Your online store’s logo is an important aspect of branding that many merchants often disregard as non-essential. After all, it’s your products you’re selling, right? Wrong! When shoppers visit your store, you’re selling your brand, not just your awesome catalog. And your logo is the single most important aspect when it comes to branding; playing a pivotal role in a shopper’s overall shopping experience.

If you’re looking to personalize your store so that it stands out from competitors, branding is an absolute must, and there’s no better place to start than designing your logo, which will serve as the face of your company. As this design will appear on all emails, invoices, banners, advertisements, and every page of your online store, it’s essential that the design is absolutely awesome.

Here are some important tips to keep in mind when designing your logo:

Your logo is a representation of your company’s values and ideals. Use this opportunity to create a design that’s the ultimate reflection of everything your business stands for.

Remember, your design doesn’t need to reflect what product/service you sell, i.e. the Coca Cola logo doesn’t showcase soda. A logo is a product identifier, so examine your logo and ensure that the design is suited for your intended market.

Logos allow us to recognize brands without ever reading a single word. Make sure your design is memorable so that it sticks with consumers long after they’ve left your website. The next time they encounter your logo, you want correlation to take place between your logo and your business name.

Make sure your logo is simple. If you have a complex logo with a lot going on, consumers are less likely to find your logo memorable. You want a unique design that reflects your business without going overboard. Complex, busy designs are often tacky, hard to remember, and don’t display well when scaled to smaller sizes.

If you’re hoping for a successful business, then that means you’re anticipating your logo to be the face of your company for the years to come. You want your logo to be able to stand the test of time. If you have to continuously redesign it, you’re changing your brand, which is something you want to avoid.

Make sure your logo is effective on a variety of mediums and applications. Does your logo look good small, huge, on a light background, on a dark background, in one color? Experiment to ensure the logo can be scaled to any size and can work in both horizontal and vertical formats.

Keep in mind, your logo is going to appear in a variety of sizes, so if you’ve got a lot of details and/or text going on, such details will only be visible when the logo is enlarged.

Well, unless you’re a designer, you’ll need to take advantage of the resources available to you. Luckily, you’ve got a few to choose from:

Do everything you can to ensure your existing customers continue to experience a personalized, awesome shopping experience. These are just a few tips to improve the likelihood of customer retention, but if you’ve got any other tricks or tips up your sleeve, feel free to implement those as well. There’s no such thing as showing too much customer appreciation!

Skilled, experienced designers can provide you with a unique, high-quality, professional logo. Take a look at your designer’s portfolio to ensure his designs are up-to-par with the quality you’re looking for.

If you’re a small business operating on a tight budget, going the crowdsourced route may be your best bet. The concept is simple; briefly describe what you’re looking for in your logo, and sit back as designers create dozens of logos for you. At the end of the contest, you get to decide which design is the winner.

o Examples of crowdsourced sites include designcontest.com, 99designs.com and designcrowd.com.

If you’re a DIY’er and would prefer to create your own logo while learning something new, there are plenty of free programs that allow you to make logos. One such program is Inkscape, a free, open-sourced graphics editor.

Another popular DIY logo site is withoomph.com, available at a low cost. Simply follow the easy guidelines to create beautiful logos instantly.

Select which route you’d like to go and do your homework to find the best site and/or designer to meet your business’ needs. Remember, your logo is the face of your company – the single most important aspect of branding – so put a lot of thought and effort into creating the perfect design. Your store’s success depends on this critical decision!