There is a growing trend for online independent retail, so we decided to write an article about how to set up an e-commerce business.
So many people these days are looking for a side income or passive income as some say. A great way to do this is by starting up an e-commerce business, so in today’s article we are going to be covering the six steps that you need to follow when you are starting an e-commerce business. The steps we’ll cover will be:
- Step One: Research
- Step Two: Get A Domain Name
- Step Three: Choose A Product
- Step Four: See How You Can Differentiate From Your Competition
- Step Five Determine Your Customer Base
- Step Six: Create Your Store
Step One: Research How to set up an e-commerce business
Read up on the subject. Reading this article about “How to set up an e-Commerce Business” is a great start. But be sure to look for other articles like: “How To Set Up An E-commerce Shop” for example. Here are a few other common search terms that could be worth looking into; “How do I start an ecommerce business with no money?” and another question people are asking is, “What are the most successful e-commerce businesses?”
Step two: Get A Domain Name
Our First tip is to get a domain name, it’s very important for a successful ecommerce store to have one but a lot of people want to skip this step, they want to save the twelve pound a year. Not getting a domain name is not a smart decision, you want to get a good domain name.
How Do You Know If Your Domain Is Good?
What is a good domain name for an ecommerce store? well it needs to be easy to spell for one, if it’s hard to spell people are going to forget it and they’re not going to know how to spell it so you might say okay my company is XYZ whatever dot-com, but if people aren’t sure of the spelling of it they’re going to make a mistake and they’re just going to give up. On top of that it needs to be easy to remember like any business name it should also be easy to remember that’s not enough though it needs to include a keyword. If you’re new to online business online marketing you might not know what that means. Let us quickly explain it so let’s say you have a store and you’re selling peanut butter, you absolutely love peanut butter so you decide to sell it online so a really good domain name would be peanut butter.com but chances are it’s probably taken or probably really expensive and unless you’re a big company you probably can’t afford peanut butter.com, so a good example might be peanut butter lovers.com so Google knows that this website is about peanut-butter, people know that this website is about peanut butter and even more so they know it’s for peanut butter lovers and if they love peanut butter well they’re going to want to buy peanut butter online obviously.
That’s a great domain name because it helps Google know what your website about it, also helps people know what your website is about. Don’t make your domain name super long if it’s too long people aren’t going to be able to spell it so they’re going to forget it. It’s also really bad for ranking high up on Google search results because Google knows if you have a really long domain name you’re probably not that serious.
Step Three: Choose A Product
What products should I use for my store? Your product is the solution to a problem. The first thing that you need to know when starting an e-commerce business is that you’re not just creating a product, you’re solving a problem, the world does not need more products what it does need is better solutions to existing problems. One of the most common mistakes we see new entrepreneurs making again and again is creating a solution before identifying the problem, so before thinking what product can you sell first think about what problem can I solve. What we need to do is find a problem that you know exists or better yet you’ve experienced yourself. Ideally this will be a niche that you’re truly passionate about as this is going to be something that you want to be able to do day in day out for the foreseeable future.
Find Your Problem To Solve
Let’s use an example we are interested in protecting our shared environment for future generations this might be because a huge environmental issue is waste. The problem we would like our brand to solve is decreasing waste from everyday disposable items, so a good way to come up with your product type here is by turning your problem into a question, and your product into the answer to that question. In our example the question would be how can we decrease waste from everyday disposable items. One answer would be to make those items reusable, so now let’s start to think of some items that are used daily that are disposable that you could make reusable, so the first few things that come to mind just off the top of my head of razors, toothbrushes, takeaway coffee cups and straws. Now you want to begin to have a think and do some research around each potential product idea and which you think has the biggest market potential and which isn’t being done as well as the others. Let’s fast forward and go for the item of those which has the least market saturation which is disposable straws then we want to focus in and start to do some additional research around our problem and solution so we want to look into some of the facts and figures that you can focus on to highlight the problem of disposable straws. An estimated 500 million straws are used every day in the US alone, this is a powerful number and will help your potential customer instantly understand the importance of making a change then you want to highlight, the fact that plastic straws cannot be recycled and that they sit in landfill for years or pollute our waterways.
Now you’re starting to create a compelling reason for your prospective customers to switch to a reusable straw by getting to them to understand and even empathise with the problem. Now your customer just needs to understand how your product is different to every other reusable straw.
Step Four: See How You Can Differentiate From Your Competition
How can I stand out for my competition? Our next point is that you need to differentiate yourself for your competition, you need to be able to communicate how you’re different from other brands or products on the market. What we’re looking to do here is to create your unique value proposition a unique value proposition is a single clear compelling message that states why you’re different and worth buying. A common misconception in e-commerce is that you need a crazy new product idea to be successful, this is not true at all and actually the most successful e-commerce brandsare the ones that have taken existing problems and sold them in a new way, so what’s important to note here is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel you just need to find a point of difference. The way that we do this is by taking a product and considering how we could make it different by changing a single dimension, the only dimensions that we take into account are design, function, price and time. So let’s take a look at how we could make our reusable straw different to others on the market. Starting with design an option to change the design of our metal reusable straw could be making it in a different colourway especially a trending colourway like rose gold or Chrome, but again these may already exist. Another more specialized design option could be playing on the design trend of personalization and each straw could be engraved with your customer’s initials for example, this makes the product feel more like their own and is a great way to not get your straws mixed up and in this way it could encourage bulk orders from families and offices etc.
Change Your Products Function
So moving on to a way that we could change our products function the best way to go about changing a products functionality is to take a pain point into account so again off the top of my head I can imagine that a straw floating around in a bag or day might get quite dirty or that you might not even be carrying a bag and you might not want to take a long awkward straw with you everywhere that you go so a functional way to help solve these pain points could be by designing a straw that’s retractable and able to be folded down to fit in a small case, maybe around the size of a matchbox and in turn this case would help protect your straw off and dirt so maybe even making the case from an antibacterial substance like copper. The next dimension that you want to consider as a point of difference is the price of the straw and it’s kind of surprising you want to consider whether you’re going for a lower direct-to-consumer price point which is more accessible to the masses, or a more exclusive price point for higher exclusivity. We generally go for the lower direct-to-consumer price point for a product like this and you can always bring out a more expensive limited-edition version of your product later, for example a solid metal rather than a Polish metal straw. Finally the last dimension that we consider is time in particular the amount of time that your product but for our example we think it wouldn’t lend itself to only being available for a certain amount of time except for maybe a limited edition version. So there you have it some ideas around how to differentiate your product from others already on the market so we have our product now we have to consider our market which brings us to our next point.
Step Five: Determine Your Customer Base
Which customer base should I target? Our fourth point is that not everyone is your customer, so you know the problem you are solving, you know how your product can serve as a solution to that problem and how to differentiate yourself from your competition. Now it’s time to start thinking about who you’re going to be selling your product to. Something that we hear again and again is that because a new entrepreneur thinks that their product is so amazing and it’ll appeal to anyone therefore their target market is everyone, but the thing is that nobody can afford to market to everybody. So to get more ROI out of your marketing you need to find the group of people who your offer is the most compelling. This is your target market, one way to think about this is in an ideal world who would love your product and want to tell all of their friends, family and followers about it. This is the group we’re looking for first so there are a lot of different ways about going to find your target market. You can create customer personas, you can do research on your competitors and who they’re actively targeting or speaking to.
Reverse Analyse Your Store
Before you launch the easiest way will be by reverse analysing your product from your audience’s point of view. You can do this by ever taking an audience centric or product centric approach. For an audience centric approach the main things that you’re going to be considering are your audience’s demographics, so things like their age, location, gender, income level, ethnicity etc., and your audiences psychographic so things like their personality values and interests and for a product centric approach you want to take apart your product and its core offerings. Again this could be in turn design, time, function and price and determine who these would appeal to most. Either way as a starting point before you’ve launched and have any data about who your customers actually are we just want to come up with a few basics. Maybe one or two demographic based factors and one or two psychographic factors, so let’s say for our reusable metal straw that were wanting to target people predominantly based in the US due to our initial messaging around 500 million straws being used daily in the US. We would target people aged between 25 to 34 as these could be young adults wanting to take more responsibility for maintaining our shared environment for future generations. So they’d value the environment and fillers that they can make a difference together.
Step Six: Create Your Store
How do I create a good ecommerce store? Our final step is to actually set up your store and we know we’re talking about a lot here we know there’s a lot of information once again you can get all of it in the checklist totally for free. Setting up your store is very important but the truth is it’s really easy, all you really have to do is add a product especially if you’re using Shopify even with WooCommerce. All you have to do is add a product and it’s pretty much ready to go people can buy from you.
Customise Your Store
You’re going to have a pretty ugly store if all you do is add a product so some other things to think about is your obviously your product page, but then your homepage. This is where you can use video to create your brand image. To do this you need a creative agency and a London production company. The home page is probably going to be the number one page people go to so you want to do a lot of things, you want to make it friendly and welcoming but also make it easy for people to go to the product page because the less clicks it takes for someone to buy the more likely they are to purchase. If you make it very complicated for people and you make them click all around the website to get to the checkout page, they’re going to get bored and they’re going to lose track on how to do it. So it’s about balance, it needs to be attractive and functional. Please take a look at our home page for Beast production company UK.
Make People Think As Little As Possible While On Your Store
You want to make people think as little as possible this is why candy is at the checkout aisle, very few people go to the store to buy candy but when it’s there it’s so easy to buy. You want to make your website follow that same mentality, you want people to come and be like wow that was so easy I didn’t have to even think that’s why amazon has one-click purchases because it knows when they make it easy for people to buy they’re going to buy more things.
Make Your Website Easy To Navigate
The next thing is your navigation, this needs to follow the same principle you need to make it as easy as possible for people to get to checkout so that means as few clicks as possible if they have to click on a category page, then they have to select something else then they have to select something else and then something else they’re going to get lost, they’re going to forget how to do it. Drop-down menus work very well for this there’s a lot of other different ways but count how many clicks does it take for you to get to checkout, how much interaction does it need and see if you can lower that.
If you follow these six steps you can build a great, responsive ecommerce store that is primed and ready to make you money.