Starting Your Ecommerce Business
HOW TO START AN E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
Have you been looking to start an eCommerce business but are not sure what all factors and limitations (if any), you must take into consideration?
Perhaps you may not be sure about the process & cost to start an eCommerce business or most importantly what kind of products you must sell to get successful at your venture.
Don’t worry.
I am here to walk you through the process of setting up an eCommerce business.
Right from thinking about the products to setting up an eCommerce website and selecting payment gateways, we will cover all the important topics here. Let's Begin.
#1 Do The Groundwork
This is the initial or basic step to starting an eCommerce business.
This step requires you to think about 2 major things:
1. A Unique Concept
Remember here that we are not just talking about setting up any ordinary eCommerce business. Instead, we want to set up a business that has the potential of becoming your successful venture.
Therefore you need to think creatively about what is that is not available easily on other eCommerce websites or the local store at the corner of your street.
In other words, you need to think about filling a gap that hasn’t been covered by anyone.
Don’t think about this as rocket science. Just keep an eye on the regular pattern of eCommerce businesses or retail stores and keep asking this question “what is that if I, as a customer, can get which will eventually improve my life or solve my problem.”
I am sure if you try to answer this question 10 times, you will certainly find 2-3 great ideas to start your eCommerce business.
2. The Products That You Will Sell
Once you find a loophole or missing gap in the market for any need, think about the product that can fill that gap.
If it’s readily available and you just need to customize it a bit, think about the vendors who can help you.
If you must bring a new product altogether into the market, start searching for manufacturers who can help you produce them.
#2 Choose Appropriate Ecommerce Platform
After managing the products procurement or outsourcing, the next step is to search for the right eCommerce platform to sell your product on.
Some of the renowned eCommerce platforms are:
1. Amazon
2. eBay
3. Etsy
You can subscribe with an appropriate eCommerce platform, list your products there and start selling.
Why eCommerce platforms?
a. They already get tons on trafficking their portal every day which you can leverage.
b. Signing up with them and selling your products on these platforms is easier as well as affordable.
Any drawback?
Yes, the only challenge in using these eCommerce platforms is that they have thousands of sellers on their portal since it’s almost free to signup and list your products. Given this scenario, you may not be able to make your business stand out.
The solution.
Get your own eCommerce website. We will discuss it in the next point.
Step 3: Build Your Own Ecommerce Website
No matter whether you sell your Products on any or all of the eCommerce platforms, you must also have your own eCommerce store.
Building an eCommerce website is not expensive or hard these days. There are several open-source CMS available that you can use and develop an affordable eCommerce website.
By using open-source CMS like WordPress, you can easily build a basic eCommerce website for as low as $3000.
Recommended View: Our Affordable Ecommerce Web Design Packages
What are the benefits of having your own eCommerce website?
- You get your own self-hosted platform to sell your products.
- Your customers know your website or brand vs eCommerce platforms. So there is a high chance that they keep coming back to your website if they find your products reasonable and useful.
- You can plan for long-term marketing activities for your eCommerce website to grow traffic & sales. You can invest your money & time ineffective marketing activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) & Facebook Advertising/ Marketing.
- You get full control of your website. It’s up to you what & how you want to display on your eCommerce store.
Step 4: Choose Payment Methods & Payment Gateways
After or during the development of your eCommerce website, you also need to choose what payment methods you want to offer to your customers.
A few of the payment methods are:
- Credit Cards
- Debit Cards
- Cash On Deliver
- Check
- Fund Transfer
- PayPal
You must also finalize payment gateways to facilitate payments via credit cards & debit cards.
Some of the renowned payment gateways are:
- PayPal
- WorldPay
- 2Checkout
- WePay
- Authorise.net
- Stripe
Need An Ecommerce Website @ Affordable Price?
Step 5 Choose Website Hosting & Domain Name
The next step is to choose a reliable & affordable web hosting package and domain name.
You can easily get a domain name for as low as $20 per annum (with .com TLD) however a web hosting package may cost you $100 per annum.
While choosing a web hosting company for your eCommerce website, you must take care of a few things:
- Price: Since you will be charged every year for hosting your website, you must make sure that you get the best deal.
- Support: Support is also very crucial when choosing a web hosting company for your website. It’s even more important than the price. You must ensure that the support team of your chosen web hosting company is available 24/7 like most reliable web hosting companies have.
- Web Hosting Space/Storage: If your eCommerce website has thousands of products, you must ensure that your web hosting package must be able to accommodate all of them. You can seek your web developer’s help if you are not sure about this.
- Customer Reviews: You must check the reviews from past customers of your web hosting company.
Step 6: Thorough Testing
Once you make your eCommerce store live, you must make sure to test out all the important features of your website. Right from adding the products to your cart to making payments & receiving an email confirmation, you must check everything yourself.
It does make sense to test out all the features of your website before you start inviting people to come and get engaged.
Some of the important things to test on your newly developed eCommerce website are:
- Loading speed
- Broken links
- Mobile responsiveness
- Browser compatibility
- Checkout process
- Seamless integration with payment gateway
Recommended Post: You may want to check out one of my previous blogs on precautions to be taken before launching your WordPress eCommerce website.
If you find any bugs or new issues on your website, request your web developer to fix them.
Step 7: Marketing & Advertising
Since now you have a great website that can make your business successful, now you are ready to get traffic onto it.
The key is to get targeted traffic on your website.
What are the ways to get targeted traffic on your eCommerce website?
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO helps you to get traffic on your website organically. It may take a while to show up targeted traffic and get some sales through SEO, but once you start getting it, the sky is the limit.
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEM (also known as paid ads or Google Adwords) can get you targeted traffic almost instantly. Unlike SEO, you don’t need to wait for months to see traffic on your website. However, Google Adwords is quite expensive compared to SEO. You will be required to pay for each click that your website gets from Google search engines.
- Facebook Advertising: Facebook Advertising is another effective medium to get traffic to your website. You may read more about Facebook Advertising activities here.