Creating a WIX Ecommerce Store

While the pandemic has pushed many stores to go online, WIX emerged as a strong contender as an online store provider and provided various payment methods all the while offering many stores a new way of doing business. It takes about 10steps for your WIX eCommerce setup using the website builder and using the WIX editor - to give you a synopsis of what it takes, this article will give you a good description:

1. Creating a new account

2. Picking a WIX Theme template that reflects your brand

3. Adding your products to your store

4. Optimizing your product pages

5. Customizing your site

6. Picking out your shipping methods

7. Configuring your WIX DNS website settings

8. Picking out a Payment Gateway

9. Editing your pages

10. Go live!!

How to Create a Brand for Your Website

This is a pre-requisite for new store owners. The brand is the identity of your business, and while most know what it represents, some do not have a strong concept of what it delivers and how it drives through your eCommerce site, ties to your advertisements, social media all the way through search engines.

Domain Names: It's one of the core identities online, and for some brick and mortar stores, finding the equivalent store name might be difficult given that a lot of domain names have been taken up. Finding a good domain name is crucial for ease of finding you directly via google searches, and finding your products and services. Remember you do have the option of custom domains to work with.

Your Logo: This is more of a creative side when it comes to your audience identifying your business to what they look for in your products and services. Your logo needs to be iconic - flexible in various situations such as imagery, stitching (caps/clothing), captivating to the eye, and unique. Remember all physical forms of your logo can translate to being in your imagery for your online presence on social media platforms.

Marketing: Your social media marketing will come from your website's cover marketing content. You should have at the ready on your site the following:

• Tag Line for your brand

• Value Proposition - what is your company about.

• Differentiation - what makes you stand out in the industry your business is into.

• Vision Statement - what does the business aspire to.

• Mission statement - how does your business operate to that vision.

From the above, you can extract colors to which your Wix Theme will absorb, create your content architecture on how your store will navigate and will be the core ingredients to creating a website.

Creating a new account on WIX

To get started, you need to create your Wix Login at: https://users.wix.com/signin

This will create your account, and within that space, you can then set up up your shopping cart. You will also be able to configure a payment gateway to take on credit cards, and even set up live-chat for you to communicate with your customers.

WIX Theme Template selection

There are over 100 Wix Theme templates to choose from in this location: https://www.wix.com/freesitebuilder/templates-us

Given you are looking to set up a store, we recommend you pick out an eCommerce Theme rather than just a website theme. However, you can get a lot of ideas and look/feel for your brand, layout of your content to share information with your audience.

Adding products to your store

By now you have selected your theme, and you are ready to upload products. There is some preparation in doing so, and it isn't a real-time exercise. You have to prepare your stock photos of your products, and organize your products into categories. The WIX guide on how to set up your store is located here: https://www.wix.com/freesitebuilder/tae-store

Optimizing your product pages

Product pages contain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sections of content for you to utilize and add to your page so that search engines can catalog the item, and when people search for it, it can be indexed and be provided in the search results. This includes a page title (chose your titles wisely), and there is a Meta Tag section where correlated words and descriptions to your product can be put in.

Customizing your online store

This exercise takes some patience with CSS and your color palette and font selections. You can edit the theme to set these parameters so as to personalize the look/feel of your theme to your brand. To get to this section follow these steps:

1. Click the Advanced tab at the top.

2. Scroll down to the "Custom Code" section.

3. Click Edit next to Custom Scripts & CSS

Selecting your Shipping Methods

Part of the homework would have been to see which shipper will pick up your goods in your area, and also have a way to be accessed in WIX. Logistics is large and can be complex in regard to delivery locations, especially internationally. The process to configure and set up your shipping methods can be found here: https://support.wix.com/en/wix-stores/setting-up-shipping-fulfillment

WIX DNS Website settings

To be familiar with what you will require to go live with, you will need to know where to add the DNS Settings from your domain provider. Details on where to add your DNS in Wix is located here: https://support.wix.com/en/article/adding-or-updating-a-records-in-your-wix-account

WIX Payment Gateway providers

WIX has integrated many payment gateways that are country-focused. The following page will describe what is being offered and how to look into the fees and integration options of each available provider.

https://support.wix.com/en/article/available-payment-providers-in-your-country

Editing your pages

While filling out your pages, and then coming around to edit them, take special attention to title changes and their associated SLUGs (link) to ensure you have been consistent in the naming conventions. Additionally, if the store is live, and if Google has indexed your pages, you will need to do a 301 redirect from the old page URL to the new page URL, so as to minimize any errors when people click on your link.

Go Live

By now, your content, your brand, your images, and your products have all been priced, described, and are ready to be promoted. After several reviews, previews, and testing you will feel it is the time to launch your site. It's time to enter the location IP Address of your WIX site to your domain provider and you are good to go. It takes a few hours to a day in some places for it to propagate. Keep checking to see how it propagates on this tool, it is useful to see how the globe updates with your store: https://www.whatsmydns.net/ - just enter your domain.

Conclusion

For some techies, this may be easy enough to follow and won't take too much time to understand and follow the steps. While it may look simple there is terminology and navigation to follow and may not be for everyone. If you need help, or just need a recommendation - just reach out to us over email or our website chat, and we are happy to help at wish@thegenielab.com. We are eCommerce builders and we specialize in various platforms.