Building Your Own Online Store: A Step-by-Step Guide

Table of Contents

You must initially choose a product to market.

If you’re lucky enough to find a reliable supplier from whom you can purchase goods at wholesale or below wholesale prices, you still have your work cut out. If you want to be competitive with your competitors’ prices, you must ensure your markup is at least 20% higher than theirs.

Alibaba.com is a website that connects manufacturers worldwide with distributors/resellers, so if you don’t know what to offer or where to get things at wholesale pricing or better, it’s worth looking out. Assuming you have the capital to spend in inventory, you must purchase a minimum quantity of items to keep on hand in your location to facilitate rapid shipping. It would be best to inquire about the minimum order quantity required by each distributor and manufacturer.

It’s possible you don’t want to keep stock. Perhaps you cannot afford to invest in stock at this time. That’s fine because there’s always drop shipping, where you select a vendor in the same country as you and have them handle all your product fulfillment. The supplier will ship the product to your customers on your behalf without revealing their identity to your customers, and you will collect the orders and the payment from your customers. The downside is that your profits will be lower because the warehouse will deduct some of its costs from your total for warehousing, packaging, and shipping.

You can drop-ship items from local warehouses or manufacturers or import them yourself. It is entirely up to you to decide.

Get your product images and pricing figured up and ready to go.

The next step is to acquire digital images of the items you plan to sell. If you have physical samples of the goods, you can snap your own photos or contact the distributor or manufacturer to request web-ready images. By reducing their size, ensure they are not too large for website use.

In addition, you should have the selling prices for everything you plan to offer. You should investigate each and keep a spreadsheet detailing your costs, the retail/msp prices, and your selling price. Spreadsheet software like Excel is helpful because it facilitates rapid, system-wide updates. In the future, you can directly integrate this prepared information into your shopping cart, saving you the trouble of manually entering each item.

Your Shop Can Be Organized in Two Ways.

You may now begin creating your online shop. There are essentially two approaches to take. You can either use a pre-built system like YahooStores, eBay ProStores, etc., where you pay a monthly fee to access all the features they give, or you can purchase software, host your website elsewhere, and install the program there.

You may have a fully functional store up and running in a matter of hours after signing up for the monthly subscription service; all you have to do is follow the simple instructions provided. That’s one of the advantages of this platform. The downside is that you have to pay a monthly fee in addition to whatever your credit card company could charge for each transaction, and they also frequently take a percentage of your sales as “transaction fees.” One such all-inclusive e-commerce platform is Yahoo Stores, which requires a subscription. Prostores, eBay’s equivalent, is also a viable option for beginners.

We recommend using your software model for those who have made websites before and are familiar with HTML, domain names, hosting, file transfers, etc. While I like the cost-free nature of open-source programs like OS Commerce and Zen Cart, I’ve found that getting them up and running takes time and that they don’t look beautiful right out of the box without much work on the templates. Regarding shopping cart software, I prefer X-cart because it’s cheap (the complete edition starts at approximately $200) and flexible (it contains a ton of add-ons and codes to help you do whatever you can imagine). To choose the best one for your company, you must first determine which aspects are most important to you. There is no need to pay a costly monthly charge or split your profits with the provider if you go this route. You’ll have to pay for everything separately (if you don’t use open-source software) and then figure out how to make it all work together in the end, including a domain name, hosting, a way to accept payments (such as a credit card or payment gateway), and an SSL certificate.

Verify everything

You must thoroughly test your chosen shopping cart type. Verify that everything looks right by running test purchases in the two most popular browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox). Maintaining a polished and error-free business is a top priority, so don’t stop improving!

Publicize the web page.

If you want people to visit your site now that it is life, you must get the word out. Since there is no such thing as foot traffic on the web, the old saying “if you build it, they will come” no longer applies. When you first launch a website, no one will know about it. You’ll need to learn about search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and other promotional strategies before deciding which tasks are worth doing in-house and which can be outsourced. Keep in mind that admitting defeat is OK. Creating the website itself. Having someone else carry it out is always an option. Make sure you have enough knowledge to avoid being taken advantage of.

Visit [http://www.ebizgurus.com/favorites/yahoomerchant.php] to learn more about Yahoo Stores. Try Shopify.

linda