It is the best possible time to start an ecommerce business because shopping online has reached its golden era. Providing your customers a rewarding online experience is absolutely crucial and you need to direct your efforts into making your e-commerce site state-of-the-art. But is that enough to thrive in this competitive field? Certainly not. Here are 5 fundamental tips for making your online business strong:

1. You need a strong website

Your success in e-commerce depends a great deal on your website because that is where your customers get in contact with your brand's products. So don't hold back and build a strong website from the very beginning. Investing in your website is essentially investing in your business, so always have it at the top of the list.

You should have a team of web developers, who can put together a strong platform built in the newest technologies. Your site must be up to date to be able to run optimally and support the current and upcoming online requirements. You also need your devs for support. If your site is down, you lose contact with your users, and you lose money. To prevent this, have an emergency system set up and make sure that there is somebody who can fix the issue as soon as possible so that you can get back online. 

2. You need solid hosting for your website

A solid e-commerce platform must rely on excellent hosting. Here's why: what if all of your business objectives turn into reality and you get that boom of customers who want to buy your products? Amazing, right? It certainly is, but you have to be ready for that boom in traffic.

What happens if your customers find themselves looking at a blank page or get an error from the 500 list? The short answer is - you lose money, a lot of money, from your customers and all the other people they are going to tell about their negative experience on your site.

So, make sure you prevent this e-commerce suicide scenario and up the hosting for your site. If this weren't a good enough reason, then you should also keep in mind that the better your hosting, the better chance you have at a high page speed loading score. People don't have time to wait anymore so one second is enough to make them bounce from your site. The first thing you have to do to prevent this is to get the best hosting you can get. It's certainly going to help your developers and your SEOs tremendously.

3. You need strong offline business skills

E-commerce is an online matter, but not all the way. All too many people end up failing in this because they don't have their offline business up to speed. Taking administration courses can do wonders for your online business because it will help you provide a better service to your customers.

Moreover, it will help you to keep your accounting. Don't think that you get to cut any corners because you sell your products online instead of a regular store. You need to be one step ahead of the market trends and to be able to analyze your business development as best as possible. Having a good website will help you make it, but what you might be tempted to forget is that all this is valid provided that your offline business is flawless. 

4. You need to do good SEO for your site

You can have the best products on the best platform at the best price and all of this is worthless if your platform is invisible to your potential customers. And to put things into perspective, this means ranking on the second page in Google search. Without a solid SEO strategy, your awesome site will be on the far end of the internet (still the second page in Google) and users will only land on it accidentally.

On the other hand, having a strong SEO strategy aimed at meeting your users' needs and setting up the fastest website that is ready to jump through Google's continuous hoops will have your site in the top positions in the SERPs. Work to get those featured snippets and make sure to implement structured data on your site and your users will come running.

You also need to make your site mobile-responsive because the era of mobile-first has finally started and Google is done waiting for you to improve your mobile experience. You might as well design your site on mobile primarily because this is the future in rank!

5. You need to be visible on social media

If you want to thrive in e-commerce, you have to be where your users are. And where do they spend most of their time? On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and quite a few other social media platforms. Just to make things clear, yes, you have to be present on all the platforms that your target audience uses and no, you can't reuse your material from one to the other.

Each social media platform has its own style and it is up to you to create a notable presence, everywhere. You need photographs for Instagram, videos for Facebook, and concentrated copy for Twitter. If you manage to get your users' attention on social media, you've got it made because they will not only interact with your brand, but they will be able to relate to it, which is going to help your business in the short and long run.

These are the 5 essential elements of building a strong e-commerce platform. If you want to thrive in e-commerce, you need a state-of-the-art platform, with rock-solid hosting and stellar SEO, that runs fast on mobile, but also on desktop, which is connected to amazing social media. And to make everything click, you need some strong offline business skills. Are you ready?