Whether you are scared or not about Covid-19, you have to agree it changed our lives one way or another, directly or indirectly.

In the business world, all kinds of changes happened and many companies, small or big, had to act fast and make decisions they have never even considered before. The first change that comes to everyone’s mind is the ever-loving/most hated — “work from home” (#wfh). Then came the online meetings (or how I love to call them “My connection is poor” meetings.)

When it comes to retail, a new revolution took place. Even though webshops have been around for some time now; it’s only now that many businesses realized the actual importance and potential of webshops. Even the laggards, also known as the opposite of early adapters, were now forced to shift to online business, or they could’ve kissed their ass goodbye.

In this blog I won’t be talking about the advantages of owning a webshop or trying to persuade you into creating one, I’ll assume you’ve already understood you need one.

Ah yes, cables is what I was looking for when I went into “computer fans”.

I also assume you already know what you’ll be selling on your webshop.

First and foremost, you have to define and write the details and specifications of your products and categorize them logically. Keep in mind your customers’ behavior and your customers’ “expertise”. Provide all the relevant information about your products. Categorize them clearly so the users know what products to expect when they click on a category.

Oh, you wanna buy these sunglasses? You might wanna check out these frying pans as well.

If you offer products that are often brought together for the same purpose (for example, nails and hammers, winter hats and scarves, etc.), you might want to consider cross sale.

What is cross-sale? Cross-selling is the action or practice of selling an additional product or service to your customers. If some products are not meant to be sold in a “bundle”, cross-sale regardless. It’s always a good idea. You are selling socks? Offer them scented candles as well. Even random products being offered over cross-sale is a good thing. You could include both logical cross-sale and random cross-sale — offer something that’s usually brought together and totally random stuff.

Free shipping? YES SIR!

Do you know what people love? Free stuff! 🙌

If you want to boost your sales and attract more customers, you might want to consider some discount mechanisms. The most popular and simple ones are first order, newsletter signup and sign up discounts. Another great way to attract customers, and what will most likely make them regulars, are quantity discounts, discounts given when you pass a certain order value and the most popular and loved, free shipping.

When it comes to the sale discounts, you should always highlight them. Put up banners, separate categories with just items on sale. Sales are the best and most popular way to promote your webshop on the internet.

A good way of keeping your customers are the loyalty programs. There are many ways of rewarding your regular customers for staying with you. The most popular way is collecting points — reward them with points for each order. One thing — to make this possible, user registration is required.

“Your order has been shipped!” — a sentence that cheers everyone up

If you do not own a truck or two and do not plan to deliver the goods by yourself, you should consider contracting a courier company. There’s a lot of them and depending on your products, you have to pick the courier that suits you the most. Check out the following link for more tips on how to pick your courier.

A neat feature to consider is package tracking. Everyone loves to track their package (personally, I’m one of those who clicks on the tracking link immediately as I receive the email that my package has been shipped). Some of them also have APIs to their tracking apps so you can implement them on your own website.

Webshops lack the physical contact regular stores have. That’s why you need to have a good return policy. I strongly suggest making the returns free and find an appropriate return deadline according to the products you are selling. That’s a good way to keep your customers happy and make yourself more trustworthy.

“Can I use my credit card?” — American proverb

Like courier services, if you want a successful webshop, you need to have the option for online payment. According to Statista over 69% (nice…) of customers across all regions use credit and debit cards for their online shopping, so online payment is a must!

But if you are new on the market, an unknown brand, I strongly suggest you offer a cash on delivery option to gain trust from your new customers (that is only the option for domestic traffic).

To have an online payment option, you have to clear out a couple of things beforehand. You have to clear some formalities with the Tax administration about online payment. The second thing you have to do is signing an “electronic payment services’’ contract with your bank.

This can take a LONG TIME, so I strongly recommend that you start working on this as soon as you find an agency that will make the webshop for you.

Terms and conditions? More like too long and didn’t read!

Some things are mandatory and prerequisites for having the webshop operating, and we went through some of them. The most tedious but extremely important are the legal documents. The one required on every website that asks for any kind of information from their users is the GDPR (privacy) policy. The longer one is the “Terms and conditions” document that covers every aspect of how you operate, such as delivery time, delivery fees, minimum order quantity, return policy, accepted cards, etc. Some webshops break this document into logically separate documents (return policy, delivery policy, payment options).

Setting up a webshop isn’t as easy as it looks at first glance, but let that not discourage you. This is the future. The time you’ll spend setting up your webshop is well worth it.

These are just a couple of obstacles you have to jump over, but once you are past them you’ll be safe.

Thank you for reading this! If you’ve found this interesting, consider leaving a 👏 or comment and share your thoughts!

Prologue

In this article, I’ll share some thoughts and advice on internal and external communication. Communication is the key to success and without it being properly structured and set up, everything is bound to fail sooner or later.

A few words about myself so you get to know me better and thus understand why am I even writing this.

I graduated in logistics and management in the maritime industry and had one single course related to project management and 2 basic IT courses that barely touched on what’s programming. I was extremely lucky to have 2 roommates who studied computer science, so I’ve learned quite a bit from them and started to comprehend what can be done and how it can be done on an understandable basis.

Considering I had zero experience and (almost) zero-knowledge, the main reason I got hired as a project manager was because I have shown motivation and eagerness for learning.

My first job was in a small company, digital agency specialized in web and mobile apps design and development, of 15 people which later grew to 20 full-time employees and a few students.

In the year and a half there, my colleagues and I, have successfully delivered over 70 projects.

“Listen to be heard” — Internal Communication Psychology

Internal communication is the key to a successful project. Doesn’t sound difficult at first, but rest assured it’s not as easy as it seems. From my experience, I can tell you it’s a process like everything else in both your career and life.

The best way to improve the communication that you, as a project manager, have with your team is to build their trust in you and to listen to them and get to know them on a personal level.

No one will listen to you if you’re a jerk and brush off everything they say. You have to listen to how they feel, their problems, and what they’re proud of.

Know, this sounds like you’re faking it, and to be frank, that’s up to you. Whatever you decide, whether to fake it or not, make sure to not take everything to your heart. You can’t fix and make everything better. In any kind of a relationship, there are two people and it’s up to the other person as well to make themselves better and take care of themselves.

You don’t want to hold a grudge against someone because that means they won’t like to talk with you and some people don’t know how to separate their private and work life, which hurts the communication that’s required for a successful project realization.

“Less is more” — Meeting Moderation

There are three questions you have to ask yourself when you are setting up a meeting and these are:

1. What’s the purpose of the meeting?
2. Who needs to be at this meeting?
3. Are there any documents that people need to read beforehand?

The last two are easy, but the first one is the question everyone has to ask themselves before they schedule a meeting. No one wants to waste their time just to discuss a couple of straightforward questions. A simple way to resolve this dilemma is to ask yourself “How complex can the answer be?” and if the answer is along the lines of “Yes” and a couple more comments, there’s no need for a meeting. The first and most important thing is to be honest with the client. If they want a meeting ask them beforehand what they want to discuss. If they say they want an update and if there’s no visible change since the last meeting, tell them straight away that most of the work was, as we like to call it, “under the hood” and you’d like to skip the next meeting in order to focus on the task at hand.

Another important thing that a project manager should do during a meeting is to moderate it.

If the meeting consists of clients and your team, let them talk, they know better what they want to say or ask. Make sure the meeting is on the right track and doesn’t sidetrack too much. You should be like a translator if needed, some developers and designers might not know how to properly explain themselves so you should make it more simple and vice versa.

“Just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t make it wrong” — Client Communication

When communicating with the clients make sure you are explaining in a way they will understand you. One thing I found very useful is using analogies. When the client says, or you assumed, they didn’t seem to understand you, the best way is to use simple analogies that are understandable for everyone. Basically write an “explain like I’m 5” and, if possible, use analogies from the client’s field of work, but don’t be condescending.

When sending an update make sure you properly explain everything that has been done since the last update. When you are sending a website design update explain to them that you are sending them static images (basically a picture of the website) so they won’t be able to click on everything and that the animations are just basic and will be better once the developer starts coding the website.

Epilogue

Client communication is the key to the project realization and success. As a project manager, you have to properly mediate the clients’ requests, needs, and feedback to your team so they know what they have to do. The same thing goes the other way around, make sure that the client is aware of (possible) problems that (might) occur during the project lifetime.

Thank you for reading this! If you’ve found this interesting, consider leaving a 👏 or comment and share your thoughts!