So you have got your Ecommerce website built and it’s ready to go? but how do you make sure you launch your Ecommerce website with a bang, follow these handy tips to learn more about how you should launch your Ecommerce website.

1. Check and check again

So first things first is to check we are ready for launch, a great way to do this is to call on to family and friends to run through as many real life purchases as possible. You can set up a 100% discount code so they don’t need to part with money, unless you wanted to test the whole payment side of things to. The benefit of getting your site checked by real people is they can often spot what maybe you even the web developers missed.

Real life testing is great, as you often family & friends aren’t so hugely biased, and they can pick up on anything which didn’t seem quite right, or wasn’t obvious, they are also likely to all be on different devices, mobiles, laptops and different size desktops, so you can get a real sense that your website looks great on as many devices as possible.

2. Meta check

So although products themselves often don’t need much information adding to their meta tags, ideally look through all your pages and other locations where you can define your metas and get ready for launch. getting this right from the start helps when you are submitting your XML to google (we will come on to that shortly) to make sure that Google fully gets what your doing from the start, otherwise Google can simply grab any random text and you will need to wait again for the website to be recrawled, and with any new website you never know when that will be.

Double check your page structures, make sure you thinks as a customer does, a great way to do this is use my own “11pm” rule

3. 11pm Rule

So a great way to understand if you have done everything right is, pretend your a customer of yours and you have come to your website at 11pm at night, no one will be available to email, no live chat is available and no one will answer the phone, have you given them everything they need to make a purchase, and we mean everything!

Check you terms are simple to locate, make sure delivery charges are well laid out, easy to understand and obvious! Can people locate products easily, can they drill down or filter out products to get to where they want, are product descriptions informative? do they all the information they need to make a purchase, if you come across anything that isn’t quite right, change it and get ti right now, if someone doesn’t have everything they need to make a purchase at 11pm at night, you haven’t done it right.

4. Launch day

Monday monday monday!!!! Don’t launch on a friday or pick some random sounding nice date, launch on a Monday, the start of the week, everyone is available, support is there, you starting off a new week with a big launch!

Don’t forget sometimes it can take time for your site to appear depending on how your domain is setup, if this is a new Ecommerce website or you are transferring over.

Submit your XML to google, to do this you will need to setup a webmaster account, if you have gone through Finley Design the team will do this for you, once setup you must upload your XML sitemap, this is an auto populating page which tells Google these are all my pages, and here are all my products, it helps Google know you exist and it should start crawling.

It can take hours, days or even weeks before Google starts to fully index and list all pages and products, so if you don’t see things straight away don’t worry

5. Get the information

As with setting up the Google webmaster account, get your Google Analytics all setup, this is hugely important to get going from day one, but try not to get bogged down with early data, as from the start the data will mean very little as it won’t really provide enough overall traffic data to determine anything.

Make sure you setup the Advanced Ecommerce analytics in Google as well as your website, again if you have Finley Design build your site this will be done for you.

6. Scream and Shout

So once launched a great way to get the word out is social media, you should have already got your site fully integrated into your social media platforms, but announcing your launch is a great boost in the early days, start linking products, highlighting key products and special areas of your website.

Ask for people to spread the word, a great way if you have the budget is to offer a free product giveaway with any likes, follows or other social media interactions, people will tend to react more on social media if you give them a reason to do so.

7. Post Launch

One of the biggest failures we see, is when people have a “build it and they will come” ideal, this in Ecommerce will never work, we have a large number of successful Ecommerce clients who all passionately nurture and grow the Ecommerce website, they understand that results take hard work and dedication, no one has ever built and launched an Ecommerce website and sat back watching the sale turn up.

Now your website is launched, you need to maintain its content, maintain it’s promotion and start looking at what’s going right and more important;y areas that need attention, Using Google analytics, or if you have opted for our enhanced hosting solution, you can get a complete insight into how your website is performing and maybe areas where you could improve things.

The importance though is to not sit back wondering what’s happening, Ecommerce can generate a lot of income and can build you a huge business, but together we work at getting your website generating more and more business by the day.