How to build a successful e-commerce business

Is there a short cut to success? I’d love to give you a new and unique answer which would magically make all your problems disappear. But, unfortunately, there is none. So, I’m just going to go with the old fashioned epithets of ‘hard work ‘, perseverance, talent and a little bit of luck (although the law of attraction states luck itself is directly proportional to how hard you work!).

A lot of budding entrepreneurs think that they can get a website, open a shop and customers will beat a path to their store. The reality is far different. With a billion websites out there, getting discovered, building the trust that gets a sale take a lot of time. Most new e-commerce sites don’t net a single sale for the first 3 months.

You could do a simple google search to find hundreds of articles about hard work. I simply wish to give a more realistic perspective on the subject.

Case study 1:

In 1993, K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues asked musicians to estimate the amount of deliberate practice– full engagement in structured training activities designed to improve a particular aspect of performance– every week for each year of their careers. They found that on average, the most accomplished musicians estimated much higher amounts of deliberate practice than the less accomplished musicians. At age 20, the average estimated hours for the most accomplished violinists was more than 10,000 hours, whereas the average estimated hours for the least accomplished violinists was about 4,600 hours.

Case study 2:

Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.”

 

The field of fashion is no different. Sure, talent is important, but consistency, hard work and dedication to the art are even more important. Opening an online store is easy, anyone can do it. But making it successful requires hardwork, perseverance and motivation. Maintaining its standards consistently with new, catchy designs, customer service, keeping up with trends, research etc are the tough parts. It’s even tougher doing all these knowing that you statistically won’t be getting even a single order for at least 3 months from starting your store. These are the parts which will determine if you will be a success story or a cautionary tale for others.

If you say, “I’ve tried all this, still no success”, here are few more case studies for you, Colonel Sander’s chicken recipe was rejected 1099 times before going mainstream, Henry ford failed in five businesses before starting ford motors, Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper early in his career because “he lacked imagination and creative ideas”.

So what is the secret sauce to building a new digital business?

1. Have something truly unique
2. Share your website with friends and family and ask them to share it with their friends
3. Provide excellent customer support. Give your customers a reason to buy from you
4. Be active on social media like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and share your work.

In the end it takes talent, nurturing, motivation, persistence and hardwork to build a success story. There are no shortcuts here!

Color Psychology: What Colors Sell?

When designing for your customers on LaunchMyWear, it’s beneficial to keep their preferences in mind. The idea is to stay true to who you are, so that you attract consumers that match your aesthetic, while also remembering the upcoming trends they’ll most likely want and their overall predilections.

Pantone Colors 2016

One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by offering colors that are trending, (see Pantone colors of the year) and making products available in some key colors or tones that are popular your your buyers’ demographic.

For example, based on this chart, you can see that one clear winner is the color blue:

Whereas orange did not fare so well …

It has also been shown that more unusual and unique color names can increase the intent to purchase. This may hold especially true with women, according to KISSmetrics. So, keep that it mind when naming and describing your products.

 

While we’re on the topic of color, it would be a disservice not to recommend looking at a color chart to determine complementary colors to use in your design.

Via ccisolutions

For more on color psychology, check out our post on logo deigns, too!

Best Free Stock Image Sites to Use When Launching Your MyWear Store

Finding stock images can be difficult. A google image search will normally yield one of two things: A slew of mystifying photos of overly excited guys in suits, or worse, an image you like, but that’s watermarked to filth.

When designing the banner for your LaunchMyWear store, watermarks and men in suits might not be what you had in mind, so we’ve compiled a list of some sites offering free, aesthetically-pleasing photos to choose from. Enjoy!

GRATISOGRAPHY

A personal favorite! Gratisography’s curated collection of stunning photography offers tons of quirk, and even more pixels.

Stokpic

A nice, downloadable mix of different styles of photography.

Pexels

Another amazing source with a huge selection of free photos that’s added to daily.

StockSnap.io

A little bit of everything, in large, high-res photos.

re:splashed

Tons of gorgeous photos to choose from in large, downloadable sizes.

After you’ve created your banner and logo, you’re all set to promote your MyWear® store. Go get ’em, tiger!

How to Design a Logo for Your e-store at LaunchMyWear.com

After you’ve registered at LaunchMyWear.com, it’s time to create a brand identity for your e-store. One good way to do so is by developing a logo. A logo is what visually represents your business and brand, after all, and can influence people’s attitudes towards your business, as well as your brand’s memorability. In this article, we’ll focus on points to consider while designing a logo for your business.

Keep it Simple: Keep your logo simple for easy recognition. Simplicity is easier to process, which, in turn, can be more memorable and help you stand out in your consumer’s mind. Often times, simpler logos are also more identifiable in smaller forms, such as on mobile devices and business cards, and they’re easier to recognize when printed with lower quality. As tempting as it is, logos don’t need to tell the entire story of your business, so try to focus on sticking to a two-color scheme and minimalist design, and not overthinking it.

Memorable: Another critical point to keep in mind while designing your logo is memorability. You want your logo to be unique, after all! Creating something that will stand out in people’s minds, while still remaining simple enough to process is the key here, as it ensures better ROI (Rate Of Return) from your marketing campaigns.  For example, Apple’s logo design is incredibly simple, but the bite on the apple makes it unique and memorable.

Timeless: Logos should be enduring for many years to come. It would be counter-productive to create something that you’d eventually have to change, after devoting so much time to creating awareness and recognition around your original logo.  However, trends change, customers’ preferences and mindsets do, too; So, your logo should be able to withstand evolving customers and an evolving product portfolio. Hence, a timeless logo is great to have.

Versatile: Your logo should be versatile enough that you can use it on various platforms. This includes web, mobile, and any marketing material; like your apparel and accessories on MyWear®. You want your logo to hold up on different sizes, a single color design, and on multiple products, so, it’s a good idea to make sure your logo isn’t too wide or tall.

Appropriate: As mentioned earlier, your logo doesn’t need to advertise what you sell exactly, or the entire story of your business, but, it should make sense in the eyes of your customer’s. A certain amount of relevance in accordance to your business will help your target customers gain a clear perception of who you are, with comparatively lesser marketing expenditure.

It should also trigger the proper emotional appeal. Colors can play a major role in this. To know which colors trigger which emotions, refer to the table below:

via ideopsychology.com

Some other points to be considered while designing your logo:

• Most top brands only use one or two colors in their logos
• Blue, red, and black are the most used colors in logo design
• Many top brand’s logos use only text, with no graphic design or symbol
• The most commonly used text is San serif
• Many logos have a rectangular shape or horizontal orientation
• Many include the registered trademark symbol in the logo
• Most top brand logos don’t mention the products they’re selling

Keep in mind: the above practices shouldn’t be taken as gospel. As an artist, you probably already know what logo’s right for your business. These are just handy tips to be considered during the logo designing process. Now, go ahead, and get to designing! You can upload your new logo in the setting section of LaunchMyWear.com.

Writing Blurbs & Tweets Like a Marketing Pro!

How many of us wake up first thing in the morning, eyes still adjusting to waking light, and strrrretch, reaching for our phones in one swoop motion. It’s probably been waiting there, on your nightstand, since the night before, when you last checked Facebook from that softly lit screen before falling asleep.

It turns out, it’s probably not just me. 74% of 2013 internet users were on at least one social networking site, 52% of online adults used multiple social media sites and 70% of people on Facebook used it daily! Those numbers have only gone up in 2015. I’m not telling you this so much to be informative, as I am to justify my unhealthy internet habits stated in the first paragraph.

Before I had a job crafting an online presence for a media company, I never really thought about my “reach”. I posted the first thing that came to mind. Done. Now this stuff haunts my dreams. No, really! I’ve woken up trying to determine the most efficient place to put the subject in a sentence.

In an effort to perform some kind of digital marketing Freddy Krueger number on all of you, I’m sharing my tips and tricks on how to engage your social media audience. And, when you start counting the number of words in your Facebook blurbs at 2 am, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Brevity is most import- Yes, almost more important than finishing that sentence. Because, according to science, you already got the gist. We’ve become insanely skilled at extracting the important words in a headline, blurb, or tweet and moving on. Normally, this leads to us paying most attention to the first and last three words. So, if a blurb is rambling on about why you should click, don’t be surprised if my millennial brain taps out by the 95^th character. Ideally, your blurbs should hover around the 40 character mark and tweets should stay in between 71-100 (I recommend 70-80 for more retweets).

 

 

Funny or Die. It turns out, people like to be entertained… or horrified. Marketing researchers have found that, unsurprisingly, humor and cute overload are incredibly effective (i.e. Top 10 Cutest Puppies Falling Asleep While Standing for Charity). But, interestingly, we might click even more for negative superlatives. One study found that negative expressions performed 30% better than positive superlatives. Yikes. Because I’m an optimistic gal, I suggest spreading peace and love, so maybe try your best to bring the funny before resorting to negativity in your social media, and life, for that matter. 🙂

Picture Perfect. Photos can be easier to consume than text (especially in that first-thing-in-the-morning scenario we discussed earlier). So, I highly recommend using large, aesthetically pleasing photos. It’s honestly one of the easiest and most effective changes you can make. If you don’t believe me, studies show that adding a photo to your tweet can boost retweets by 35% and, on Facebook, posts with photos account for the highest rates of engagement by a landslide. Go for Facebook’s aspect ratio of 485 x 255 to ensure half of the photo doesn’t get cropped out during posting!

Be Coy. How many times have you been lured into clicking on a post you didn’t actually care about? If you’re anything like me, it probably went a little something like this: You’re scrolling through Facebook and a blog you follow posts: “You won’t BELIEVE what Kylie Jenner did this time…” Mind you, I barely know who Kylie Jenner is, BUT, what if she did something actually news-worthy and I’m the only person who won’t know about it? What if she succeeded where her brave, trailblazing sister failed, and actually broke the internet?! Ugh, fine, Refinery29, you got me, *click*. Then, the article reveals she got a trim and natural highlights… Duped again!

Now, I’m not at all suggesting you trick your audience, but it is perfectly acceptable to not give everything away in your bylines. In fact, I would highly recommend it.

Ask Yourself: What would you want to read? This is sorta the Occam’s razor of online marketing. What do you find most interesting about the thing you’re sharing? By putting yourself in your audience’s shoes, you’ll be able to decide what type of byline would catch your eye — and, hopefully, theirs!