How to start an online store from scratch and drive sales

Launching an ecommerce business has never been easier

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One of the greatest talents that you can have as a business owner is knowing how to start an online store the right way.

Why? Well, it has never been easier to launch aneCommercebusiness. Anyone can start an online store, but not everyone can make it into a success.

Fortunately for you, all the tips and tricks you’ll need to know when starting an online store are here in this article.

Curious entrepreneurs and ambitious business owners – right this way.

Benefits of starting an online store

If you want to create an online store, remember that whatever products you sell, the business will require two things from you: time and energy.

Pouring effort into your eCommerce website will pay off, though. Here are just some of the many advantages to starting an online store:

Ready to start building your business and finding your customers? Here’s how to start an online store from scratch, step by step.

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1. Choose your niche

The first step you’ll need to take towards launching an eCommerce store is finding what will make your business stand out from the competition.

From products to customers and fulfillment, you should begin the journey by thinking about every step along the way. Sounds intense, but it’ll be worth it.

Products

The best way to start an online store is with a niche product (or range of products) that you feel passionate about. To find those perfect products:

Think the stars have aligned and you’ve found products for your online store? The next steps are as important – it’s time to validate demand.

Make sure to:

Customers

Finding the right products and the right customers is a balancing act – these steps usually overlap. Here’s how you can land the ideal target audience:

Business model

With your products and a target market in mind, think about what kind of business structure you’d like. Online stores typically use a few distinct fulfillment models:

2. Write a business plan

The next step will help you transform your online store ideas into actions. It’s time to pull together your eCommerce business plan.

Writing a plan not only gives you a clearer view of the future of your store, but it’ll show other people what you’re doing. Here are some key tips.

Lead with a mission statement

This is the place to share the purpose of your online store. Even if you’re a small organization with very few products, it’ll help to give your eCommerce venture some direction:

Highlight your market research

You’ve already put in the work to uncover your ideal products and customers. As you grow your brand, make sure you have justified what makes your online store competitive:

Share your strategies

Any good article about how to start an online store will tell you that good marketing is key to your success. You should plan your approach before setting up your business with a comprehensive Marketing Plan. This should include:

There’s plenty more that you can include in your company’s plan of action. Leave room for the practical stuff which is just as vital to the success of your online store, for example:

If you don’t feel comfortable with dealing with balance sheets, now is a very good time to find an accountant for your e-store. A good accountant can let you know about costs associated with establishing and running your store such as setting up bookkeeping systems, tax and preparing financial statements. They may also be able to suggest ways to manage your cash flow and/or save money.

First and foremost you should list when you actually want your store to move from testing and go ‘live’.

You can also set milestones for events like your store reaching X number of visitors by a certain date, as well as your estimated conversion rate i.e. how many of them actually buy something.

Another important milestone is estimating your revenue at regular intervals. Your accountant can help you with this if you’re not sure where to start.

3. Select a website builder

If you want to know how to start an online store quickly, easily, and without spending thousands on developers, start looking atwebsite builders.

Website builders simplify the site development process. Accessible to anyone, these platforms take care of hosting, design, and coding so that users can focus on growing a business.

You can launch your online business another way, but the benefit of a website builder is the tools you’re given to guide you through scaling your site or store.

From big platforms like Shopify to newer ones like Zyro, there are plenty of website builders to choose from. Here’s a quick breakdown of three of the best eCommerce site builders:

If you’re anentrepreneurand you haveno coding experience,Zyrois a great choice. With a drag-and-drop editor and an impressive AI toolkit, designing a website is effortless:

Shopifyis a well-known store builder platform for users with abigger budgetor people withsome coding experience. That said, Shopify is easy to use for building a store:

AWordPress-powered online store platform,WooCommerceis ideal for moreexperienced userswith ambitious plans. Here’s an overview of what this store builder has to offer:

4. Choose and register your domain name

Once you’ve found the ideal platform for your store, it’s time to make it official with a business name and adomain name.

Choosing the right name is a vital step towards building your brand and you want people to recognize your business, so take time to get it right. Let us guide you through the process.

Business name

When you launch an online store, expect your business name to be featured everywhere, from product packaging to sales invoices, and maybe even the products themselves. Make sure to:

If you’re totally stuck, website builders like Zyro and Shopify have business and domain name generators to help you land on the perfect name for your store.

Domain name

Your domain name is the address of your website on the internet. It doesn’t have to perfectly match your business name, but it’s better for your brand and for attracting customers if it does.

Whatever you choose, one of the most important tips to remember is to avoid hyphens and numbers in your domain name. It looks less professional and becomes less memorable if you include them.

Use domain name checking software to ensure availability and find the perfect top-level domain (TLD) for your site – for example .com or .net.

In the case of businesses, most visitors feel reassured by a .com address. However, if you’re selling specifically to a particular region like Britain, you may also want to register a country-specific TLD such as .co.uk.

Made your decision? Now it’s time to:

Social media handles

One of the final steps in confirming the name of your business is grabbing hold of the matching social media account handles.

Say your store is called the Store Shop. To create a truly identifiable brand and excel at social media marketing, you’ll want to own the @storeshop handle on every platform, too.

If that name is taken – even if only on one of your chosen channels – experiment with variations until you find one that you can use everywhere: for example, @thestoreshop.

5. Customize your website

With a platform chosen and a store name ready, the next step is the fun one: it’s time to design a spectacular website for your online business.

There’s no particular order to the steps for designing a website, actually – with a website builder you can spend as long as you’d like perfecting your site. Here are our top tips.

The layout

One huge perk of using website builders is the designer-made templates that help you to get an idea of your site layout. Pick your favorite design then get to work on customization:

The branding

Your site design should embody your brand. When you’re dreaming up a visual brand identity, create a guide that keeps all your branding rules in one place.

Think about:

The products

Possibly the most important part of building your store is listing the items that you sell. Take extra care when you upload your product catalog if you want to maximize the potential for sales:

Mobile Platforms

These days around half of people accessing the Internet do so on their mobile devices. This means your online store has to be optimized for viewing on the relatively smaller screens of cellphones and tablets.

If you use a ‘responsive’ web design, it should automatically adapt to the size of the screen on each device. Some products like Shopify have a mobile version built-in, so can make the switch easily.

If you feel comfortable editing pages yourself, try to use smaller, compressed images for the mobile version of sites, as this will reduce load times. Fonts and buttons should be larger, so they can be easily tapped.

6. Configure payment and shipping options

After you’ve spent so much time creating beautiful, on-brand,SEO-friendly product pages, it’s essential to make sure that your customers can easily buy and receive those products.

Things are starting to get real with your online store – here are the next steps in the process.

Establishpayment gateways

One of the best things you can do for your customers is offer multiple payment options for their orders in your store, so that neither of you miss out.

Consider the fees per provider as well as user experience before landing on your chosen payment options. Let us share a few examples:

A side note about sales tax

The amount of sales tax you need to pay will vary depending on where your business is located.

With a great website builder, you can calculate and manage sales tax on a central dashboard so that it doesn’t slip off the radar.

However you choose to monitor it, and whatever the amount, make sure that your business is paying the necessary taxes for your location.

Smooth out your shipping options

Remember step 1 of how to start an online store? You picked out a business model, so now is the time to prepare for whatever shipping logistics you need to manage.

Let’s look at your options in more detail:

7. Start an SEO-friendly blog for your online store

Creating ablogisn’t an essential step for building an online store, but it provides a great technique to drive awareness of your brand.

Search engine optimization (SEO) itselfisessential if you want to drive traffic to your store in an organic, cost-effective way. You can build for SEO with several tactics.

Thoroughkeyword researchfor your product pages, site responsiveness, and link building are all SEO boosting techniques, so why create a blog?

Your blog will be a central part of your content marketing strategy: you can take important keywords for your store and capitalize on them with a helpful, reliable blog entry.

The SEO boost that a blog provides can help your eCommerce website rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) so that you stand out, especially if you post consistently.

Consistent posting also gives way to sharing opportunities across your other sales channels, like social media.

Here’s what you could write about if you add a blog to your platform:

8. Test your online store

The last step before launching your eCommerce business is to put your website on trial. Before any customers go on a shopping journey, it’s your turn to test the store.

One useful idea is to pull together a focus group of trusted friends and family.

Before your site goes live, provide the focus group members with a password or URL to access the store and trial the shopping experience – don’t forget to gather feedback.

Go slowly, and shop your store just like a customer would. While you don’t need to check every product page to the same level, it pays to be thorough. Here’s a checklist of what to test.

The homepage

The search function

The product pages

Shopping cart

Checkout

9. Launch and promote your store

You’re here: it’s time to launch your carefully-made, groundbreaking, never-seen-before online store.

Are you ready to spread the word?

If you’ve followed the previous steps, you’ll have an SEO-friendly site packed with the right keywords and content to drive traffic and convert leads. But it’s not all about your website.

Kick your marketing strategy up a gear and find ways to maximize your store’s coverage so that it launches in the best possible way.

Use social media

You already know that social media platforms are pretty much essential to your eCommerce store’s success. Here’s how to make the most of them:

Don’t forget other marketing channels

Social media isn’t your only marketing tool, although sometimes it might feel that way. You can supercharge your site traffic with some more well-honed techniques:

Keep networking

Make sure that you keep conversations with your customers and your peers alive while you’re growing your business. It’ll help improve your product offer as well as promote it:

10. Track and tweak as you go

You’ll be so obsessed with your store’s success that we probably don’t need to remind you to monitor your website’s performance as it grows. But let’s help you set some objectives.

First up, you should set some key performance indicators (KPIs) for your store, so that you’re actively tracking the right data for the right reasons.

Schedule time to pull an in-depth review of the key metrics each week and get started. Here are just some examples for tracking performance as you go:

The more aware you are of who is visiting your store, what turns customers away, and which products are most successful, the easier it will be to adapt, grow, and succeed.

Many online store products like Shopify support third-party plugins to help you gather and organize this kind of information.

For instance,Analytics Buddypulls all the data from yourGoogleAnalytics profile and displays it in one place. If you have allowed customer reviews,Yotpocan automate the process of requesting them from customers and also help you display them prominently in yours store.

This will also easily allow you to set up an e-mail newsletter that can target customers with specific products rather than bombard them with identical messages. You can usually create custom newsletters from the admin dashboard of your store.

Setting up an online store is only part of the journey – tracking performance once you’ve launched can bring so much more potential to your business.

Stores in Summary

Setting up your first online store is hard work but help is available to get you over any bumpy patches.

The best mindset to develop is to treat your online store exactly as if you’re opening a bricks and mortar one. It deserves exactly the same amount of time and devotion. Choose your products carefully, then write up both a business and marketing plan. Make sure to register both an original business and domain name that match.

When it comes to your website, research your options thoroughly based on how easy you find the store software to use, as well as your expected volume of sales. Don’t forget to publicize your store using social media, blogs and customer reviews.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to offer discounts or use paid advertising at first to get your store off the ground, after which it’ll hopefully snowball. Even once it’s up and running, make sure to engage with new customers through gathering reviews and even installing achatbot.

You can enhance your store even further with other plugins to allow you to analzye marketing data and interact better with your customers. Give careful thought to creating custom e-mail newsletters to existing customers too, so you can let them know about new products. This will encourage repeat business.

Starting an online store can be a profitable and exciting opportunity for anyone looking to turn their passion for products or services into a lucrative business. However, careful planning and execution are necessary to ensure success.

This comprehensive guide has covered everything from choosing thebest ecommerce platformand selecting a target audience to picking the right products, connecting a payment gateway, and launching and marketing your store.

By following the steps above and using effective marketing strategies, you can build a successful online store that reaches a wider audience and generates significant revenue. With the right guidance and tools, anyone can launch a thriving e-commerce business.

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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