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What Is the Best Way to Begin an Online Business?

Making an Online E-Commerce Site: A Step-by-Step Guide

By Tebogo MotinyanePublished 3 years ago 11 min read
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What Is the Best Way to Begin an Online Business?
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

You're probably curious...

Is it simple to open an online store – can I set up a website, secure it, add payment gateways, and ship my products myself?

Yes, to put it succinctly.

Everyone can launch an eCommerce website without understanding design or coding thanks to modern software and website builders.

Before you set up your web store, you must settle on a few items, such as what you'll sell, how you'll manage shipping and payments, and what marketing tactics you'll employ.

If you follow our step-by-step instructions, you'll be able to create an eCommerce website from the ground up in no time.

The following is a list of topics covered in this post (table of contents)

Make a decision on what you want to sell.

You can either dropship or sell your own stuff.

1.Choose the exact Products you want to market.

2. Come up with a name for your business.

3. Develop and launch an online store

4. Create payment options.

5. Promote your online shop.

1. Make a decision on what you want to sell.

The first and most important move is to choose your niche. A niche, as it's commonly known, is a subset of a larger market.

Please accept my apologies if this sounds a little too dictionary-like. Let's take a look at it in more layman's terms. Essentially, when deciding on a niche, you must decide:

1. What exactly are you looking to sell?

2. To whom are you planning to sell it?

3. What makes you think they'd buy it?

These three questions can seem to be self-evident, but they are not.

Defining your target customer base and determining why they will purchase from you would make your job much easier in the future. People often make the mistake of thinking that the larger the potential market, the more likely they are to make successful sales. This is not the case.

You'll have a hard time positioning your product in the market, marketing it, and describing what makes it so valuable if your target consumer base is just "people who breathe."

Overall, concentrating on a single niche is preferable to attempting to cover all bases.

It's best to begin with something about which you already have a personal interest, expert knowledge, or passion. It's difficult to work in an area where you have no prior experience.

So, start with your passions and work your way up. Define your ideal consumer and what motivates them to purchase the goods you want to sell.

Looking at what your niche's competitors are doing is a good place to start. Look at how they market their goods and who their target market is. Take what you've learned and add to it with what you've learned from others.

2. Decide whether to dropship or sell your own products.

Let's start at the beginning and go through two popular eCommerce scenarios:

The first scenario is the standard method of operating an online shop. This is how it works in this model:

(1) You purchase goods from a vendor or make them yourself (2) You make those items available to consumers through your website. (3) The commodity is purchased by the consumer (4) You give them the product.

The dropshipping model is as follows:

(1) You begin by creating a product list on your website. (2) The commodity is purchased by the consumer. (3) The commodity is sent directly to the consumer by the retailer.

The key advantage of the dropshipping model is that you do not need to have any inventory on hand. This ensures that there are no costs associated with producing or handling the goods. In reality, because you only have to pay the supplier after you receive an order from your client, all you sell is pure profit.

In the conventional model, you would pay money upfront to either purchase goods from a supplier or get them custom-made. That must be completed before you can begin selling them.

Dropshipping, on the other hand, isn't for you if the items you choose to sell are your own creations or need customization/personalization before being sold.

Overall, if you have the option, go with dropshipping – particularly if this is your first time starting an online store. Dropshipping is an excellent way to test the waters and ensure that the goods you intend to sell are in fact desirable to consumers. Then, as time goes by, you will grow and start selling your own goods.

3. Choose the Specific Products to Sell

One of the best aspects of dropshipping is that there are so many different items to choose from in almost every niche.

This is great news for companies that are just getting started and don't want to invest in product growth. The overall measures are as follows:

Make sure you know what your niche is. Examine the types of goods your rivals offer, as well as their best-selling items.

Look at content pages on the internet to see what kinds of issues, items, or topics your target audience is interested in.

Examine niche-related sites to see what the customers are discussing.

Use Google to find the keywords that are most important to your niche.

Go to Amazon and do the same thing. Examine the items that are the most common.

With all of this information, you can now visit some well-known markets and begin searching for unique products to sell.

AliExpress is the largest marketplace of this kind. By most accounts, it's yet another eCommerce marketplace, but it also helps you to form relationships with merchants and sell their goods as a dropshipper. Go there and look for items that are in line with your research and still seem to be good enough for your target market to enjoy.

Starting with 10-50 items is a good place to start. This will provide you with more than enough merchandise to complete your store while also ensuring that you are not overburdened with information as you deal with it on a daily basis.

Keep the following points in mind when putting together a product list:

-Check to see if the product can be shipped to the places where your target audience lives. Furthermore, the cheaper the delivery, the better.

-Check the delivery times to make sure they don't go beyond what you deem appropriate (we'll leave it up to you to decide what's acceptable and what isn't).

-Avoid brand-name brands if at all possible (you don't want to depend on being able to sell Adidas sneakers, for example).

It's normal for dropshipping stores to set their margins at around 50%. To put it another way, when looking for items to sell, look for ones that are half the price of what you want to sell them for.

As previously stated, a list of 10-50 items is sufficient for a launch. Later, when we import the items into your actual online store, we'll use the list.

4. Choose a company name and register a domain name Bluehost offers a free Domain and you only pay for Hosting

Choosing a domain name for your store is without a doubt the most enjoyable aspect of the process. People like giving stuff names. Especially for businesses.

Nonetheless. The name you choose will have a big impact on your business's potential success and ability to market itself effectively. When coming up with a business name, keep the following points in mind:

-Choose a name that is simple to pronounce.

Imagine you're on the phone with someone and you need to say your store's name. Is it necessary to spell it out for the other person to comprehend it?

If that's the case, the name is just too complicated. On the first try, go for something quick and easy to pronounce.

Choose a name that is simple to remember.

This is somewhat related to the previous issue. Your name must be easy to remember in addition to being easy to pronounce.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways. One choice is to use a totally made-up word as your name (think "Google"). Alternatively, you can bring two words together that have real meanings but produce something unique when combined (think "Face-book").

Choose a Name That Can Be Branded

Your business name should be unique enough that no one would confuse it with another similar company.

For example, if you want to name your pizzeria "Pizza Den," but there is already a "Pizza Pan" in town, it isn't a good name.

Pick a Name That Isn't Too Long (ish)

It should be no more than a couple of words long. It will become more difficult to recall and less brandable if you keep it any longer.

Use only numbers and special characters.

Dots, underscores, dashes, and other punctuation marks are also ignored.

Choose a.com domain name that is available.

The.com domain name extension is the most common and significant of the bunch. If you're thinking of a name, avoid using one that doesn't have a.com domain.

On a domain registrar site like Domain.com, you can see if your desired domain name is available.

5. Create Your Own Online Store Website

Finally, it's time to build a functioning online shop.

The best thing is that you can do it all on your own, with no need for professional assistance, and without sacrificing the quality of the finished product. Your online store will be just as usable and attractive as if it were designed by a professional.

I suggest using WooCommerce to accomplish this.

6. Provide Payment Options

Accepting payments from consumers is the final piece of the puzzle when it comes to starting an online shop.

WooCommerce allows you to accept PayPal payments by default. You also don't have to do anything to make this payment system work. During the initial WooCommerce setup, you most definitely took care of it.

You may, however, use a different payment system or even a couple of different payment systems at the same time. One explanation for this may be that some of the customers prefer some payment methods over others. As a result, the more of them you have in your shop, the more sales you'll get.

Stripe and Square are two of the most common additional payment methods for WooCommerce. If you want to accept credit cards, these are excellent options (which you surely do).

Both Stripe and Square are completely free to use. However, as with any payment process, there are extra costs associated with each transaction (the same goes with PayPal), so be mindful of that.

It's simple to add a new payment method to your eCommerce store. Both of those payment systems are WordPress plugins, so you can install them the same way you did WooCommerce.

Following that, each payment system has its own setup process. The majority of the time, all you have to do is create an account and check your details.

7. Begin promoting your online shop.

There are several ways to promote your shop, but we'll concentrate on only four here – the four that are most likely to succeed in 2021 and beyond.

Marketing with Influencers

Influencer marketing is a newer method of promoting your company. The majority of it is done via Instagram.

The following is how it works:

1.Find people who are well-known in your field or who are easily identifiable for some reason.

2.Contact them and inquire about their fees for marketing goods similar to yours. Pay attention to their following size and inquire about the amount of engagements they get on similar blogs.

3.Agree to a series of two or three promotional messages, and then give your goods to them.

Paid Ads

Paid advertisements almost never miss. You can make sales if there is a demand for anything and you advertise to that market.

Google AdWords is the most common platform for advertising your goods. It's pretty simple to get started with them, and Google has its own guides to help you get started.

Marketing on Social Media

Though Instagram is undoubtedly the most popular social media platform today, it isn't the only place where you can promote your shop.

In reality, you should be present anywhere your customers are likely to congregate. In today's world, this refers to the majority of the most popular social media platforms. Or, at the very least, the most common ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, and, if desired, Pinterest (if your customers use it).

Your approach to both of these networks will be identical, but your objectives and message construction will vary.

The first thing you can do is look at what your competitors are up to and how they promote their businesses. Take note of their methods and techniques, and see what you can apply to your own circumstances. Pay special attention to:

The types of messages they send out

The pace at which they send them out and how much they directly advertise their goods

How do their messages make you sound and what is their general tone?

SEO and Content Marketing

Nowadays, the most important approaches for promoting any website are content marketing and SEO (including eCommerce stores).

The concept behind content marketing is straightforward: you provide people with information on topics related to your company, generating interest in what you have to offer.

If your store sells winter socks, for example, you can give customers advice on how to choose ski socks. That advice can be delivered in the form of a simple blog post. People are introduced to your store and the socks you have in your catalog as they read your material.

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