Ecommerce or electric commerce is a business model that holds sales transactions online. An online business usually follows this structure, and any website that allows you to buy or sell online is considered an ecommerce store.
With 5.16 billion internet users worldwide as of 2023, more and more businesses have started establishing an online presence to reach a wider customer base.
Why Should You Start Your Own Ecommerce Business?
The ecommerce industry is growing. To keep up with customer trends and demands, an online store is just what your business needs. Most of the population has gone online, and it would be a waste not to capitalize on the huge opportunity to boost sales.
In fact, the US was estimated to earn a revenue of roughly $1 trillion in 2023 from ecommerce, making it a more profitable business model to follow and giving a lot of advantages over brick-and-mortar stores such as:
Lower costs
In order to make a profitable business, lowering your upfront costs is a must. A brick-and-mortar store may cost thousands of dollars due to the rent for the retail space, maintenance, staff, equipment, stock, and warehouse space.
An online store lowers the required personal and business finances by not needing anything previously mentioned. Since online stores don’t need physical space or employees, you can easily cut down on your expenses and gain more profit.
24/7 operation
Unlike physical stores that has closing times and employees that need to go home, an ecommerce store doesn’t need to close. You can keep services on-going even while you’re asleep.
Your ecommerce store lets customers shop and browse your products anytime, anywhere with convenience, increasing your sales and generate revenue.
Wider reach
The internet connects everyone around the world. When you start an ecommerce business, you can widen your target market and attract new customers all over the globe by just having an online store on the internet.
Even if they don’t make a purchase, most customer’s shopping journey starts online. Just by browsing and scrolling through your products, you can slowly entice customers to buy your product when they do feel like shopping.
Affordable marketing
You can save marketing costs with an ecommerce store. Unlike traditional advertising, your online store allows for more digital marketing strategies. Having an ecommerce site and submitting them to search engines gives more visibility to your website. People go online and search up the product they wish to purchase. The easier you are to find, the more traffic your ecommerce website has.
Having an ecommerce store also allows easier access to social media channels. This way, you can promote your online business to where most people are hanging out online.
10 Easy Steps to Start an Ecommerce Website
In order to start an ecommerce business, you need an ecommerce website to start selling online.
Creating an ecommerce website is one of the best business ideas and fastest ways to launch a new venture—or to expand an existing business into cyberspace. Here are 9 steps to starting an ecommerce company.
Step 1: Find your niche
As a small startup, you can’t hope to compete with online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, or Etsy, selling everything under the sun. Select a niche you can own, such as clothes for English bulldogs, sun-protective hats and clothing or decorative fireplace screens, and determine your target market. If you’re taking a physical store online, you don’t have to sell every product you carry in your store—you can start selling a few of your most popular items, then expand as sales pick up.
By identifying your main target audience, you can focus more of you efforts into turning them into potential customers. Now, you can diversify, improve, and scale up your ecommerce business plan and product ideas according to your customer base.
Step 2: Choose your domain name
If you’re launching a new business, choose your business name with an eye to potential domain names (URLs). You want your domain name to be easy to say, spell and remember. Of course, it also has to be unique. You don’t want to be mistaken for as other businesses.
Use a site that offers domain registration, such as Web.com, to search for the domain names you’re considering. Register your domain name and make sure to renew it every year so you don’t lose the rights to it.
Step 3: Choose a Web hosting service
You want a service that offers 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime (i.e., your website won’t go down), has the bandwidth to handle the amount of Web traffic you expect at your ecommerce website and offers good customer service and assistance.
If you’re still planning to start an ecommerce business, then using a basic hosting plan would benefit you more. You don’t want to pay extra expenses for features that you can’t use yet. Don’t worry though, hosting plans are often scalable so you can always upgrade yours when you need it.
Step 4: Design your online store
Many Web hosting companies offer one-stop shopping where you can not only register your domain name and have your site hosted, but also choose from a range of templates and either build your own site or have the company build it for you. Templates are a great low-cost solution for most startup ecommerce businesses, but if you want to get fancier, see if the site offers custom website design.
Ensure that you list all the descriptions of your own products, contact information, total shipping costs in a digestible and easy to read manner on your ecommerce website. You can also add high quality pictures of your items.
It’s important to showcase the merchandise accurately since your customers cannot see your physical products and they’ll want to know whether your business is worth their money.
Step 5: Make it mobile.
Mobile-friendliness is increasingly important for ecommerce websites, so plan your site with mobility in mind and an eye to the future. With lots of people shopping online through their mobile devices, most of your target audience and potential customers are more likely to purchase your products from their phones.
Remember, the more navigable and attractive your ecommerce website is, the more repeat customers you’ll likely get.
Step 6: Plan how you’ll get paid
Thinking of the payment process is one of the most important parts of an ecommerce business. How can you sell online when there’s no way to pay you? Luckily, there are numerous online payment methods available nowadays.
You want to be able to accept all types of payments online, including debit and credit cards and PayPal. And, of course, you’ll want to make sure your shopping cart and payment solution is secure to protect both your customers’ data and your company’s.
Secure your ecommerce website’s transactions as well. Installing an SSL Certificate will encrypt your connection and reassure your customers that your ecommerce website is legitimate and safe.
Step 7: Handle inventory
Unlike a brick and mortar business that handles inventory manually, an ecommerce business allows you the convenience of managing inventory through a simple-to-use backend solution that lets you track inventory, edit product listings and keep everything up to date.
Your ecommerce website should update your customers whether your products are available or out of stock to avoid disappointed customers who are planning to purchase from your ecommerce business.
Step 8: Finalize your shipping plan
Another important aspect of an ecommerce business is deciding your shipping plan. One clear advantage of brick and mortar stores is the guarantee that what customers buy will be with them after they leave the store. An ecommerce business have to consider the risks of shipping their products to their customers.
Think carefully about your shipping plan. Do you want to ship internationally or do you want exclusively ship domestically? Do you want to include free shipping. same day shipping, or do you want to use a flat rate? Or would you rather hand over your inventory to a dropshipping business?
Once you’ve ironed out those details, you need to finalize your shipping costs and present this on your ecommerce website for your customers’ information.
Step 9: Market like crazy
One of the advantages of an ecommerce website is the affordable digital marketing strategy it provides. Since most people search online to find out more about items they’re interested to buy, it helps to have your own website. If you have a powerful search engine optimization tools, you can rank higher in search engines so customers can find your first and learn about what you have to offer before the competition.
Having an online store also makes social media marketing easier. You can leverage ad campaigns, using Instagram marketing through partnering with influencers, or host giveaway contests to generate interactions.
And if that isn’t enough, there are reliable marketing tools to boost your brand identity and visibility online that you can use to your advantage.
Step 10: Watch the data
In order to improve your business model and create a successful ecommerce business, you need to track your performance over time.
Look for website solutions that offers the ability to create and analyze reports on visitor traffic, browsing and buying habits, customer purchases, and other data so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. Create key performance indicators to accurately measure how well your progress is ongoing.
Once you’ve compiled all the data, you can finally make improvements to your ecommerce business plan and boost your brand towards rapid growth.
Create a Powerful Ecommerce Website with Web.com
With everything and everyone moving towards the cyber scene, it is within a lot of businesses’ interests to shift their transactions online. Fortunately, creating an ecommerce website is easier than ever.
Start an ecommerce business and build your own ecommerce store with Web.com’s online solutions to keep up with the industry’s demands.
