Every day, new entrepreneurs are born.
With a great idea and the willingness to work hard, anyone can start their own business.
But, when it comes to expanding internationally, many entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed and unsure of where to start.
In this blog post, we’ll outline five easy steps that will help you build your international eCommerce from scratch in 2022
Each step would be effortless to follow because we are going to do it on a worldwide popular eCommerce CMS – Prestashop.
You must be thinking, why not WordPress or Shopify or Magento?
Well, Prestashop is one easy fella anybody can use, whether a teenager or a homemaker.
Plus, it is free of cost, and this blog post intends to guide you with the minimal investment possible.
So, make sure you pay close attention to each step and don’t skip because you may feel the need to hire a certified Prestashop developer at some points, and we’ll then guide you with the best instructions on how to do that.
Step 1: Install Prestashop on a high-quality hosting
The first step to starting an online business is subscribing to a solid web hosting plan.
It’s the foundation of your business. And when merged with Prestashop’s goodness, premium hosting by a reputed provider can power your business up with HTTP backend services, caching technologies, non-stop performance, and stable connectivity, so visitors don’t leave your site empty-handed.
Pro Tip: If you’re a little crunched on your budget, you may go with a shared hosting plan considering the initial stage of your business. Else, nothing’s better than a dedicated one.
Step 2: Pick & install a chic-looking theme template
The theme templates on the Prestashop marketplace are both aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. You can find the perfect one for your products in just seconds!
Prestashop’s marketplace has over 1000 themes you can explore and pick one for your store. Simply type in your product category in the search box, and you’ll witness a beautiful collection.
Remember that themes are not just different from each other in terms of appearance. They also reside in unique features and compatibilities. So make sure you read the theme description before finalizing and installing it on your Prestashop.
Step 3: Install Essential Add-Ons
After setting up your store’s appearance, aesthetics, and ergonomics, it’s time to focus on installing essential add-ons.
Because it’s an eCommerce business you’re setting up internationally, you need some specific plugins that get your job done without a jitter.
A) International Payment Gateways:
This is the biggest concern when it comes to online transactions from outside your nation’s boundaries.
Fortunately, there is an option for you with Prestashop that will allow international customers easy access and quick transfers of their money into your account.
Prestashop has partnered up perfectly with international payment partners, so all they need from users nowadays is to enter some basic information like name or address before making purchases without any hassle whatsoever.
They also assist via live chat, making communication very simple and your consumers more comfortable with your newly established brand.
B) Shipping & Logistics Management:
Prestashop has designed a remarkable shipping & logistics management module.
After this shipping module integration, a humanoid robot will manage & take stress for all your international orders. The software is intelligently coded, which makes it possible not only to track packages but also to determine delivery times as they travel across borders, both nearby or far away!
This can help businesses stay up-to-date on what needs doing without sacrificing efficiency since all data gets synced automatically between multiple devices, including tablets, PC laptops, smartphones, etc.
Step 4: Add products, and optimize them
You are done past 50% of your work. Now you need to add all your products & inventory carefully to your Prestashop. There are generally two ways to do this. If you don’t currently have too many items, then you can add each product individually.
Yet, if your product range is extensive, then you can create an excel sheet of all your items with their SKUs, unique product ID, color codes, titles, and descriptions, then upload it straight from your Prestashop backend into the ‘Add new products’ section.
This will automatically upload your complete inventory on your Prestashop, and then you can check them for potential mistakes, improvements needed, and other things you know.
Because eCommerce is a game of visuals. The more attractive your product looks, the more it’ll sell. To push your efforts in this game, Prestashop comes with a built-in image compressor that optimizes your product images to load 38% faster than other CMS platforms, and that too without compromising much on its quality.
Note: If you experience any trouble getting started with this step, we recommend you take professional assistance. This task is better done by an expert rather than messed up by an inexperienced person.
Step 5: Set up your marketing chamber
It’s 2022, and Prestashop has grown up into a full-fledged hub where you can hire virtual forms of real marketing professionals. We mean to say that Prestashop’s terrific library of modules consists of enough incredible tools to help you create your dedicated marketing chamber.
SEO & Content Creation Module:
You may install Prestashop’s advanced SEO module that manages not just all your on-page and off-page SEO aspects but your content creation practices as well.
It helps you research trending blog post topics, article scrapping, and potential sites to create backlinks. Each time you create content for your Prestashop web page or any other source, its SEO module suggests you with high-performing keywords you can include for better search engine ranking results.
Social Media Module:
Experts say that it’s hard to post unique content on all social media platforms and stay consistent with it. That’s why Prestashop’s social media manager module is different.
It allows you to add your Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social channels’ profiles in one place, so you can plan a single piece of the image, optimize it for all these platforms, and shoot them in a single tap at a single time.
You can even schedule your posts, manage your branding, and check your analytics for better social media content planning in its built-in social media calendar.
Ads & Analytics Module:
The most impressive yet pleasing part about Prestashop is Google apps integration. Yes! It has partnered with Google, so you can use its Google Ads, Google Analytics, and other standard tools to create high-performance ad campaigns for your Prestashop, and drive stupendous traffic, sales, and customers in a matter of days.
These Google app modules also help you retarget your customers using beautiful emailers and push notifications, so you can keep them entertained and hooked to your services.
Congratulations!
You’ve learned the easy 5 step process to ignite an international eCommerce from scratch. With these easy steps, anybody can be on their way to building a successful international eCommerce from the ground up.
If this was overwhelming, don’t hesitate to consult an expert for Prestashop development services or marketing assistance.
There are a lot of steps involved in building an international eCommerce from scratch, but if you take these five easy ones seriously and don’t hesitate to consult experts for help along the way, it can be done.
All the best! Happy Business
