How To Start An Online eCommerce Business In 2024

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s economy has been massively hit. As the governments of many different nations announced the lockdown in their country, all traditional shop owners are facing a huge loss and no sales. So it is the best time to stay ahead, recover your losses, and turn them into profits by selling your products online. Yes, you heard it right we are going to tell you how you can start your own ecommerce business.

You wouldn’t believe that the total number of ecommerce web applications across the world lies between 2-3 million. There is no wonder of such a huge number, as more and more consumers are getting used to buying online. Also, starting an ecommerce business doesn’t require such a huge investment, unlike traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

You will find this article useful if:

• You are thinking to start an ecommerce business from scratch
• You already have an ecommerce company but the sales are not as per your requirement
• You own your ecommerce store but are having trouble scaling it up to size

Opening an ecommerce web store has not been a rocket-science, thanks to ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and others. These platforms make the set up of an ecommerce site quite easier and quite cost-effective.

Let’s begin now…

1. Choose Your Product to Sell

Obviously the first step in any business is to decide what you are going to sell to your customers. You can either sell any item or provide different services to your customer, however, in this article we are going forward assuming you will sell any physical product.

Do you want to sell your own products that are manufactured by you or want to source products from others and sell them on your platform?

Manufacturing your own products and selling them online is the most profitable strategy of any business. It is a great option if you want to have complete control over the final price of the product, where to sell it, and how to go about selling it. However, there are some challenges also such as finding the right raw material & labor, manufacturing costs & licenses, etc.

If you don’t wish to manufacture products, then you can obtain them from other manufacturers. In this business strategy, you need to maintain a stock of products in the inventory, or you can also adopt the dropshipping feature by arranging the items to be shipped directly from the manufacturer.

But before coming to the decision of the strategy, the main question still lies in front of you is that what you can sell, and will people buy it? If you want to do something out of the box then you can choose those products which are trendy or are not easily available on popular ecommerce stores such as Amazon. That’s why opting for a generic route of selling items can even lead to a dead end. There is already a lot of player in the race of that segment.

2. Choose Your Business Name

You should be careful while deciding by which name your customers will remember your product i.e. your brand or business name. It’s best to go with a name which doesn’t already exist. It will enhance your brand reputation and also ensure that you stand out among your competitors.

To know whether your chosen name already exists or not, you can check on Google and other social media platforms. Now if you find, no competitor with the same name exists, then you must look for a domain name. There are providers such as Godaddy and Google Domains who can help you in finding out and purchasing domains.

3. Choose the eCommerce Website platform

After all this boring stuff, here’s the creativity begins. You will need to choose an ecommerce platform on which you want your website development company to develop an online ecommerce store. This is one of the most important steps in the process because you will be inside your website platform every day as an ecommerce entrepreneur.

Also Read: Best eCommerce Platforms for Large Businesses

It is the most important technical component of your ecommerce store. It can even make or break your business. Here are some factors that you need to consider while choosing an ecommerce platform for your site:

Hosting

Do you want to go with a self-hosted route or go with a fully hosted platform? If you are not tech-savvy and don’t have coding skills then it would be wise to choose a fully-hosted provider. It would be quite simple to set up your site. However, if you want flexibility in the future for changing the designs and other features, then you can opt for an open-source platform. Make sure you have enough money and time for hosting & development.

Features

The features of a site are highly important for overall customer experience and what services you want to provide to your customer. Do you want to sell your products on Facebook? Do you need SEO-optimization on your platform? The best way is to create a list of all the necessary features that you want in your ecommerce platform. Make separate sections of “Must have”, “Good to have” features, and then go through the platform to check whether they are able to fulfill your requirements. Better to use a spreadsheet for a better which you can later provide to the developers later.

Add-ons

Do you want to use any other software in your ecommerce websites such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or any accounting software or a PIM? Require any particular shipping platform or payment method? If the answer is yes, then check the platform you considered can seamlessly integrate with your preferred programs.

Learn More: Best PIM Software To Integrate With Magento 2 Store

Pricing

The price of an ecommerce platform is also a significant factor in choosing it. It depends on several factors such as the type of platform whether it is self-hosted or fully hosted, enterprise version or community, features you require, and other things.

Mostly, the open-source ecommerce platforms are free of cost, but you have to spend bucks on development and maintenance. On the other side, fully hosted platforms charges for a monthly subscription, which depends on no. of factors, users, sales, and other features.

4. Development of the website

After choosing the ecommerce platform, the next big thing is the development of your online store. The best approach is to hire an ecommerce web application development company that can meet all your requirements. However, you wouldn’t exonerate from all the responsibilities yet. You need to provide all your requirements in a precise manner to the project manager, and you can’t show yourself a laymen like “I want an ecommerce site built on Magento” instead you have to give details such as:

• Design: The design is the first thing that the developing team will ask you. You can either provide the reference to your competitor’s site or the designer can provide you with some templates from which you can choose the design.
• Platform: The ecommerce platform which you have already decided will be researched by the development team. They can ask you which version you require such as community, enterprise, expert enterprise, etc.
• Database: Database is where you store all your customers’ and products’ data. These databases maintain all the transactional operations and stock inventory data. Some of the different types of databases are MySQL, MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.
• Payment methods: Obviously, you require a payment gateway by which the customers would be able to make a payment on your site. A payment gateway is a merchant service that authorizes and processes credit card payments for online and offline retailers. Simply put, payment gateways enable you to accept different cards, net banking, UPI, digital wallet, or any other payment method on your ecommerce website.
• Shipping Method: If you want to deliver the products which the customers will order on your ecommerce store then you definitely require a shipping method to integrate. Most shipping providers such as FedEx come with their APIs which your developers can integrate on your site.

Also Read: How To Develop An eCommerce Website?

5. How to market your newly developed site?

You have developed your ecommerce store, but no customers are visiting it. That would be an obvious cause, as no customer knows about your site. You have to market your site online to bring up the traffic. Here are some ways of doing it:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It is the best way to bring customers in, showing your websites on the search engines. For this, you need to hire an SEO expert who can rank your site on the top Google search results. It includes practices such as On-page SEO, keyword research, content marketing, etc.

• In On-page SEO the SEO will check all the SEO parameters of your website pages and will make them SEO friendly.
• Keyword research includes finding the best keywords to target which the users often search on the search engine. This is crucial, as ranking for the wrong keywords may attract traffic but not the type of traffic that you’re likely to convert into a lead later down the sales funnel. You can also find keywords on Google’s Keyword Planner, a free tool by Google that gives you keyword ideas along with information on search volume.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing includes writing blogs that are relevant to your site products or services and also include the target keywords on those blogs. These blogs are then posted to various blogging websites, and also on the Blog section of your site. This helps in ranking up your site on a search engine. So, if you want to start a blog for your business then it’s a great idea.

2. Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Another way of marketing your ecommerce site is to entail it on famous social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. On the platforms, you can make up the pages of your business, and share regular posts about the products, discounts, offers, etc. You can add yourself to a wide range of groups and get connected to people. There are also options for advertising on these platforms.

3. Building links

Having links to relevant, high-quality major websites back to your online store will have a positive impact on your site’s rankings, so strive to obtain those high-quality links. Here are some ways of including backlinks:

• Getting product reviews from different blogs and sites
• Obtaining links from websites of your niche
• Guest posts
• Try to obtain some media coverage which can be initially hard
• Creating content that other sites would love to link to

4. E-mail Marketing

Social media marketing is useful and can certainly help you get in front of the right people. There’s just one problem: you don’t “own” your audience on social media. The visibility of your content on social networks is controlled by the algorithms and policies of each site or app. Hence, another option is e-mail marketing. You can have an e-mail list from the database and you can send personalized e-mails of promotions and communication. You can easily collect e-mail from the customers in a sign-up form.

6. Site Traffic

Hope after adopting the different marketing strategies you are having a lot of visitors on your site. But again, that’s not the end. You need to regularly analyze how many visitors are you getting per day, week, or month? How do customers find your site (e.g., search, social media, third-party sites)? Where are they located?

Answers to all these questions will help you taking better business decisions. When you know from which source you are getting more traffic, you will invest more there. Knowing the location of your customers could help you implement more localized campaigns or website features. You could, for instance, start displaying prices in a particular currency if you know that most of your visitors are from a specific country.

Also Read: How To Develop A Mobile App For eCommerce

7. Conversion Rate

Last but not least, the conversion will show you how many visitors are actually products on your site. A high conversion rate implies a good profit and vice versa. A low conversion rate also shows that you are attracting the wrong audience. Perhaps there’s a disconnect between your marketing and your product offerings. The user experience of your site could also be an issue. Maybe your website is too slow, or the design is poor, and that’s causing people to bounce.

Whatever the case, if you have a low conversion rate, dig into the issue and try to pinpoint the reason so that you can address it.

Wrapping Up

Running up an ecommerce store and making profits is not rocket science but neither a cakewalk. You need a top-notch ecommerce development company like Emizentech, which will not only meet your requirements but will also provide you with better suggestions.