WuliLessons from Wuli Grooming’s e-store development

It took me 5 months with the help of a talented team, but I couldn’t be more proud of the Wuli Grooming e-store. Building a great e-commerce store forces you to leverage a multitude of skills and features. Sure, you could easily just use the DIY template provided by Shopify, but that only scratches the surface. If creating an online store that’s both engaging and informative to visitors is your priority (btw, it SHOULD BE), then you’ll find helpful some of my key learnings from my experience below:

1. Content Matters: Too many online beauty stores these days look cookie-cutter and keep information like product descriptions to 1–2 sentences and then bullet point main active ingredients without much context. I’m here to tell you that unless your product is phenomenal, you need to invest in your site’s content. Tell a story. Make it engaging. Give people a bit of humour if you can. It goes such a long way in how your brand comes across as well as that extra confidence from a customer viewing your brand through a screen.
2. Good photography is invaluable: Aside from investing in a professional web developer (note: I wrote all my website’s copy myself and hired an Ex-beauty Editor to edit my work), I also invested in quality photography. Great e-commerce photos are almost impossible to obtain through real-life imagery, so I knew I had to invest in CGI renders to get every detail of my products right. It was a bit expensive, but the website’s professionalism speaks for itself. DM me if you’d like my photographer’s recommendation (he’s based in Australia).
3. Automate as much as possible: I truly believe the future of great e-commerce is in artificial intelligence and automated systems. These tools have the ability to help guide customers to the best product without human intervention and also help you collect critical data on who’s coming to your site, what they’re buying etc. Don’t let it scare you because it’s technology. The greatest skill you need to do it effectively is a bit of Marketing experience and lots of Customer Journey knowledge (i.e. you need to be able to visually map out what the customer’s journey to your store looks like and then identify every single touchpoint they would take to making a sale). I took my time researching the best Shopify app plugins to address this and created a nice mix that addresses onsite inquiries (i.e. a hair quiz), instant feedback from the store (i.e. Facebook messenger plugin), reviews from current/past customers and curated emails based on actions on my site. All of these things become monthly subscriptions costs. But if you set it up properly at the beginning, you’re setting yourself up for long term growth.

That’s all I have to share for now. Thank you again for your amazing words of encouragement on this journey. I’ve been knee-deep in promoting the site, sharing the news to media outlets and continuing to do weekend markets each month to generate direct sales.

Planning to launch your own online store and would like some advice, feel free to message me at hello@wuligrooming.com