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Setting up an e-commerce business is one of the best ways to make a living today. Online retail is at its peak, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down its upward trajectory.
With all the different stages involved, however, the idea of setting up one may seem overwhelming. Many e-commerce businesses fail to conduct the necessary research and make the required preparations before setting up their online stores and, hence, end up failing.
Building the best e-commerce platform involves much more than simply choosing a product to sell and creating a brand name. From start to finish, each step involved in setting up the store and eventually making your sale is crucial to your thriving.
So, without further ado, here’s a crash course to how you set up your own e-commerce business and make your first sale:
Research The Basics
Research is integral to anything, from selling your website to building it, so it’s crucial you don’t ignore this part. While there isn’t one specific business model that tends to work for every aspiring business owner, you can start by looking into various business models to determine what could potentially work for you.
For starters, let’s focus on four kinds of e-commerce stores: software, digital products, physical products, and service-based businesses. Each of these models offers its own sets of pros and cons. For instance, e-commerce businesses that sell physical products have to struggle with how they’re sourcing their products or managing their inventory.
There are various options available, such as drop shipping that helps you generate revenue without investing too much up front or investing a lot upfront and operating on a warehousing model.
There is a multitude of options available to you that’ll suit your needs, all that’s need is an investment in terms of time and effort to know the ins and outs of those alternatives.
Conduct Research
While it’s a good idea to provide your target audience with a variety of options, it’s not a good idea to not have something to focus on. E-commerce sites that appear haphazard without having a target niche in mind will struggle with sending out mixed messages to their audience.
You can argue that Amazon and Best Buy can offer a vast variety to their customers, but these companies are e-commerce giants and it a lot of years, and a lot of money, to reach the place they’re in today.
Choosing a niche also offers the added benefit of working with related niches for cross promotion or affiliation purposes that can help expand your customer base.
To choose your niche, you can start by focusing on what’s trending and the companies that are succeeding in trending niches. You need to pick a niche that’s not too overly crowded since that market will be difficult for you to penetrate or one that has no competition at all since that could indicate no demand from consumers. For starters, look into niches that have more than a thousand keywords on Google Adwords and is popular on social media.
Choose Your Persona & Your Product
Once you’ve identified a business model and a niche, you might want to jump into the products you want to sell. Before you do that, though, think about your brand persona and how your customers can identify you.
To build a consistent brand image, you should know who your target audience is and what message you’re trying to convey to your consumers with your brand. Once you’ve established your intended brand image and the customers you want to target, you can finally focus on your products. Before you take drastic measures and start supplying multiple product ranges, start with one and see how your customers respond.
Once your product is sorted out, test it out yourself and to different focus groups to rectify any potential problems before you go public.
Establish Your Business
Before you start building a brand, some technicalities need to be sorted out first.
- Register your business after you’re done choosing a business name. You can avail tax benefits and legal protections, so this needs to be a priority.
- Pick a store name, which even though it can be different from your legal name, should be the same due to consistency. The title should fall in line with your target niche.
- Getting a business license is crucial and, if this is unfamiliar territory for you, various resources will help you out with this. Check with your state, county, and city to determine what permits and licenses you’ll need.
- Get an employer identification number (EIN), so you can set up a bank account and file your taxes and other necessary paperwork.
- Explore different vendors and choose one that offers the best quality and prices to so you can provide competitive products to your customers.
- Create a logo that can be adapted to different mediums and isn’t too similar to one that is used by a competitor.
- Establish the visual imagery you’re aiming to convey, including the colors of your brand and your fonts. You should consider hiring a marketing company that can help you out with this part.
Create Your Online Store
Once you have the legalities sorted out and have an idea on what your brand should be like, you should register your domain name and, also, redirect URLs that could be related to your brand.
The design aspects you previously decided are going to come into play when you’re finally building your store. Whatever design you eventually opt for should be compatible with your e-commerce software too.
There are plenty of e-commerce shopping cart platforms available so you need to carefully evaluate them based on, for example, speed, payment gateways they can work with, features, and SEO-friendliness, so you can compare them and determine which one would work best for you.
When you’re building your online store, you should ensure it’s scalable and can be integrated with other online marketplaces to increase brand exposure. Lastly, you should set up email marketing and automation too so you can generate traffic and drive conversions. For starters, you can set up thank you emails, coupons, and upsells to ensure website visitors turn into loyal customers.
Attracting Customers
So, it’s time for you to make your first sale and the only way you can do is by marketing your e-commerce store.
SEO is your holy grail if you want people to know about your store. You need to explore popular keywords and incorporate them to every page of your site, the URLs, and your ads to drive traffic and generate leads.
The most popular e-commerce site focuses heavily on online marketing, and they do that by exploring different digital marketing options and subscribing to newsletters. You should also focus on email marketing, offer freebies on your website, host a giveaway, or a launch a social media campaign to gain subscribers.
To build loyalty, provide your customers with content and coupons in your emails and respond to any queries or complaints they may have. Additionally, attract customers by posting attractive product images and crisp descriptions. Use analytics software to keep track of what’s working and what isn’t to drive traffic and make sales.
This handy guide will help you build an online store for yourself or even for a website broker. All it requires is time, money, and effort and your store will be up and running in no time!
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