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How To Start A Successful Online Store & Optimize It?

Disha

One of the things that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that eCommerce is an industry that can thrive in almost all situations. So if you are thinking of starting an online store, you can rest assured that it is a viable idea.

Although there are 7.1 million online stores globally, you can still have your own space online and thrive.

However, it’s one thing to have an online store, and it’s another thing to optimize it. Most online stores go out of business in the first year with little or no profit. The primary reason for this is poor optimization.

This article will discuss all you need to know before starting a successful online store and optimizing it.

Practical Steps to Start an Online Store in 2024

Starting a new online business comes with a lot of processes, challenges, and thrills. In addition to the passion for starting your business, you should have everything you need as well.

The same applies when you want to start an online store. Here are some practical steps you need to take to start an online store in 2024

#1. Set the Right Foundation

The first step to take when you want to start an online store and start selling online involves laying the right and lasting foundations. To begin with this step, you need to make a proper business plan to guide your future business online and offline.

You don’t necessarily have to be a business administration guru to build a comprehensive business plan. Here are some of the components and questions your business plan should have:

When you’re done giving answers to these questions, you could always go back to your business plan for guidance as you build your online store!

#2. Find the platform to host your online store

Once you’ve set the right foundation for your online store, the next step is finding an e-commerce platform to host it on. Since this is a very critical step to take before you start selling online, you’ve got to review your choices and weigh all alternatives.

There are many great platforms to choose from when starting an online store; it all depends on your needs. While some are dedicated to fast-growing businesses, others are there if you need to keep things modest. Some online store builders offer paid plans and a free trial to assist you to build your site right. However, a good e-commerce platform should have the following:

  1. A comprehensive library of professional but aesthetically looking appearance
  2. Shopping cart add-ons to add products while shopping, and useful plugins
  3. Good mobile support for responsive design
  4. Technical Help and support that come on time.

In all, your choice should come down to the type of product you sell, and whatever platforms give you the most freedom in customization.

#3. Get a befitting hosting plan for your online store

Your online store will need a customer database, shopping cart software to add products to while shopping, and your product catalogue. For this reason, your hosting plan needs to have the right bandwidth and enough storage space. Also, make sure it supports whatever shopping cart software you use on your site.

As a good starting point, try to choose plans with at least 10 GB monthly bandwidth and 2 GB worth of disk space. This will give enough space to store all your data and make customers’ access to your products seamless. We recommend using Bluehost for hosting your websites. It has a reputation of being a reliable service provider over the years, and has some very affordable pricing packages to let you choose from.

#4. Buy a domain name

A domain name is whatever address people type on their browser to get to your online store. Every online store or an online business should have a unique, short, and catchy domain name. With around 366.8 million registered domain names in the world currently, you’d have to make yours pretty unique.

A domain name is gotten for a fee, and this fee varies with the extension. The best domain you should look out for is the “.coms.” Your customers will find them easy to recall. Some site-building platforms can also help you pick a unique domain name.

#5. Build Your eCommerce website

After buying your unique domain name, you should look to set up your eCommerce website. Some eCommerce store builder offers you the option of automatically designing your online store with artificial intelligence.

You could also begin with a pre-set template and customize it to your taste. Some templates may have almost everything you need to start your store. Whatever choice you go with, ensure you don’t go overboard by following these guidelines:

After that is done, you should connect your unique domain name to your eCommerce website site. Next, you need to start adding certain components that will allow you to sell products on the internet. Some of these components are:

#6. Add Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate to your website

Securing your eCommerce website is a crucial part of setting it up. Every day, an average of 30,000 new websites are hacked on the internet, with most of them belonging to small business owners. Your customers will trust you with their private details, like their credit card numbers. This is why you must protect them from internet hackers and eavesdroppers.

Adding an SSL certificate to your eCommerce website is a great way to restrict these internet bad guys from accessing customer’s information. SSL certificates are internet connections that secure your internet connections and protects sensitive data sent between two computers.

Data sent from your customer’s browser to your eCommerce website will be scramble by encrypted algorithms. This makes it impossible to read by hackers. Adding an SSL certificate attaches HTTPS to the URL of your online store. You will usually see a lock symbol on the browser bar, next to a protected website.

#7. Set up payment gateways

Setting up payment gateways will help make the customer experience smoother on your website. With covid-19 re-enforcing the need for more contactless purchases, your online store definitely needs a payment gateway.

A payment gateway is a technology that online stores use to accept debit or credit card payments from their customers. A POS can act as a payment gateway for a physical store when you sell your product online.

However, in eCommerce, they are checkout portals your customers can use to enter their credit or debit card details. When you integrate payment gateways into your eCommerce website, it also helps protect your customers during transactions. It encrypts sensitive and personal credit card details, keeping you far from the risk of fraud.

Asides from credit and debit card options, you should also make sure third-party payment methods are available. Most of your customers, especially those overseas, may prefer making payments with alternate paying methods like PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Stripe.

#8. Start selling

The next step involves you to start selling. If you’ve customized your website, set up security and payment gateways, uploaded your products, the next step should involve making sales. This is where you decide when to launch your online store and when you need to start taking orders.

But before your online business goes live, you need to go through your website one more time. Doing this helps you find out typographical errors, mistakes in your links, and any other error from uploading your product. It would generally help if you looked out for anything that may cause issues for your customer’s shopping experience in your store.

Subsequently, you may want to take out time to run some tests through the eyes of a customer. Navigate through your pages, place orders, try to use the payment gateways and shopping carts, and fix whatever faults you find on the site.

The final thing to do, to start making hitch-free sales is to open your eCommerce website to potential customers by going live. Changes made to your domain name system (DNS) settings will help set your online store to appear live. Once such changes have been made, depending on your hosting company, it may take up to twenty-four or even forty-eight hours for the changes to show.

#9. Promote your eCommerce website

The next step requires you to grow your business online. A great looking eCommerce website with lots of nice products will mean nothing if potential buyers don’t know it exists. This is why you need to promote your eCommerce website and grow your business with diverse online marketing campaigns. Some of the marketing tools you can use as you start selling include:

1.Promotions Like Group and Daily Deals:

You can use this marketing tool to offer your customers great deals. Group deals allow you to set specific purchase goals that must be achieved to open the deal for all customers. Interested customers will share your links to their friends and family, prompting more traffic and patronage for your business online.

3. Paid Adverts:

Search engine advertising is another great way to get your site up to the first page when people search for the product you sell. There are some great search engine ads like Google Ads that you can choose from. Some eCommerce platforms may also offer free ads that you could consider using to get started.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

SEO is one marketing tool that, if applied well, can give your site more visibility on search engines. Having more visibility on search engines will help your store grow and attract more visitors and potential customers. The way to do this is to optimize every page on your eCommerce website with an SEO tool. Include relevant keywords that people tend to search more so that your website ranks higher on search engines.

5. Blogs:

Another useful marketing tool for business that some online stores neglect is blogs. Having an online store blog can serve several useful marketing and PR purposes for your business. For one, you could use it to show your visitors and customers your level of expertise in your niche or line of business. Well written blog posts optimized for SEO can offer your online store more visibility on search engines. Blogs can also help educate your customers about the products you sell and how best they can handle them. You could also utilize your online store blog to keep customers updated on your products, industry, and business changes. In all, blogs are a unique way to maintain your online presence and keep customers. As a best practice, make sure you link your blog to your eCommerce website via links.

6. Social Media Campaigns:

Social media marketing is considered much cheaper and easier to use than most traditional marketing. With lots of following and great consistent content, you can use social networks to pull traffic and potential customers to your online store business. But first, you need to make sure you have a separate page for your online store and connect it via links to your eCommerce platform. You can then decide to run paid, targeted ads like Facebook ads, YouTube Advertising, or Instagram For Business. You can offer promotions as well. Remember that the purpose is to communicate with your existing and potential customers and increase interest in your products.

7. Email Marketing:

Emails are one of the most effective marketing tools in recent times. As a best practice, your emails need to be as conversational and well-written as possible. It should be frequent, useful, and creative enough to keep the customer interested. These are some of the tools you can utilize in email marketing:

8. Emails For Abandoned Carts:

Abandoned cart emails are used as simple reminders to customers who forget to purchase items they placed in their shopping carts. To stimulate more purchases, you could offer special one-time discounts for such items.

9. Autoresponders:

It sends out already prepared and customized emails, like a welcome note when a new customer buys from you or a thank you note for every purchase made.

10. Online Newsletters:

These are a great way to send entertaining and informative articles and facts about your products. Once you give customers a choice to subscribe to it, make sure to send informative newsletters on specific intervals to their email address.

Top 8 Platform to Choose for Your eCommerce Website

#1. Wix

A simple ranking search online will show that Wix is arguably the best eCommerce store builder. With over 110 million subscribers around the world, surely they must know how to satisfy their users. If you’re new to the whole eCommerce website building, starting with Wix is a great choice.

Their platform is user friendly, fully-customizable, and you’re guaranteed to own an SEO friendly site. You can choose from at least 500 free eCommerce themes optimized for mobile. Wix also offers multiple languages to users to create their store; as much as 90 languages are available. Let’s get down to some of their main features:

In terms of pricing, Wix offers three plans that users can choose from.

#1. Business VIP Plan

Starting at $49 per month. The following added features come with this plan when you purchase it.

#2. Business Unlimited Plan

Is priced at $27 per month.

#3. Business Basic Plan

Priced at $23 every month

Pros
Cons

#2. Shopify

With 2 million active users, eCommerce giants Shopify are among the most popular platforms in the website building business. Also, they have a market share of 31% in the U.S for eCommerce websites, helping thousands build their online business.

In just a matter of minutes, online store owners can begin designing and customizing their sites. You can choose from custom templates or apply your creativity and feel to the Shopify designing process.

All Shopify plans come with unlimited email forwarding and bandwidth, web hosting, and a good content delivery network. Here are some of the different features you can find when you go with Shopify

Pros

Cons

#3. Squarespace

If you’re looking for a site builder with drag-drop functionality, Squarespace is one of those. Squarespace is ideal for creatives who want to make their sites as visually effective as possible. Although some users claim it is harder to operate than most eCommerce website builders, Squarespace has great design flexibility and strong inventory to compensate.

Navigation on the software is easy with a reviewer and unique editing tools to make the process quick. Some of the main features of Squarespace include the following:

In terms of plans and pricing, Squarespace offers three plans you can choose from.

Pros

Cons

#4. Square Online

If you’re in the market for a site builder with offline payments functionality and POS systems, Square Online is your best pick. Square brings a lot of simplicity to the eCommerce game with straightforward digital plans.

You can start designing and building your online store with no design or coding experience! They’re ideal for small business websites and freelancers. Here are some of its best tools and features:

Pros

Cons

#5. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another eCommerce hosting service for people with limited web designing skills who want to build the site themselves and sell online. It offers a comprehensive list of features that you can employ to customize your online store and build your business.

With their lowest plan priced at $29.95, they offer one of the cheapest rates for more features than most sites. In addition to a selection of 12 free templates available, BigCommerce has the following general features common with all its paid plans:

In addition to these common features, BigCommerce has three plans with its unique features, according to your needs. If you decide to go with BigCommerce to host your domain to start an online store, here are some of the plans they offer that you can choose from:

Pros

Cons

#6. WooCommerce

Since it opened up in 2011, WooCommerce has helped thousands of online stores sell online with their powerful but simple hosting services. They’re considered the best online shop plugins by most online store owners.

WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin that easily integrates with WordPress sites. It is open-source software, meaning anyone can enhance, inspect or modify it when you create.

Some parts of their services are free to users. However, creating your own online store may require more advanced, paid features. WooCommerce comes equipped with these features and functionalities you can apply to create your online store:

Overall, WooCommerce is free to download and operate. However, to gain access to advanced features and more plugins, you may need to pay.

Pros

Cons

#7. Volusion

One of the oldest eCommerce builders founded in 1999, Volusion, currently offers its services to more than 30,000 online business. Volusion offers several responsive templates if you create an online store, and you can follow your online store on your mobile devices.

Equipped with the right smart systems, Volusion helps track your inventory as you sell online. Although ideal for users with eCommerce building experience, beginners will find it complex.

There are five plans available to you to choose from, depending on your online store’s need for them.

Pros

Cons

#8. Zyro

Zyro is a website building tool that also offers site hosting services to users who create an online store. They are one of the newest eCommerce builders, having been found in 2019.

It is more popular for the ease it gives newbies in eCommerce building. All of their templates are customizable. Although Zyro offers some free templates, some of the paid ones do not come with advanced features. Some of Zyro’s main features include the following:

In terms of pricing, Zyro is one of the cheapest website builders, with plans starting as low as $4.49 per month. Although Zyro is currently offering discounts, here are the plans that they offer:

Pros

Cons

#9. Magneto Commerce

Magneto is an eCommerce platform that functions as open-source software that helps thousands of online stores sell online. Being an open-source platform means they have a huge community of developers and designers.

In fact, you will find that the Magneto Community has at least 360,000 active users and 1,500 members. This makes it really easy for members to get support and advice to help take their business to the next level. They list Ford, Nike, and Coca-Cola as some of their major users.

These are some of the unique features you can get when you use Magneto Commerce to create an online store:

Pros

Cons

#10. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is another open-source online store builder that thousands of users and businesses depend on since it started in 2007. As open-source software, PrestaShop has 800,000 members globally who are dedicated to using and supporting the platform. They offer a free trial if you like to create an online store with them from time to time. PrestaShop is quite easy to use despite offering a wide range of features that include the following:

PrestaShop is available in more than 60 languages globally. In terms of pricing, PrestaShop is totally free to use. However, it offers a support plan where users can get expert support and advice while building. Although most users consider this plan expensive, there are still several advantages to this platform.

Pros

Cons

#11. OpenCart

If you’re looking to use a free, open-source platform to build your online store, you should consider OpenCart. OpenCart gives a modern approach when you create an online store with them. They have lots of flexibility and customizable features.

The platform has a pool of about 13,000 extensions to help you build your business online. OpenCart also provides users with a support plan that is priced at $99 every month. There’s a one-time-fix plan going for the same price as well. These are some of its main features:

Pros

Cons

Best SEO Practices For Your eCommerce Site

Having a well-built eCommerce website may not be valuable if you don’t utilize the various pages’ SEO potential. However, should you choose to DIY, there are some useful tips and SEO best practices to follow:

  1. The first thing to know about SEO is that it uses important keywords that are frequently searched in your niche or line of business. There should be relevant keywords placed strategically from the URL of your pages down to every page on your online store. However, you may be writing for the search engine to optimize. It is equally important you write what your customers will understand. Avoid what is known as keyword stuffing; placing too many keywords on a page to increase SEO ranking.
  2. Make sure whatever content you put out on your website is of superior quality and free from fluff. You should also take out time to study and understand your audience and potential customer’s needs.
  3. Connecting your eCommerce platform’s different pages through internal links will keep your visitors engaged and longer on your online store. Doing this will make each page relevant to your users and visitors. You could also use links to direct users to your more important and priority pages.

Conclusion

If you’ve ever wanted to start an eCommerce business, now is the time. 2024 is a new beginning for everyone who survived the pandemic. And new beginnings come with new opportunities.

The market is fresh and all the tips provided in the article are viable to get you started. It’s time to choose a niche and launch your business online.

Further Reading:

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