Are you planning to start an eCommerce business but you don’t know where to start? Choosing a brand name, producing product listings, and starting to sell things online aren’t enough to establish an eCommerce business. you need to know that even the best business ideas can fail if your website does not receive enough visitors.
Consider several eCommerce business models
The most important step is the first one: begin your research. Don’t make decisions based on a hunch. Any online business is a long-term investment. There is no company model that works for everyone. The list is long, with service-based businesses, software, digital product sales, and physical products, and so on.
You must first think of the various business strategies available before deciding what to sell online.
Dropshipping or print on demand are good options if you want to make money without handling your product or investing a lot of money upfront. If you want to have your own warehouse full of goods, you’ll have to put in more money upfront and adopt a wholesaling or warehousing (retail) model. Do you have a business idea for the perfect product or a favorite item you’d want to sell under your own brand? Investigate white labeling and production options.
Then there are subscriptions, where you curate a collection of things or a single product to be delivered to your clients at regular intervals.
Many people are drawn to the eCommerce business model of a single product category supplemented by affiliate marketing. You can concentrate on content marketing and branding for a single product while monetizing traffic to drive sales.
Many people have hundreds of products, dozens of categories, and no real focus on their eCommerce website, which is wrong on many levels. You can’t be the next Amazon without a huge budget. To manage a profitable eCommerce store, you must find a specific niche.
The most important step in starting an online business is to decide what should be your niche. Start with identifying businesses that are already successful. Check to see if the area is competitive; if there isn’t any, that usually means there isn’t a market.
A smart step is to choose a niche that isn’t too crowded, and avoid anything dominated by huge businesses. If you’re having problems, narrow down what you want to do even more — the more specialized you are, the less competition you’ll encounter.
Finding a specific niche has the advantage of providing you with a large number of similar niches that are connected but not identical to what you do. You can cross-promote, become (or buy) an affiliate, and expand your consumer base by collaborating with other business owners in those categories.
Choose a product category with at least 1000 keywords and a niche that performs well on social media, where local publishers are Amazon affiliates. You won’t have to worry about delivering as much merchandise if you can find a few affiliate marketing opportunities, and you’ll still be able to make a profit.
*To discover trends and opportunities, use keyword research tools.
When it comes to selling online, your enthusiasm does not always equate to success. You must determine whether or not customers want your product. You can utilize web resources to research trends, consider the issues your audience might have, and figure out what solutions they currently have.
How to find ideal customers?
By deciding your ideal product to sell, it is even more important who are the people you are selling to. Create your avatar, a buying persona, and imagine who is the right match for your product or service.
Talk to people to see how they think and to see if they need your product at all. Make a question form and make an interview with as many people as you can, and only then you should make a conclusion if you have chosen the right product to sell or not.
Find a catchy brand name and register your business
Now you need a brand that connects with your buying persona. Building an eCommerce brand is made easier by getting your identity. If you’re marketing products to corporate businesswomen who want to live a more sustainable life, you might want to stay away from girly colors and pictures.
Then, register your company and choose a name for it. Don’t forgo incorporating because it offers legal protections and tax advantages.
Name your online store
Although your website’s name and your company’s business name don’t have to be identical, keeping them similar has its advantages. You don’t want to pick a brand name at the last minute, so be sure whatever you choose fits your niche.
Then, create its visual identity: pick up the colors you want and make a logo. Together with the site name, it makes a brand recognizable.
Create an Online Store
Once you’ve officially become an eCommerce business owner, you’ll need to register your domain name as well as any appropriate redirect URLs. When you’re ready to build your store, you’ll need the design information you chose in the previous stage.
There are hundreds of eCommerce shopping cart platforms to choose from. It’s not easy to pick the best eCommerce software. Things like loading speed, compatibility with various payment channels, functionality, compatibility with your business structure, your web developer talents, SEO-friendly features, and more must all be carefully considered.
Best eCommerce Platforms
Every eCommerce platform has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. You should evaluate the various platforms based on their own unique requirements and use cases.
Here are some of the most popular eCommerce platforms:
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is the greatest eCommerce platform overall. It’s perfect for larger retail firms for its advanced product search engine. It’s also a nice choice for persons who wanted to start an eCommerce site or who already have a physical store but want to expand their operations on online business. Its numerous tools allow any niche or business to succeed.
Using any of the adjustable templates to create your store, sell, and market your products, you may customize your online shop without having to know how to code.
The most affordable option is $29.95 per month. Checkout codes, unlimited bandwidth, gift cards, and professional reporting are among the perks. Yet, you won’t receive a custom SSL or an abandoned cart saver, but it’s a great option for small businesses with annual sales of less than $50,000. The sales limit rises with the strategy.
Pros
It is scalable and adaptable. It dominates multi-channel selling. BigCommerce is also exceptional SEO results, which is very important for your business. It also has amazing theme designs that give your customers a fantastic online shopping experience.
Cons
When talking about the bad sides of BigCommerce, we can mention speeds in consecutive studies are not consistent. It gets pretty much expensive for high-volume stores. There is no Cart abandonment on the entry plan and no 1-click Selling or Upsells.
Shopify
Shopify is the most effective selling platform. If you want to dropship, the best option is to use Facebook Ads or Instagram marketing. If I were going to rely on SEO, I wouldn’t utilize Shopify. If I were to open a large store with a lot of products, I wouldn’t choose Shopify. Instead, I’d go with BigCommerce.
Shopify outperforms BigCommerce in a few areas, such as 1-click upsells after purchase, however, it lags behind in terms of performance. I’ve used Shopify on my site before, and I’ve dealt with a lot of Shopify sites, but I prefer WordPress because I have an affiliate business plan in addition to selling things.
Shopify has a drag-and-drop interface that is very easy to use, and setting up an online store is more than simple. Most beginners can figure it out in a matter of minutes.
There are more advantages why you should choose Shopify as your platform. Above all, loading time is very important and we should say that it is lighting fast. It allows multiple channels and social selling which is more than useful. You can choose among various themes and designs so you can customize your shop according to your brand.
There are also many cons when talking about Shopify. Unfortunately, SEO is a significant disadvantage for Shopify. One of the problems with their SEO is their poor ranking performance.
They also have a set URL structure that you can’t change in any way. you can encounter unusual unstructured URLs on Shopify sites that don’t follow the slug requirements of /products/, /pages/, and /collections/. We came to the conclusion that websites that use Shopify have low rankings. In terms of SEO, Shopify is at best in the middle of the pack.
Finally, if you do not use Shopify Payments, you will be charged transaction fees. And no one wants to be around those. Shopify Payments, on the other hand, is a solid alternative.
There are a lot of apps you can use to improve your eCommerce business, but in the end, it can cost you pretty much. In the end, for some advanced features, you may even need to hire a developer.
Wix
In just a few years, Wix eCommerce has come a long way. In recent years, Wix is becoming a key player in the eCommerce industry, offering incredible value to solopreneurs and small eCommerce enterprises. Wix’s eCommerce features have advanced significantly, and they now include multi-channel integration, abandoned cart recovery, dropshipping, and print on demand.
This platform is a good place to start if you’re new to the game. Wix outperformed all of the top website builders when it came to on-page customer help when building the store.
You may drag and drop pieces to construct the website you desire, including stunning videos and functions. They have over 500 themes, with 72 of them being free.
Unfortunately, you’re stuck with the theme you choose when you first launched your website. And it is also difficult to fully customize the theme. There is also more place for improvement and this refers to SEO. The ranking is very important, so think twice and do research before you choose this platform.
Shift4Shop
Shift4Shop (formerly 3dcart) has supported over 22,000 online businesses since its public launch in 2001, with clients including PCMag. They offer useful features such as limitless storage and no transaction costs. You may also use their point-of-sale system, which supports multi-channel sales. The company changed its name to Shift4Shop in 2021.
Despite being older than BigCommerce and Shopify, Shift4Shop does not perform as well, and the reason is obvious. It’s not for the faint of heart. Despite a good onboarding video when you get into your dashboard, the entire process is difficult to understand; the builder is not visually appealing.
They have several industrial-style templates, but they feel dated. Furthermore, because there is no drag-and-drop feature, personalizing the store takes a long time to grasp and become used to, even for experienced users. Fortunately, there is a developer community prepared to help with theme development and other tweaks.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best all-in-one platforms for running an eCommerce and affiliate website, although there are eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify that sell better.
With WooCommerce, any WordPress site can be transformed into an eCommerce store. There are many available extensions for integrating payment gateways, email marketing, social media, 1-click selling, and so on.
The main issue isn’t the setup; that can be accomplished with the help of YouTube instructions. The issue is scalability. As additional products and consumers are added, most users say that it slows down.
A very important fact is that WooCommerce is completely free. Only a few addons have a charge, and certain WordPress themes are pricey. You may not require those extensions, and there are some excellent free themes available.
If you’re already familiar with the WordPress platform, WooCommerce will be simple. All you have to do now is install it, add your own products, and tweak the settings.
The technical specifics will be difficult for those unfamiliar with WordPress. This includes everything from purchasing hosting to installing WordPress to configuring your theme and plugins.
Magento
Magento is trusted by big brands like Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Cisco. Coding is a necessary component of the product. Magento is a good choice if you have a developer or the cash for one and want something that is truly configurable and powerful. You can make changes and undo them until you have the feature-rich web store you desire.
The community is an important aspect of Magento. It has a significant number of developers who will work on your store for a fee or answer some of your inquiries for free. You can get extensions and themes on a marketplace to improve your platform’s functionality.
Magento is most commonly used for free, however enterprise solutions for large eCommerce firms are available for a fee. The annual licensing charge might be in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a lot of data, but it’s on the cloud, so it’s faster, plus it has extra features like automated trigger-based email campaigns and automatic cross/upsell.
Whichever option you choose, you’ll like the large list of options you can add such as discounts, the ability to grind SEO, recurring payments, per-user content adjustments, membership subscriptions, endless items.
