How to Setup an Ecommerce Store

I pride myself on being very honest with my readers. I try not to include to much fluff or to not make things look better than they really are. At the same time, I want to be honest and not discourage you from your dreams. In this case, I will not say that owning an ecommerce store is impossible. It is not, not at all. In fact, there are thousands of people who are very successful at it. However, they did not get there by luck. There had to have been some time, effort, and probably lots of dedication before they ever came close to reaping the rewards they are seeing now. If your desire is to do something like that, then I want to encourage you to read the few tips on how to setup an ecommerce store the right way below.

Step 1: Find a Product That Will Sell Online

I visit a lot of forums and talk with a lot of other ecommerce store owners. Some of them will struggle. They feel like they have followed the dotted line to a successful online business, but they are just missing the mark on the biggest priority of selling items on the internet. Before they ever finish their sentence, I always ask them, “Are you selling toilet paper?” Most of the time I just get a, “huh?” in response. The reason I ask this question is quite a simple way to think about it though. In reality, who has ever bought toilet paper online? Probably not very many people have. The ones that have probably found it to be some kind of ultra-special toilet paper. The reason people are not buying it online is because 1) they can easily go down to the store and buy it and 2) it is probably cheaper buying it locally. Your product needs to be sellable online and you must take a objective approach to determining with your product might sell online well. You can get into a situation where the product is not desirable enough online. More frequently though, people simply try to sell products that everyone else is selling because they feel that they can compete. This is not the best way to start a business.

Step 2: Build a Website around the Product

Now that you have a product that you believe will be a great hit online, it is time to start developing a website around it. Pictures, explanation of how the product works, and an easy way to buy it are all things that a good ecommerce website should have. The common statistic is that within seven seconds your website should tell the reader what your website is about. That actually includes the loading time of your website. Since most websites take a couple of seconds to load, really it is probably closer to five seconds. This is done with the use of pictures and making the important words more visible. For example, I saw my dad make a recent purchase of a tomato tree. Yes, a tree, not a plant, they make them now. The first thing I saw on the site was “Tomato Tree” written in nice big graphical colors. The second thing I saw was a picture showing what they look like. I thought that the website was done nicely, and it ended up that my dad purchased from them as well. The web development of a website should always be done around whatever product you are selling. Therefore, never try to start a website project before you know what product you are going to sell.

Step 3: Use the Various Methods of Internet Marketing to Advertise Your Product

If I told you that after you built a website that you were finished with the work and can sit back and let the money roll in, I would be lying to you. Unfortunately this is just the beginning of the process of being successful online. Every website online must be marketed to potential buyers. Luckily, there are several things you can do to bring people to your website. I would encourage you to spend the vast majority of your time reading about internet marketing and spend a lot of time testing out new things to see what works for you. If I told you spend “this much here”, spend five hours doing “this”, and another three doing “this other”, it may not always work. When it comes to internet marketing it is all about finding something that works for you. Good luck!

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Adding Products and Setting up the Store

You now have your shopping cart lined up, you probably have most all of the backend setup so that you can add products to your store. You might even be looking at how many products you want to add. Now is the time to start evaluating that process.

Adding products should be a fairly simple process

If you picked the right shopping cart for your products, this should not be a difficult task. On the other hand, it can be quite time consuming depending on how many items you have. Evaluate your shopping cart and see what options you have for getting this process done. Try to eliminate or modify the shopping cart if you have to take repeating steps.

For example, let’s say the vast majority of your work requires that you select a category for the product to go in, but most of the products are going into the same category. Perhaps have it setup so that this category is already chosen when you go to add a product. This may not seem like a time saver, but if you have hundreds of products to add, this can be a significant amount of time wasted here.

Outsourcing the work

If you have too much work, you might consider outsourcing the work. I highly recommend that if you can avoid doing this, you should. There are a couple of reasons. First of all, adding products is primarily copy and pasting anyway. You typically copy and paste from the vendors’ description, you type in the price, copy and paste the name, and submit it. Therefore, if you are telling someone else, add “this name, this price, and this description” you are simply defeating the purpose.

Another problem is that this costs money. I highly recommend that you save money where possible so that this money can be invested into marketing your website. If you are on a budget, this is especially true. You do not want to run out of funds before you ever get started.

Feature your big items

Always keep in mind that your big items should be featured in some manner. It is not uncommon for your ecommerce store to be tailored to a specific product you have. For example, you may sell candles. If your website is devoted to this, have some of your best candles directly on the front page and easily accessible and highly visible. Products such as candle holders or candle lighters should take a back seat. This way the products you want to sell most of are the ones that are most likely to be purchased.

Always keep in mind your initial concept

If you have read all about sourcing your products and things, you probably had an initial concept for your shopping cart. It is understandable that you deviated from this a little bit, but try not to go too far. A lot of people, once they get right into it may see dollar signs on some products and totally revamp the direction that they originally had for their website. This is terrible because you have already done research and rationally thought out what could potentially work. Straying away for this only increases your chances of failure. While studying the marketplace on products, do not change the direction you are going simply because of profit margins. Stick to the original plan, and then maybe add on if you see these other products selling too.

This is not to say that you can not add additional products to your website. You just should keep in mind what products are the ones you have done research on and are most likely to sell well online.

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