Your brick-and-mortar corner store is the heart of your business, but you don’t need another location to expand. Taking your business online isn’t just a way to increase sales; it can increase your entire brand.
In the early 2000s, a basic website was enough to impress customers and competitors alike. But that’s not the case anymore. A website has a ton of advantages, but it needs to be created and curated in tandem with your socials and your emails. That’s quite a task, but it’s one that millions of merchants have used to turn their corner store locations into their very own corner of the world wide web.
Going online also doesn’t mean abandoning what made your physical business successful. Your storefront, customer service, reputation, and local community are still valuable. An online presence simply gives those strengths somewhere else to live, while giving new customers a way to discover your business before they ever walk through the door.
We’ve already written about how to boost e-commerce businesses that are already online, but let’s take it back to the basics. In this guide, we’ll dive into how to finally take your business online.
Why Your Business Needs an Online Presence
Here are just a few of the benefits of simply creating a website for your business:
- Expands your brand and your business
- Ability to sell merchandise and goods 24/7
- Growth opportunities
- Easily update customers on current sales, hours, deals, and more
- Creates an increased level of trust with your customers
Not every industry is going to see an increase in sales because of a website or Instagram account. Your coffee shop can’t necessarily sell a latte online, but you can extend your brand.
A website isn’t just an order form, and it’s not just a virtual sign for your store. It’s both. That’s why the best merchants and store owners utilize every tool at their disposal. A website takes time, especially when you want it to be more than a simple page with store hours.
It can become the central hub for everything surrounding your business. Customers can discover your products, learn your story, find your physical locations, join an email list, make appointments, buy gift cards, browse upcoming events, or shop without ever visiting the store.
That makes your online presence an extension of your physical location rather than a replacement for it.
How to Take Your Business Online
Learn Web Development – Or Hire Out
The easiest way of creating your online presence is to start an X or Instagram account – the most difficult way is to create your own website. We are in the golden age of web development, where it’s easier than ever, but that doesn’t mean the basic website you can knock out with help from Shopify or Wix is good enough.
Web development takes years of knowledge and expertise. It takes creativity and design expertise, skills that not everyone can master while running their business at the same time.
That doesn’t necessarily mean every business needs to spend a fortune on a custom website. What matters is understanding what your website needs to accomplish.
A restaurant may need menus, reservations, locations, and online ordering. A clothing store might need a full e-commerce catalog. A contractor might care more about quote requests, service pages, and customer reviews. Start with the customer experience and build from there. If a website builder can accomplish everything you need, great. If your requirements are more complicated, hiring a professional may save significant time and frustration.
Whatever route you choose, don’t forget mobile users. Your website needs to be easy to navigate, browse, and buy from on a smartphone. A beautiful desktop website doesn’t accomplish much if customers have to pinch, zoom, and fight their way through checkout on their phones.
Optimize Your Business for Online Search Results
Customers need to be able to find your business, and many of them will use Google to do so. Stats show that over 80% of US-based customers use search engines to find local businesses. It could be a restaurant, it could be a tailor, but they pulled out their smartphone and typed in a search bar to find it.
That’s why your business needs to be fully optimized for online searches. Include relevant keywords in your profiles, fully update and fill out any Yelp or Google Business pages, add your location and hours, and last but not least, make sure to add that useful website and socials you created! Customers should have every opportunity to find and support your business, and getting to the top of SERPs will do that.
Consistency helps, too. Your business name, address, phone number, hours, website, and other important information should be accurate wherever customers find you. Conflicting hours or an old address can turn a potential customer away before you even know they were interested.
Online reviews can also become an important extension of your reputation. Encourage satisfied customers to leave genuine reviews and make a habit of responding professionally to feedback. Your reputation already matters on Main Street. It matters just as much when someone finds you through a search engine.
Build Your Network
When a customer leaves a store without buying anything, that’s more than just one missed opportunity. Just because they didn’t see what they wanted today doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.
The same goes for your website. In 2025, the cart abandonment rate hit 71%. That isn’t just a lost sale; it’s a lost connection. Give customers an opportunity to hear more from you. It could be a future sale, it could be a new line of products, but whatever it is, it might turn that abandoned cart into a completed online transaction.
Your online audience doesn’t have to consist exclusively of customers who have already purchased something. Newsletter subscribers, social followers, loyalty members, and even visitors who regularly interact with your content can eventually become customers.
The goal is to give people a reason to stay connected. Once someone leaves your website with no connection to your business, getting them back is much harder.
Use Clear and Attractive Photography
In the early 2000s, businesses could get away with poor quality photos or none at all. That’s not the case anymore. Your storefront and merchandise aren’t just your products; they’re an extension of your brand.
Customers who can’t tell how high quality your product is will just buy it from your competitor. Over 65% of customers list high-quality images as an important part of their purchasing decisions. Clear and quality photography helps to remove any doubt about the quality of your products or the quality of your business.
Consistency matters here as much as quality. Product photos shouldn’t look like they’re coming from five completely different businesses. Similar lighting, backgrounds, dimensions, and overall styling can make even a relatively small online store look much more polished.
You don’t necessarily need an expensive photography studio. You do need photos that accurately represent what customers are purchasing and give them enough detail to make a confident decision.
Build an Email or Subscriber List
Decades ago, it was a Rolodex. Now, it’s an email list. When you’re building a brand, you want to give your customers a chance to be a part of the process.
Keeping a subscriber or email list gives them the chance to connect with your business. It also lets them know about sales, new products, events, and whatever other marketing opportunities you have coming down the pipeline.
Connections are everything, so make sure you’re keeping those connections with an efficient email list.
Give customers an actual reason to subscribe. Early access to new products, exclusive offers, useful content, event announcements, or loyalty benefits can make handing over an email address worthwhile.
Just don’t turn every email into another sales pitch. Your customers’ inboxes are already crowded. Useful, relevant communication is more likely to keep subscribers around than constant promotions.
Establish a Presence on Social Media
In the 2020s, your social media presence is just as important as your physical presence. Customers support brands for more than their products. They use it as a part of their identity.
Your causes become their causes. Your charity events or showcases become their social life. That only happens with an active and established social media presence. That means when new products hit the shelves, new stories and posts need to hit customers’ feeds.
The trick isn’t being everywhere. It’s being active where your customers actually spend their time.
A business that posts consistently on one or two relevant platforms can create a stronger presence than one with neglected accounts across every social network available. Use social media to show what makes the physical business interesting: new inventory, employees, behind-the-scenes content, customer stories, events, promotions, and the personality customers already experience in-store.
Most importantly, make sure your brand feels like the same business everywhere. Someone who discovers you on social media and later walks through your front door shouldn’t feel like they’ve encountered two different companies.
Add Online Protection Tools and Features
Take your website security seriously, because your customers certainly do. A study from Mastercard recently showed that over 90% of consumers wouldn’t do business with a company after experiencing any fraud through them.
Hackers and fraudsters are just as advanced as the technology and tools that fight them. If there’s a way to get access to your transactions or email list, they’ll find it. But all you need to do is make sure your website has robust security. It protects your customers’ data and financial information in the short run, but it protects your brand and business in the long run.
Security should extend beyond the checkout page. Strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, restricted employee permissions, updated software, secure plugins, fraud prevention tools, and careful access management can all help reduce vulnerabilities.
As your online business grows, so does the amount of valuable information moving through your systems. Treat security as an ongoing business responsibility rather than something you set up once and forget about.
Create a Plan for Shipping, Fulfillment, and Returns
Almost 70% of customers will refuse to reorder from a company that misses its shipping dates, even if it’s just by a day or two. Customer expectations are sky-high these days, and rightfully so.
When some of the biggest e-commerce companies can get a package delivered 4 hours after it’s ordered, that raises the standard for everyone else. No one expects you to be the next Amazon or Walmart, but to get a plan in place that keeps customers happy.
Create a notification system that offers consistent alerts, notifies the customer when the package has been dropped off at the post office, and offers tracking so they know exactly when to expect their products.
The same goes for returns. You can’t always please everyone. Refunds can be costly, but confusing or restrictive return policies can be costly in different ways.
Think about fulfillment before online orders begin piling up. Where will inventory be stored? Who packs orders? How often are shipments collected? How will online inventory stay synchronized with what’s available in your physical store?
The first ten online orders might be easy to handle manually. The hundredth could expose every weakness in your system. Build a process that can grow with demand.
Make Checkout Easy
Getting someone onto your website is only half the battle. Once they’re ready to purchase, don’t give them a reason to leave.
Keep checkout as simple as possible. Avoid unnecessary form fields, clearly display shipping costs and taxes, make important policies accessible, and offer payment options your customers actually use.
Customers should also know they’re buying from you throughout the entire process. A checkout experience that suddenly looks completely different from the rest of the website can create hesitation, especially for customers purchasing from your business online for the first time.
Every unnecessary obstacle between “Add to Cart” and “Order Confirmed” is another opportunity for a customer to reconsider.
Find a Secure Payments Partner
Security is more than just adding some bot management or fraud detection; your transactions are your bread and butter. It’s a process that not only needs to be seamless, it also needs to be secure.
That’s not just a concern for customers; it’s a concern for you. If a malicious user can get access to a customer account, they can likely get access to your entire system, which means that your customers and your data are right there for the taking.
Your payment provider should therefore be chosen with the same care as the platform hosting your online store.
Look beyond the advertised processing rate. Consider payment security, fraud prevention capabilities, accepted payment methods, reporting, integrations, customer support, settlement times, chargeback management, and whether the provider actually supports your industry and business model.
This becomes even more important when a brick-and-mortar business begins processing a meaningful percentage of its transactions online. e-commerce transactions can introduce different fraud and chargeback risks than face-to-face sales, so payment infrastructure that worked perfectly at the counter may not necessarily be the right solution for your growing online operation.
Take Your Brick-and-Mortar Success Online With Luqra
Taking your business online shouldn’t mean leaving behind everything that made your physical location successful. It should give you more ways to reach customers, build your brand, and generate revenue. Your payments need to make that transition with you.
Not every processor is ready for your online sales spikes, though. Growing businesses can trigger reviews from companies like Stripe. That means for legacy processors, your success could be a red flag, but not at Luqra.
Luqra helps merchants build payment infrastructure capable of supporting both where their business is today and where it’s going next. Whether you’re adding e-commerce to an established physical operation or building a much larger omnichannel presence, your payment setup shouldn’t become the thing holding you back.
With Luqra, merchants taking their business online can benefit from:
- Online and in-person payment capabilities that help connect physical and digital commerce
- Secure payment technology designed to protect transactions as online volume grows
- Flexible solutions for businesses that don’t always fit the standard processing mold
- Payment infrastructure built to scale alongside your sales, customers, and operations
- Tools and support for navigating fraud, chargebacks, and the challenges of e-commerce payments
- A payment partner that takes the time to understand the business behind the transactions
Taking a brick-and-mortar business online is a major step, but it doesn’t require reinventing your entire company. Start with what already works, translate that experience into the digital world, and build the systems necessary to support it.
Your storefront may still be the heart of the business, but Luqra can help make sure your payments are ready for everything beyond the front door.
