The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the landscape businesses operate in. In Canada, untold numbers of businesses suffered and are still feeling the impacts of people staying home.
As all this has happened, many brick and mortar stores have figured out that they need to step up their online presence to diversify their customer base and find other sources of revenue.
If you’re just now thinking about getting your operation online, here are some things to consider:
You’ll have to revamp your site
Many brick and mortar stores have sites that don’t have any real functionality and mainly provide information like the business’s address. Now that you’ll need your website to stand as a replacement for your physical location, you’ll need your site to be both more functional and more appealing in general.
You’ll have to learn how to do e-Commerce
The main reason to beef up your site in general is that you’ll want to be able to sell things online. Once you can sell things online, you’re no longer limited to people who can get to your physical location, and you can sell to all of Canada and even internationally. But this comes with the price of extra complexity. Thankfully for you, it’s never been simpler to use a plugin like WooCommerce or Shopify to create a web store, complete with inventory organization, search, and checkout functionality.
You’ll need to update your marketing plans
You may currently do some marketing for your business, but as you’re trying to have an increased online presence, you’ll have to update your strategy to include things like Search Engine Optimization, social media advertising, and just generally growing your online presence. Lucky for you, there are countless great resources available on the web to learn these skills.
You’ll have to commit staff time and resources to your new site
It’s a fact: if you have a more robust site with ecommerce and hope to get a lot of visitors, you’ll have to dedicate adequate resources to it. This may be especially painful as you get started, because you won’t have an online customer base to justify your investment. However, it’s important to stay the course, because if you do a good job at all the above, you have a great chance at expanding your customer base exponentially.
Ready to get started? Check out the hosting plans on our site to decide which one may be right for your new and/or improved site!
