You’re probably wondering…
Is it easy to start an online store – can I set up a website, its security, payment gateways, and shipping options myself?
The short answer is…yes!
Thanks to modern tools and website builders, everybody can launch their eCommerce website without knowing design or coding.
However, you have to decide on a couple of things before setting up your web shop; matters like what you’re going to sell, how to handle shipping and payments, and what marketing strategies to use.
Follow our step-by-step online store building guide and you learn how to start an eCommerce website quickly from scratch.
The first step that’s an absolute must-do is to pick your niche. As it’s often defined, a niche is a specific piece of a broader market. Sorry if this sounds a bit too dictionary-like. Let’s break it down into simpler terms. Basically, when picking your niche, you have to decide: These three questions may seem fairly obvious, but they’re actually far from. Defining your ideal customer base and figuring out why they would buy from you will make your job much easier later on. The main mistake that people make is going too broadly in the hope that the bigger the potential market is, the more likely they are to get good sales. This is not correct. If your target customer base is simply “people who breathe” then you’re going to have a hard time positioning your product in the market, promoting it, and explaining what’s so valuable about it. Overall, focusing on one niche is better than going all over. It’s best to start in an area that you already have a personal interest in, expert knowledge about, or passion for. It’s really hard to operate in a field that you know nothing about. So, begin with your interests, navigate from there. Define who your ideal customer is, and what makes them want to buy the products that you want to offer. A good starting point is to look at what your competition in the niche is doing. See how they position their products, who their customers are. Learn from that and build upon other people’s experiences. Let’s start from the beginning by explaining two popular eCommerce scenarios: Scenario no.1 is the traditional way of running an online store. In this model: Here’s the dropshipping model: The main benefit of the dropshipping model is that you don’t have to hold any inventory yourself. This means that there’s no cost involved in making the products or storing them. In fact, everything you sell is pure profit since you only have to pay the supplier after you receive an order from your customer. In the traditional model, you have to shell out money upfront to either obtain products from the supplier or get them created. You must do that before you can ever start selling them. On the other hand, dropshipping won’t be for you if the products you want to sell are of your own production or need to be customized/personalized before they can be sold. Overall, if you can, opt for dropshipping – and especially if it’s your first attempt to start an online store. Dropshipping is a great way to test the waters and validate that the products you want to sell are indeed something that customers will want to buy. Then, later on, you can expand and start offering your own products as well. One of the great things about dropshipping is that there’s an abundance of different products to choose from in nearly every niche. This is excellent news for businesses that are just getting started and don’t want to invest in their own product development. The overall steps are: With all this research, you can now go to some popular markets and start looking for specific products you can sell. The biggest market of this kind is AliExpress. It’s a regular eCommerce marketplace by most standards, but it also allows you to establish relationships with merchants and offer their products as a dropshipper. Go there and look for products that are in tune with the research you’ve done, and also seem like something interesting-enough for your customer base to enjoy. We recommend getting started with between 10-50 products. This will give you more than enough stuff to make your store complete and also not overwhelm you with what’s going on as you work with the store on a daily basis. When you’re putting together a list of products, keep the following things in mind: As we mentioned earlier, having a list of 10-50 products is suitable for a start. We’ll use that list later on when importing the products to your actual online store. Choosing a domain name for your store is undoubtedly the most fun part of the whole endeavor. People love to name things. Especially businesses. However. The name you end up with can have a lot of significance for your future success and ability to market the business effectively. Here are the things to keep in mind when brainstorming a business name: Imagine yourself talking to someone over the phone and needing to mention the name of your store. Do you have to spell it out for the other person to understand? If you do, the name is too complex. Go for something simple and easy to pronounce on the first go. This relates to the previous point, somewhat. Apart from being easy to pronounce, your name also needs to be easy to memorize. You can achieve this in a couple of ways. Going with a completely made-up word as your name is one solution (think “Google”). Alternatively, you can put together two words that do have real meanings but create something original when put next to each other (think “Face-book”). Your name should be original enough so that people won’t mistake it for any other similar business. For example, if you want to name your pizzeria “Pizza Den” but there’s another business in town called “Pizza Pan” then it’s not a good name. Not longer than a combination of 2-3 words. Any longer and it’s going to be harder to remember and less brandable. Also forget about dots, underscores, dashes, etc. The You can check if your dream domain name is available on a domain registrar site like Domain.com (but don’t buy it yet). Finally, it’s time to build an actual online store. Here’s the best part: you can do it all on your own, there’s no professional help needed, and you don’t have to sacrifice the quality of the final outcome. Your online store is going to be just as functional and just as good-looking as if it was built by a pro. To make that happen, I’m recommending using WooCommerce. However, there are alternative ways to set up an online store. You can also use Shopify (or any other ecommerce platforms out there). The last piece of the puzzle when attempting to start an online store is accepting payments from customers. By default, WooCommerce allows you to accept payments via PayPal. You don’t need to do much in order to enable this payment system either. You likely already took care of it during the initial WooCommerce setup. That said, you can choose a different payment system, or even use a couple of alternative systems at the same time. One of the reasons for this might be that some of your customers will prefer specific payment methods over others. So the more of them you have integrated into your store, the more sales you’ll get. Two of the most popular additional payment methods for WooCommerce are Stripe and Square. These are particularly good choices if you want to accept credit cards (which you surely do). Both Stripe and Square are free to get started with. However, like with every payment method, there are additional fees imposed on every transaction made (it’s the same with PayPal), so just be aware of that. Getting a new payment method installed in your eCommerce store is simple. Those payment systems are all delivered as WordPress plugins, so you can install them the same way you installed WooCommerce. After that, each payment system comes with its own setup procedure. Most of the time, though, all you have to do is sign up for an account and verify your details. There are many different things you can do to get the word out about your store, but we’re going to focus on just four here – the four that are the most likely to work in 2021 and going forward. Influencer marketing is a relatively new way to promote your store. Most of it is done on Instagram. The way it works is this: Paid ads basically don’t ever fail. If there’s a market for something, and you target that market with ads, you will get some sales. The most popular platform for advertising your products is Google AdWords. Getting started with them is relatively easy, and Google has its own guides to take you through the initial steps. While Instagram certainly is the most on-trend social media network of today, this doesn’t mean that it’s the only place where you should promote your store. In fact, you should be present in all the places where your customers are likely to hang out. This, in the modern-day, means most of the popular social media networks. Or, at the very minimum, the top ones like Facebook, Twitter, and optionally Pinterest (if your customers use it). Your approach to all these networks will be similar, but the goals and the way you construct your messages will be different. The first thing you should do is research what your competition is doing and how they go about promoting their stores. Take note of their strategies and tactics, and see what you can adapt to your situation. Chiefly, pay attention to: Next, set your own goals as to what you want to achieve through social media. Most commonly, those goals should be building brand awareness among customers, and only occasionally promoting your products and trying to generate direct sales. If you push your stuff too much, you’ll alienate people quickly. The next step is setting a publication calendar in place and preparing some social media posts in advance. You can then publish those posts with the help of tools like Buffer. Nowadays, content marketing and SEO are the most effective methods to promote any website (including eCommerce stores). The idea behind content marketing is simple: you give people insights on topics related to your business and thus generate interest in what you have to offer. For example, if your store sells winter socks, then you can offer people advice on things like how to pick ski socks. You can deliver that advice in the form of a simple blog post. As people read your content, they also get introduced to your store and the socks that you have in your catalog. The same principle can be adapted to any market or niche. Find out what people want to know and then create content that delivers that info to them. When doing so, optimize your content so that it’s more discoverable via Google. It’s reported that Google is responsible for 94% of total organic traffic on the web. Here’s more info on how to get more traffic using free strategies.1. Decide What You Want to Sell
2. Choose Between Dropshipping and Selling Your Own Products
3. Choose the Exact Products to Sell
4. Come Up With a Business Name and Register a Domain Name
.com
is the most popular and most important domain name extension of the bunch. If you’re brainstorming a name, don’t go for something that doesn’t have a .com
domain available.5. Start an Online Store Website By Yourself
6. Set Up Payment Methods
7. Start Marketing Your Online Store
Influencer Marketing
Paid Ads
Social Media Marketing
Content Marketing and SEO
Mwansa
Why do I need BlueHost if I pay for WooCommerce anyway?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
WooCommerce is free to use just like WordPress, but you need some sort of web hosting to have your site on the internet – that’s where Bluehost comes in.
Pamela Swords
Thank you – how can I obtain a commision for the items that I post on my store front?
They are various items (links) from different stores, so I want to charge a finders fee on top of what the store charges.
Returns would go back to the store that fulfills the order, but on my site people can see the collection of items that match their needs.
Nick Schäferhoff
What you are describing sounds like dropshipping. More information about that here: https://websitesetup.org/online-business-ideas/