What you need to know when starting an ecommerce brand

What you need to know when starting an ecommerce brand: Here are top tips for ecommerce success from WatchPilot, an independent watch retailer launched in February 2020.

Customer is king

It’s crucial to focus on customer convenience. From the initial point of ordering through to shipping, returns and exchanges, a customer’s experience with your business should be seamless. If a business makes it difficult, a customer may well not come back, and existing repeat customers are far less costly than attracting new ones.

Customers also love a great user experience (UX). Site navigation should always be easy: a website must be straightforward and simple to understand because if site visitors get confused, they will leave. Alongside this, don’t forget to optimise your site for mobile and tablet viewing format. Today, around 85-90% of search traffic is via mobile and tablet, so if your website is not mobile first, you will be losing many valuable visitors and potential sales.

Build Your brand

Focus early on in building your brand and ensure it aligns with your target audience: it’s essential to offer a clear message and product offering. To begin with, focus on creating great original content. A customer will engage with your brand much more via original content as opposed to regenerated brand content they have seen before.

To build on this, what's next in our plan is to become a lifestyle content leader. We want to become an authority source and leader in print and video content within the watch industry rather than a destination where you just go to buy a watch. That's where we're aiming to differ from our competitors.

Your digital offering

Another big focus for WatchPilot is its approach to bringing the aspect of an in-store experience as closely as possible to online; for WatchPilot, it’s important to not just have 360 images but also including product videos, dedicated brand pages and, eventually, being able to book an appointment online with a sales advisor – something which customers expect with higher price point items.

Utilise social media to add to your marketing mix, too. While WatchPilot primarily uses Google, with shopping display networks, it's also been promoted across Instagram and Facebook, and it's about to branch out to promote the itself across YouTube, too. In addition to this, WatchPilot's influencer and brand ambassador strategy is also due to launch in Q3 this year.

Look to the future

Tim Harrison, co-founder and director of WatchPilot says: "We’re very proud of what WatchPilot has achieved in just 12 months or so: our sales growth, the people who we've attracted to come and work for us, and what our vision for the future is.

"We knew we wanted to establish ourselves as a brand that can be trusted as we're up against many established competitors: getting brands and customers to trust us as a new retailer was an initial challenge. However, over the past year, we’re pleased to have secured distribution agreements with Intercity Group, Time Products and Dartmouth Brands to name a few, as well as several Swiss Brands such as Graham, U-Boat and Roamer.

"It can be easy to get stuck in the day-to-day requirements of running a busy company but it’s crucial to always keep brand growth in mind. The only way is forward."

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