A Smart Approach to Starting Your Own Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce is a huge opportunity for anyone who wishes to start a business. Whether you are looking to sell physical products or digital products, ecommerce is an exciting opportunity with billions of dollars of transactions in the U.S alone. Most other countries have ecommerce bubbling up as an opportunity only now.

So, no matter where you are in the world, it’s an opportunity that beckons you. The best part is this: starting an ecommerce business is as simple as finding products or services to sell, setting up a store, marketing your store, and repeating the above steps forever.  It’s not as hard as it used to be. You are not too late to enter your market, and it’s less expensive than ever. Here are tips on how to start smart and launch your ecommerce store:

Starting With Products

If you are already a full-fledged business that creates products, choosing to go online is a strategic decision. You’d back it up by making arrangements such as setting up an ecommerce store, shipping, logistics, and other critical inclusions. If you were an affiliate, dealer, or an entrepreneur looking to deal with products, you’d have to ask the following questions:

• What are the specific products you’d like to deal with? What are some of those products that you are passionate about? Note that the best choice of products is usually the kind of products that you love and also those that have respectable profit margins.
• Do you plan to deal with one single manufacturer or shelf products from different manufacturers or brands?
• Would you like to deal with informational products, digitals, or downloadable software instead?

It’s these decisions that’d probably take up the bulk of your time. Once you decide, however, you are good to go.

Look to Provide Services

Products historically suffer from low profit margins but give you a huge possibility to scale up so that you can still make profit in volumes. Services are much harder to scale up but provide you with healthy profit margins. For offering services, you’d still have to “productize” services such as bundling your offerings as products for a specific price. That makes it easy to list your services as packages and make the transactions clear. Customers will also know exactly what they get for the price they pay.

Options for setting up your store

Whether you choose to sell products or services, your options for setting up an ecommerce store range from simple to complicated; from affordable to outrageously expensive. It’s obviously smart to start small but still not miss out on features and security that the expensive ecommerce platforms demand. Your options are as follows:

Shopify

It’s one of the few options available for small business owners where setting up an online store is a matter of plug and play. Starting with Shopify themes, you’d be able to set up a store and run it almost without any help whatsoever. If you need help, there is an enthusiastic community of partners, developers, or web designers recommended by Shopify. Shopify also has apps for virtually every other aspect of running your business while you can sell both products and services.

Magento or Magento Go

Magento is a robust platform for an ecommerce store. While it’s open source and it does have a huge community of followers and enthusiasts, it’s limited to “products” and not “services”. Even Magento Go (a web-based version of Magento) does not provide you with an ability to sell services. Magento works well for highly customized options for ecommerce.

Adobe Business Catalyst

Hosted on Adobe’s secure servers, Adobe Business Catalyst is a good option for small businesses that are looking to accept payments for their products and services online. Of course, you can build a completely dedicated ecommerce store too. There’s a growing community of Business Catalyst specialists and partners to help you with customization, hosting, and launching your ecommerce store.

Open Source CMS + Ecommerce Plugins

WordPress is, by far, the most popular option for small businesses and even individuals who’d like to start with ecommerce (while CMS systems were not build specifically for this). Thankfully, there are plenty of dedicated open source ecommerce engines available such as OpenCart, OSCommerce, and many more. You might have to work with themes, plugins, and possible help to integrate and customize your store according to your needs.

Marketing your eCommerce Store

While setting up an ecommerce store and preparing to deliver products or services is a hard job, it’s even harder to market or promote your store. In fact, it lies at the very core of your success. Marketing is one activity that’d never stop. It’s not something you do because sales don’t seem to be hitting the roof. Marketing begets sales, which in turns brings in revenue. Here’s what you’d certainly have to do while running your ecommerce store:

Blogging

Blogging is a mandatory activity to begin promoting your ecommerce store. Write about your business, share new ways to use your products, throw in some behind-the-scenes details about how you run your business, and provide tips for your customers. Do blogging to help build a community around your products and/or services. Blogging is also your ticket to allow others to link to your content, get noticed, and to make your content go viral.

Other forms of Content Marketing

Blogging isn’t enough, by itself. You’d need other forms of content to help promote your business. Start guest posting on other blogs that seem to have a readership that matches the profile of your average customer. Create slide decks and informational whitepapers or reports to upload to content hubs such as SlideShare. Get featured on major business-related publications such as Forbes. Blogging also opens up another line of communication, makes your presence felt, helps your content to spread, and allows customers and prospects to communicate with you directly.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization – as a type of digital marketing – is overhyped, dynamic and tends to depend on major search engines such as Google. The tactics and strategies for effective SEO always change each time Google launches an update or puts up policies regarding content on websites, availability on mobile searches, and pretty much everything else related to websites and content. Old tricks such as keywords stuffing, using bland and copied product descriptions, and many other tactics are already extinct. Take a holistic approach to SEO, work on your content for the long-term, and follow SEO best practices. Just don’t depend on SEO alone for your marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows you to get personal with your customers, no matter how many customers you have. Based on the power of “opt-ins” and the concept of “permission marketing”, it’s a powerful channel to nurture leads and pump up conversions. Email subscribers begin to relate to businesses they subscribe to (provided the businesses in question are doing it right).  In spite of multiple new methods of promotions and advertising today, email is still the staple for marketers and small businesses. You can still bet on those opt-in forms.

Social Media

While social media isn’t exactly a marketplace, it’s a way to gain traction, following, and engage with both present and future prospects. Social media is where non-commercial conversations and discussions related to your business niche, product class, or maybe even your specific brands happen. Deep dive into those conversations, provide information where needed, support others when required, and solve problems. Social media demands your interactivity, active presence, and credible support without expecting sales. Interestingly enough, that’s when social media begins to work for you.

Paid Advertising

Plenty of options are available for going the paid route online. Starting with Google Adwords and plenty of other players working to distribute your online ads across networks, you also have social media networks with their own paid advertising programs. LinkedIn, Facebook,Twitter, and even Pinterest are now hoping to provide the much-needed platforms for advertising your products or to promote your content.

Serving Customers

Every business needs an efficient and streamlined way to serve its customers. Integrate your ecommerce store with variety of tools built to help you serve customers. Open up lines of communication such as emails, inbound phone lines (including toll-free numbers), and web-based support ticket systems. Optionally, you may also use your social media networks as an additional channel for customer support.

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