Lessons From Looka Affiliates: WiziShop’s Focus On Creating The Best Customer Experience

As more and more businesses moved online over the last year, it’s no surprise how competitive the ecommerce space has become.

We chatted with Alexandra Thomas (International Communications Executive) at WiziShop, an innovative ecommerce solution for creating professional online stores, (and one of Looka’s top affiliate partners) to learn more about their dedication to a customer-first approach and the keys to standing out in a crowded market.

Can you give us an overview of WiziShop?

Our platform is SaaS (software as a service) so you don’t need to have any prior technical knowledge to create your online store, it’s super simple! We pride ourselves on providing an all-in-one solution with everything you need to set up, market, and develop your store.

We take care of the website hosting, provide client support, and have over 400 different features, from design, content, and marketing, to SEO, delivery, and payments.

Our main focus is centered around SEO: everything included in our solution is fully optimized for search engines. From the minute technical details to detailed training on how to improve your store’s SEO, we’ve thought of everything our clients need to make sure their stores are referenced as highly as possible so they reach as many prospects as they can.

WiziShop was founded in 2008 by three friends who realized that creating your own online store was not only very technically challenging but also cost a fortune in agency and developer fees.

They wanted to democratize online retail, making it open to anyone and everyone. WiziShop’s purpose is to encourage entrepreneurship!

How have you seen the ecommerce landscape change over the past few years? Do you feel that it’s become more or less challenging for entrepreneurs to be successful?

There are very few industries that have not made the move online, and this mass digitization has resulted in a boom for ecommerce. This growth has allowed smaller, independent businesses to move online and reach a greater number of customers.

Particularly since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, ecommerce has seen exponential growth. With physical stores having to close, store owners were accelerated in their digitization process.

Digitization has opened up so many doors for entrepreneurs that they never previously had access to. So in terms of process and setting up a new venture, we could argue that it has become much simpler, but making your business succeed and stand out is another question.

What are the main obstacles people hit when starting their online business?

We often see that people are most frightened about the move online due to a lack of technical knowledge, but I can assure you that solutions like WiziShop make this unbelievably easy.

Another expectation we see is that people expect their business to start making money as soon as their website is live but that’s definitely not the case.

You need to work on your SEO, website content, photography, and marketing which can also seem very challenging to people who have never worked on something similar before.

But with WiziShop is there to guide them the whole way through the process, with Business Coaches on hand to answer any questions and perform audits of the website to ensure everything is ready to go.

What role does branding play in a new ecommerce store?

Branding is incredibly important for any business, offline or online. It’s particularly important for online businesses as clients don’t have any physical interaction with the brand so they need to build a connection through simple elements like logos and website content.

If customers feel an affinity with a brand, they’re far more likely to purchase a product.

If you have a strong brand image, it can significantly help improve your notoriety; people that visit your website will remember your brand name and logo and consequently search directly for your website, or directly input the URL, the next time they want to visit your store.

This in turn reduces the dependency on other acquisition channels such as SEO or social media and generates free, quality traffic to the website. A strong brand image is invaluable!

What led you to seek out a partnership with a logo maker?

At WiziShop we wanted to team up with a logo maker to offer a simple and intelligent option for our clients to make their businesses more professional and to, in turn, incite confidence in their customers.

A lot of our clients don’t have specific graphic design skills or don’t feel capable of creating their own logo design so it was important for us to offer a trusted and professional partner to help them with this step of their business.

What attracted you to partnering with Looka?

We decided to partner with Looka as it’s a very simple interface that provides amazing results. The adaptability of the AI is incredible, offering a multitude of logos to choose from based on the client’s selected preferences. The results are then fully customizable, enabling the client to adapt their choice of logo to their tastes, from the color and font to the symbol featured.

Another great advantage is that the customer has the choice to purchase simply the logo itself or to opt for the full Brand Kit, making it a service that’s open to customers at all stages of their business development and budget levels.

What are some acquisition tactics and channels which have worked well for WiziShop?

Our main focus at WiziShop is SEO: for ourselves and for our clients. We have a dedicated team that’s constantly working on this and our strong positioning in Google often helps us with the acquisition of new clients. We also run Google Ads and ads across social channels, with specific targeting to reach new clients.

What we really think helps attract new clients is the amount of content we create with the customer in mind: we write a lot of guides, create lots of videos, and are constantly providing tips and tricks for how to improve.

We’re in constant communication with our clients, across social networks, and through our help center and Business Coaches, which helps to make our clients feel like they are being supported. Our guides and content are all optimized for search engines as well which helps those interested to find our solution.

Can you give me an example of a test, experiment, or initiative that didn’t go so well? What did you learn from it?

A while ago we completely redid our newsletter and made it a bit “prettier” and we thought this would have a direct impact on the open rate and click rate without having to do much else. We quickly realized that this wasn’t sufficient and we didn’t see a significant difference in the results.

So, we decided to take it a step further. We segmented our database into trial users, new users, engaged users, churned users, and blog subscribers. By segmenting our users and adapting the content for each group we considerably improved our open and click rates and it enabled us to re-engage our clients and recuperate users that had become disengaged and encourage trial users to become paying customers.

What are some exciting initiatives coming up for WiziShop?

WiziShop saw great success in 2020, the team grew and we saw success upon success for our clients, which was great. In 2021 WiziShop is launching internationally with the full solution (back office, training program, client support) all available in English.

This is something we’ve been working really hard on over the last couple of years and the team is really excited to see it go live. We’ll be launching at the end of summer in a variety of different anglophone countries and we can’t wait to see WiziShop grow and expand and help more entrepreneurs across the world achieve their business dreams!

Any advice that you’d like to pass on to other affiliate partners?

If you really believe in your affiliate partner, as we do with Looka, then putting them forward as a solution to one of your client’s problems couldn’t be simpler. We’ve tried and tested similar logo creators and we never had the same confidence we do now in recommending the service to our clients.

We offer a full tutorial of how to create your logo with Looka in our training program, right from the conception to the final product being integrated into the online store. We think this really helps as we offer a step-by-step guide and prove just how simple it’s, taking away that element of fear.

Summary

Whether you’re a software provider, blogger, review site, or even a small business yourself, being laser-focused on creating the best possible experience for your audience has tons of long-term downstream benefits – from a stronger brand to a richer product offering, to more loyal customers, to higher search rankings versus your competitors.

Keep asking your audience or customers how you can make a better experience for them, create compelling content that meets those needs (i.e. tutorials, guides, training programs, videos), then iterate and improve on those efforts over time.

As always, if you have any questions on our affiliate program, please feel free to email us at affiliates@wordpress-715453-2404509.cloudwaysapps.com