How to Start an Online Store: 9 Unfailing Steps

Have you been thinking of How to Start an Online Store? We have the 9 easy steps you need to start selling online. Many people fail because they try to plan everything perfectly without even taking a single step to reach their goals. 

How to Start an Online Store: 9 Unfailing Steps

If you’re reading this guide, you’ve likely reached a point where you’re ready to take action. So these are the steps you need to take to bring your ideas to life.

1. Find What to Sell

Before getting into the essential part of setting up an online store, you should know what product or service you want to sell. You can look at your local market and try to find a niche there. Maybe you have a digital product (art, tutorials, comics, e-books, etc.) that you would like to sell. 

You have many options here, for example, if you are thinking about ‘how to start an online store without inventory?’, Maybe you should learn about Dropshipping. Different products require different logistics and support services, as setting up shipping for a luxury product is very different than setting it up for low-cost products. These are the questions you will have to ask yourself sooner or later, and are best answered at the beginning of your journey.

Read Also: 8 Advantages of Having an Online Store

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Who are you selling to? Before thinking about how to start an online store or how to market your product/service, learn about your target audience, and who are your ideal customers, since these are the particular sets of people you want to visit your online store. 

Creating a buyer persona can be very useful in this regard, as it not only informs you about your ideal customer base but also gives you information about their behavior so that you know how to reach them and prioritize the channels they use the most.

3. Create Your Store

Now that you have a better understanding of your potential customer and the products/services you will sell, it is time to Create your Store. Eucarlmedia has different plans based on the type of store you want to create, we have a plan for businesses in various stages of growth. Understand which one best suits your business.

4. Adding Products

It’s very easy to upload products to your store. Here you have options to add and edit your products, add multiple images per product, and control the stock of your products. If your products have more than 1 variant, it’s also easy to manage product options or variations and custom fields. 

If you have many products, you can divide them into several categories and Manage your Catalog, this way it is easier for you to manage and easier for customers to navigate your website. You have options to add, edit, delete, and reorder categories, and you can also assign products to categories, delete them, and reorder them.

Dropshipping

If you are following the Dropshipping model for your online store, you can add products using third-party plugins, if at the start you inform us that you will need to operate dropshipping on your store we can also help you integrate the best type of dropshipping.

5. Brand

This is where you bring your creativity to work. We have a wide range of themes in our Theme Gallery that are suitable for all types of businesses. Select the one you like the most. You can also customize the themes to small details to match your dream if you have little knowledge about it.

• Personalization: Personalize colors, graphics, and texts or create your personalized theme, we can do this on your behalf.

• Add a Favicon: Then you can evaluate some details. To make sure your brand is strong and your store looks completely professional you need to add a favicon.

• Get your domain: Having a custom URL is also important to give your business that professional look and footprint of your brand. Also, if you ever decide to change your shopping cart, you can keep your domain name, which is how your customers will know you.

6. Payment and Shipping Methods

• Payment gateway

Choose the most appropriate form of payment for your client and how to configure it in your store. Once you have set up the store, you must solve the important problem of collecting payments for the product or service that you sell. 

Now, this can be tricky as many variables that depend on the country you operate in must be considered. You have to verify what types of payment gateways are the most popular, and then you should also consider your audience in the market and see how they would be willing to pay: do you prefer bank transactions, cash on delivery, or maybe a digital payment gateway like PayPal? Sometimes you may even have to integrate more than one.

• Shipping rates

Set shipping rates, free shipping, flat rates, or table rates (based on several items, weight, or total order price). There may be many shipping options available to you, and sometimes the cheapest option may not be the best, so you have to think about customer satisfaction and order fulfillment is an important part. 

7. Opt for Optimization

Even if you have a good product or service, if the website is not easy to use and navigate, visually appealing, fast, etc., it will be difficult to keep visitors’ attention and make conversions. Before continuing with the marketing campaign of your online store and spending money on ads, it is advisable to test it, see if everything is working well, and if something can be improved. Remember, first impressions are important.

Also, with EucarlMedia you can easily set up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website, be it for product descriptions or your blog. Use this feature to properly structure your store content to make it easier for Google to rank your online store in searches, you can hire us to optimize for you.

Read Also: 10 Tools To Measure Website Loading Speed

8. Configuration Analysis

One thing all good companies do is keep track of their customers’ habits and learn from them. You can easily manage Orders in your administration panel and on your store Dashboard. You will have all the important Statistics to help your business move towards growth.

Even if you want to do a detailed review and analysis, you have free tools like Google Analytics that you can use to look at data that would not otherwise be visible. You can evaluate your audience, see how they came to your website, what the most popular medium they use, etc. This will also help you understand where to spend your marketing budget.

9. Market Your Business

So you’ve learned exactly How to Start an Online Store, but it doesn’t stop there. After starting your store, it’s best to initially use Google Ads to start attracting customers and start gathering information about their behaviors and preferences. Another popular way to promote your business on a budget is by using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

You can create Special Promotions to entice visitors to make a purchase, drive traffic by creating content pages, and increase sales through the use of discount codes (Coupons).

Conclusion

Paying attention to details is good, however, when it comes to How to Start an Online Store, don’t let the little details stop you. Sure, there will be things that you can’t fix right away, but not everything has to be perfect in your online store. So don’t wait until you launch a perfect product, as time can also be an important factor in the success or failure of a business.

Feel free to contact us at any time.