Self-built cross-border e-commerce website: analysis of advantages and success strategies

Advantages of building your own website

Improve product conversion rate

Self-built websites allow sellers to communicate directly with customers and understand customer needs more clearly, thereby increasing product conversion rates. Compared with cross-border e-commerce platforms, self-built websites have less competitive pressure, and sellers can devote more energy to website optimization and product promotion.

Highlight the characteristics of the merchant

Self-built websites can highlight the characteristics of the business and make it easier for customers to identify and remember the brand. Since there is no interference from other sellers on the self-built website, merchants can better display their product information.

Reducing financial pressure

For novice merchants who are new to cross-border e-commerce, building a self-built website can reduce store opening costs and later expenses, allowing merchants to invest more funds in website optimization and product promotion.

Common self-built website platforms and their advantages and disadvantages

Wix Store – Simple, Beautiful and Affordable

Wix Store is easy to use and quick to set up, requiring no coding knowledge to create a website. It offers over 500 templates made specifically for online stores and comes with a fully functional shopping cart. However, the inability to change the template after publishing the site is a drawback.

SiteBuilder – Best for Beginners

SiteBuilder is easy to use and has everything you need to get started, including domain name, hosting, analytics tools, SEO and e-commerce tools. Its disadvantages are that there are only about 100 templates suitable for the e-commerce field and it lacks advanced marketing tools.

BigCommerce – Best for Small Business

BigCommerce provides excellent store management features, including promotions, processing returns, coupons and discounts, and more. It also supports Amazon, eBay and social network integration. However, BigCommerce lags behind in terms of template products and lacks native POS functionality.

Shopify – the best choice for boutiques

Shopify is fully featured and offers dozens of free mobile-optimized themes. It supports multiple third-party payment gateways and has a large app marketplace. However, Shopify has higher fees and uses its own markup language “Liquid”, which has certain limitations on customization.

Volusion

Volusion provides comprehensive e-commerce and product management tools such as rich-text product descriptions, local fulfillment options, subscription options, loyalty programs, and more. However, Volusion’s pricing is unreasonable and it lacks blogging features.

Squarespace

Squarespace offers elegant, beautiful templates suitable for selling products that require high-quality images. It offers all standard options like product variations, inventory management, unlimited products, coupons, shipping, engineering. However, Squarespace is somewhat limited in functionality and lacks important options for more complex stores and large numbers of products or variations.

Magento

Magento is an open source software that offers tons of features and options, including membership subscriptions, recurring payments, discounts, and more. It also has a strong community with plenty of support and expert advice available. However, Magento requires certain technical knowledge and may consume more resources.

OpenCart

OpenCart provides everything you need to create and manage your store, including unlimited products and product categories. It also supports multiple currencies and offers hundreds of payment gateways. However, OpenCart’s native marketing capabilities are very limited.

ZenCart

ZenCart is fully customizable and has a strong reputation for security and scalability. However, ZenCart’s user interface is outdated and lacks dedicated support.

Key steps to successfully establish and operate a self-built website

Define goals and needs

Before establishing a self-built website, sellers need to clarify their goals and needs, consider their own business model, target market, product type and other factors, and determine the functions and features required for the self-built website.

Choose a suitable self-built website platform

Choosing the right self-built website platform is a critical step. Sellers should choose a self-built website platform for cross-border e-commerce to ensure that the platform has the required functions and features.

Design and develop self-built website

When designing and developing a self-built website, sellers should pay attention to user experience and interface design. Make sure your website has a clear navigation structure, easy-to-navigate product categories and search capabilities, and a streamlined shopping process.

Configure payment and logistics integration

Self-built websites need to be integrated with payment systems and logistics services to successfully complete transactions and logistics processes. Choose payment and logistics services that fit your target market and make sure your website can integrate seamlessly with them.

Implement marketing strategy

A successful self-built website requires an effective marketing strategy. Sellers can use search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing and other means to increase the exposure and attractiveness of their self-built websites.

Monitoring and Optimization

Sellers should regularly monitor the performance and data of self-built websites for optimization and improvement. By analyzing visitor data, sales data and user behavior, sellers can understand market trends and user needs and make corresponding adjustments and improvements.

Conclusion

Self-built websites provide cross-border e-commerce sellers with advantages such as independent control, better brand image, and higher marketing capabilities. Sellers should choose the most suitable self-built website platform based on their own needs and actual situation, and focus on brand building, optimizing sales strategies and marketing activities, paying attention to the security and stability of the website, exploring multiple sales channels, etc., and making full use of The advantages of self-built websites can improve sales efficiency and conversion rate, thereby obtaining greater business value [[1]].