The E-commerce industry has been enjoying major increase over the years, turning dreams to reality.
E-commerce sites have seemingly increased over the years with the emergence of high profit in the e-commerce business.
Since 2014 when e-commerce businesses made over $3 trillion in US alone as retail sale, the chase and increase for profits has not dropped on the e-commerce business.
Without much emphasis on E-commerce, lets go straight to why we are here.
In this article i will show you how to setup your own e-commerce business follow these 5 simple steps:
Choosing a product
They are so many aspects that needs to be considered when starting an e-commerce business, but the first question still balls down to, what will you selling?
The e-commerce space is very competitive so you need to look out for where you have an advantage. This could mean selling a product you create, selling to a niche community, or picking up on new trends early. Ensuring you have a viable product from the beginning will help lay a strong foundation for your e-commerce business.
Developing a business plan
Failing to plan simply means planning to fail.
Developing a clear business plan is critical to establishing a successful business and just because your e-commerce is online doesn’t make it an exception.
Your business plan needs to include a strategy for financing, marketing, and advertising the business.
A clear idea of how you’ll reach success and what milestones you need to hit along the way needs to be established.
The most important outcome of this stage is to develop a long term plan of what you would like your business to become.
Setting up your ecommerce website
If you have a technical or background knowledge about building a website, building a website from scratch is always an option.
But a high chance is that you will take advantage of a pre-existing resources to create your online store.
With sites like Shopify and Squarespace Commerce you’ll be able to purchase your own domain name and use their tools to build a custom website from the ground up.
As soon as you are done with the technical part of your site set up, the next step is to move to design of your website. You need to set up the theme, headers, and organize your products into easy to navigate categories. You’ll also need to complete your store’s About Us section and decide whether you’ll be using a company blog.
As soon as you are done with that your site is up.
Inventory & shipping
You also need to think to about building an inventory. If you’re not going to be manufacturing your products yourself, you will need to get a supplier or find a solution that allows you to distribute through reselling.
Shipping is another consideration that can make or break your business. If you choose an inexperienced shipping partner your customers could suffer a poor experience leading to negative reviews. Take the time to understand what different logistic companies can provide and if you’re unsure, search properly and also ask questions.
Marketing your website and Maintaining the business
Wrapping this up with last part, you need to follow carefully.
Once you’ve established your business, built up your inventory, and worked out all (or at least most of) the bugs on your website, it’s time you start thinking about the official launch of the business.
The main determinant of how you launch your site is the sole dependant on the resources you have available. If your business is small, be sure to leverage social media to advertise your site.
After the launch your marketing shouldn’t end, make sure you are using Google Analytics to better understand you customers and their habits. To be effective you’ll need to consistently grow your customer base.
As soon as the site gets up and running the remaining objective is to continue maintaining and growing your business.
Try to stay on top of all technical aspects and continue weeding out any bugs on the site. You’ll also need to stay on top of the company inventory, make decisions about new and discontinued products, and provide customer service to keep your customers happy
