’t have to think about this anymore.
Some of the things to check might sound complicated, but you can do them with the right tools and some time.
What to look for in a website hosting
We’ve listed the most important things you need to look at when choosing a web hosting service.
Reviews
Do some research on the web hosting services you are interested in. Web hosting services don’t like it when people write negative feedback about them, so they do everything they can to get these reviews taken down from the sites where they appear. Do a Google search by typing in the name of the company you want to find out about and the word “reviews.” You will get fast and accurate reviews from websites that publish unpaid reviews and from information posted on the personal blogs of people who have used the specific hosting service.
Limits on bandwidth and storage
Since you will be selling products from different suppliers, your dropshipping business needs enough storage space for you to be able to run it. Your hosting service must be able to make sure that at least 10,000 products can be uploaded without any problems.
Bandwidth is very important, so make sure you find out if the hosting service limits bandwidth or if it is unlimited. When customers look around your store, they will download information. If your hosting service has limits, this will cause problems, and customers will become impatient if they can’t download information and images.
SSL Certificates
One of the things that search engines use to rank sites is whether or not they have SSL certificates. Sites that have SSL certificates do better in search results. When a customer is browsing the web and a Google pop-up warns them that a certain website does not have SSL certification. This alerts the person who is browsing, and most will leave that site and go to one they trust.
PHP 7 Support
Make sure that the web hosting service you choose works with PHP 7, which is the most recent version of PHP. This is especially important for your dropshipping website because some of the best dropshipping plugins no longer work with older versions of PHP.
Pricing
Web hosting services can be very expensive, especially for an e-commerce business that is just getting started. Cloud hosting is a great way to save money because it gives you unlimited bandwidth and automatic scaling, which makes changes when your website gets more traffic.
Performance
Using the tools that are available, you can check how quickly or slowly a hosting service loads pages and how fast a page actually loads. Another option is to go to websites that use a certain hosting service and see how long it takes for them to load. This will let you get rid of hosting services that don’t work well.
Security
You need a secure control panel that prevents all back-door entries, plus offers secure access through SSH and FTP.
The majority of hosting solutions today provide users with cPanel website management. Check whether the hosting service use cPanel or lesser known managing system.
Helping customers
A good hosting service will have phone support and customer service that is open 24/7. For your business to do well, potential customers need to be able to visit your website at any time with as few problems as possible.
Scaling Ability
If the hosting service you’re interested in doesn’t offer automatic scaling, you should choose one that does or make sure their servers can scale up to meet your needs. Your business can’t lose customers and have less orders come in because the servers can’t keep up.
Top WordPress hosting services
If you’re looking for a recommendation for a WordPress web hosting services, our list of the five best options will assist.
Your Own Web Address
Your domain name is your address and unique.
All computers on the internet have a unique number address called an IP address.
However, people will never remember a specific IP address because there are so many of them.
When it became clear that an IP address alone wasn’t enough to find specific websites, domain names were made.
So, your unique address is made up of a unique IP address and a unique domain name.
No business can afford to vanish in cyberspace, because if people can’t find you, they’ll look for someone else who does what you do.
Not only does having your own domain name help search engines find your website, but it also has other benefits that many people don’t think about.
Benefits of Owning Your Own Web Address
Internet Mobility
Once you have created your unique domain name, it belongs to you. Should you decide to transfer from your web host or change your server, you take your domain name with you. Not owning your domain name creates huge problems for you. You will have to start over again with a different URL and you lose all the effort you have put into building your brand name.
Credibility
If you don’t have a domain name, your web host or ISP will give you a generic name. This is clear from your website’s address and shows that your business is not very professional or reliable. You have to show the potential customers why they should trust you and want to work with you.
People will know that you aren’t willing to spend money on your online presence by the fact that you haven’t registered a domain name. No small business can afford to be called cheap, because customers would go to other companies that show they are serious about their business.
Shows That You Are Proactive
Your domain name shows that you are keeping up-to-date with the changes in technology. The younger generations are very tech-savvy and pick up on the finer details, and you do not want to alienate a huge portion of your potential customer base by saving money by using generic URLs.
Choose a Domain Name That Fits
You do not only have to choose a domain name that is your company name. If you choose a domain name that matches what your business is all about, a word that connects searchers online to your niche, it draws in people searching for anything in your niche.
Essentials for an E-Commerce Website
You want your website to reflect your products and your niche and create a shopping experience for your customers that they will remember and make them come back again.
Match Products, Design and Content
You want your customers to associate your website with the products you offer and they want. Every aspect of your website must focus on your niche, from colours, text, images, videos to music. Your client demographics come into play as well; your website must appeal to the type of person who is interested in the products you offer.
User-Friendly Shopping Cart
When a person is ready to buy something, nothing is more frustrating than getting stuck in the website shopping cart and not being able to add, change, or remove items. When they want to go back and look around again, they get stuck and can’t keep shopping. The customer is king, so take your time and look at all the features that will make it easy and stress-free.
Keep the Check-Out Process Simple
Your goal is to make it easy for your customers to check out, because you want to make as many sales as possible. There are a lot of reasons why people leave their shopping carts without completing their purchases.
Customers want shopping to be easy and not make them feel bad. Your check-out process needs to be easy, quick, and in line with what your customers want.
Social Media
Social media has become an integral part of the lives of millions of people. It is crucial in the world of business today to make social media part of your website. Today people check social media for trends and to see what is being said about a product they might be interested in. Using social media as a marketing tool brings your products to the attention of a large number of people and leads to a much higher conversion rate in sales.
Security
For your dropshipping business, the e-commerce site you use must have the best security features.
Security is so important to shoppers that it is usually the first thing they look for on a website. If the website is not secure, they will leave, even if they really want to buy a certain product.
Making sure that your website design includes all of the necessary security measures is a good way to get people to buy from your website more often.
Multi-Language Support
Many business owners don’t think about how important it is for their website to be able to support more than one language. This isn’t just a handy tool for your customers; it also gives you an edge over your competitors who don’t support multiple languages.
Multilingual support is important to multinational companies, but smaller e-commerce sites still don’t pay it much attention. E-commerce has become such a big part of international buying that smaller businesses can get a head start and enjoy the benefits while their competitors fall further behind.
This is a very effective way to market your business because it lets you reach customers all over the world who are interested in your niche products. If you can talk to them in their own language, they will pay attention right away. When you add the top world languages, you increase the number of people who might buy from you and have the chance to double your sales.
A website that can be read in more than one language makes it easier for buyers from other countries to trust your business. People often don’t feel comfortable shopping online in a language they don’t fully understand.
Most of the big search engines can also search in languages other than English. With language support, you increase the chances that people will find your website when they look for your products.
WordPress Themes
Whether you go for a simple color scheme or something more sophisticated, there are plenty of great WordPress themes available that will help you create a website that not only looks good but also feels great.
Read our blog post, The Best 5 of WordPress Themes, where we take you through some of our favorite themes on the market today and explain why we think they’re the best.
Plugins Are Necessities
You can’t have a dropshipping website that works without plugins. You need them to handle the many tasks that would take a lot of your time to do by hand.
Whether or not you need plugins depends on the online retail platform you’re using. Some plugins are only good on one platform and won’t work well on others.
We will introduce you to the WordPress plugins for dropshipping that have the best reviews with the highest ratings done by users. You should give these a try and see which ones work best for your website and products.
WordPress plugin WooCommerce is free, and it has gained great popularity. Users can handle all aspects of their e-commerce business with the plugin, including shopping baskets, checkout, payments, and more. However, this doesn’t mean you’re limited to just this, there are plenty of other plugins that work in conjunction with WooCommerce to open up your options. We’ll look at some of these as we proceed.
The Dropified dropshipping plugin is one of the most versatile on the market. You can use it with WooCommerce or any other dropshipping platform, and it has a wide range of features. It is simple to use, and the plugin makes it easier to import and put your products on your e-commerce platform. You can also automatically ensure that any price changes or availability are updated and keep the original information if necessary.
Dropship.me is another excellent plugin. It allows you to easily import products from over 50,000 popular items Import items from a database of over 50,000 popular items into your store quickly and easily with this plugin. You can feel confident that the products you choose for your store will be of good quality because all of the listed items are best sellers. The images and titles from this plugin also make it easy to set up your store without requiring additional editing.
Finally, you may present real customer reviews of items that they’ve purchased in the past. This may drive additional sales.
Spocket is a WooCommerce dropshipping plugin that uses US and EU dropshippers. . Need to sell globally, but all items are delivered from the US or EU? Spocket is the plugin for you. You may sell globally, but all of the items will be fulfilled from the US or EU. This plugin permits you to start selling with a few clicks. The plugin uses a set of chosen drop shippers and allows you to include products from the inside. The wholesale rates offered by Spocket are adequate for making more money than with some other WooCommerce dropshipping plugins.
It’s a versatile plugin that assists you construct your dropshipping website effectively with WordPress. This is a pretty useful plugin if you’re using AliExpress. You can easily Import important items, make and finalize orders, and use other WooCommerce plugins without any disruption.
It’s not free but it only demands a one-time payment and you will receive a lot of valuable functions for your money.
The Checkout Manager plugin is designed to help you manage the checkout process with ease in WooCommerce. You can add, delete, and reorder the billing fields when gathering customer data on the checkout page. You can also disable or require certain fields for customers to fill out in addition to those you want. The premium version is available if you want more advanced features.
It’s a dropshipping plugin that can help you boost sales and achieve your business ambitions. OptinMonster is capable of creating email lists and tempting visitors with discounts and rewards. It is a marketing strategy that can help you increase your sales and become a success. People who browse your site will not necessarily buy, but with OptinMonster you can build email lists and draw visitors into your sales offer. You can then use your lists to market to your target audience and drive sales.
The wishlist feature that many big retailers now offer is, in fact, quite simple. Visitors can browse the store and save items they want in their ‘wishlist.’ This way, if they do not make a purchase right away, they will be persuaded to come back and buy these later.
Advantages of Your Own Website
Trustworthy Image
When customers come to your website they are faced with a website that has been designed to be professional and customer orientated. People are more comfortable to spend money with a company that has a professional website instead of a listing on a retail platform that is totally anonymous.
No Competition
Competition can be a headache when you have to compete with so many other listings that sell the same or very similar products. Visitors to your website see only items displayed that you sell. On the online auction platforms, prices are often driven down to such an extent that there is no profit margin left as there are simply too many sellers competing. When selling through your own website, you can set realistic prices that gives you a decent profit margin.
Fees to List and Sell Fall Away
Depending on which payment options you have on your website, you may still have to pay some fees even if you offer PayPal and other similar payment methods. You get rid of many other fees that come with online retail platforms and cut into your profit margin, such as fees for each product you list, subscription fees, and more.
Disadvantages of Your Own Website
Start-Up Costs
When you start your own website, you’ll have to pay some costs up front, so you’ll need a budget. But the initial cost will depend on the website you choose. If you want a web design company to make a website just for you, your start-up costs will be high. If you are willing to put in some work, you can save a lot of money with a WordPress website, which gives you a fully functional site with everything you need.
Support
You do not have the advantages of the support staff you get when you subscribe to the online retail platforms. When problems crop up on your website, you will have to deal with it yourself. However, if you had chosen a reputable website builder, you will have access to their technical support team to assist you.
Traffic Builds Slowly
When you have just started up your own website, it will take time to build organic traffic. You will have to build up your client base over time and start to slowly build up loyal customers that will return to your website.
In conclusion, setting up your own website can be a great way to build customer trust and build credibility in the eyes of potential suppliers, wholesalers and customers. You’ll also have a more professional site that does not look like any other online retail platform. All these things will help you to stand out from competitors who only have an online shop or a listing on an online retail platform.
