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So, you want to know how to start a successful ecommerce store selling digital products.
You are eager to register an Amazon and Clickbank account and ready to offer the products on your website. However, you are toying with the idea of selling actual products of your own your ecommerce store.
You have been sniffing around forums to look for suggestions as to what product to sell. You begin to wonder whether to do affiliates or build and sell your own products! And you to ask, what things do you need to prepare to start a successful ecommerce store?
Lot of things to prepare, but don’t be discourage
There is a lot of things one needs to prepare to start an online ecommerce store or website. The biggest part I think is that, first you need to decide exactly what you are going to sell. This may sound redundant and a little over-emphasizing, but really, a lot of start ups do not even go past this question.
For example, if the digital items that you are wanting to sell are yours then they will need to be prepared and ready to be sold. They needed to be packaged in such a way that they are sell-able. And if you are going to be getting your products from another source, then you will need to get the supply end sorted out.
Take a look the image below, an example of an ecommerce platform supply chain flow chart to give yourself an idea.
Figure out all the supply issues and preparations,
once that is out of the way, then you can start to look into the best way to build your ecommerce website to maximize the products. Different products sell differently, others responds to certain methods. There is that part of knowing how to sell your products, and there is that part of knowing your products competition. Going into some research and finding out what works for others that offer the same or similar products.
While setting up an ecommerce website for your online business is easy. Getting a grip of what you actually want to start selling can be quite daunting. Not to mention the effort you will put into marketing your website among millions of competition.
Careful analysis of the market should be considered
Like any other business, the sale of goods through an ecommerce store, despite the apparent ease and low cost of running it, it also requires careful study, analysis of the consumer market, assess investment, and research of business competitors.
Today I will try to give you a complete full cycle of actions you can take to start your own ecommerce store – that will give you a clear picture of “an online store” of your dream prior to you making your first sale.
Actions you can take to start your own ecommerce store
- Carefully determine your product. Do not just go after your passion. Go after product that have a market.
- Check out some of the websites that sells the same or similar product you will be selling. How are they doing it, what are their activity. Check out their social media pages. You will probably get a better grip of your competition after a few interaction with them on social media.
- Determine the value of your product to people you are targeting? Does it offer good value to warrant their money?
- As in other businesses, advertisement is the engine of your business. How much are you willing to invest in advertising your product(not just money, but more so, your time and other resource)?
- Look for qualified person to work under you(programmers, content writers, etc). To make sure that your content and product pages are friendly to Google search engine.
- Determine and calculate the monetary cost.
- Procure the goods from dependable supplier.
- Purchase your domain Domain and Hosting.
- Create your ecommerce store. You can go for website builder services or have your own website built from the ground using open-source platforms such as Prestashop ecommerce or thirty bees ecommerce.
- Create your social media accounts. Social media takes almost 50% of traffic today. If there is one thing you should invest in, invest on social media traffic generation. Design a working social media strategy.
- Are you going to hire Staff (manager, consultant, site administrator, accountant)? Or do it yourself?
- Determine your advertising resource.
- Get a good and stable internet connection (telephone, mobile, Internet)
- Take a plunge. Let Google and the search engines know your are live!
It takes time to gain a good traffic
Remember, it takes at the minimum 3-6 months before your website gains good traffic. Most takes a lot longer, depending on the kind of niche it is. You have your work cut out for you, for sure.
As you may have noticed, it does seem a lot of work to get your ecommerce website store started and keep running, and it is. I am not one to sugar-coating anything. This is not to intimidate you. This is because Shoptech Media wants you to succeed!
Post Scriptum: A couple of tips!
As a future business owner associated with operating an online store, you should be aware that in running of an online ecommerce store, you fully assume the responsibility before your customers. You have to love and understand the product, which is being implemented in your online store, in your gut. Some calls it “being passionate”, and i completely agree with that. But simply, what this meant is to treat your ecommerce store as a real business!
Here is why you should treat it as a real business?
To start a real business, the first thing that any real business man looks for is….Tadaa … Location!
Why location is important?
No matter what your product and stock is, or how great the quality or usefullness. If it’s yours or your affiliate market, or how beautiful your ecommerce website is designed….if you don’t have traffic, you’re out of business!
After going through all of the steps to start your ecommerce business, you need to know where your traffic will be coming from – then create your plan and your strategy around optimizing for it. Often times people are building up what is in their estimation – is what they THINK will draw people to their business like honey draw files. It does not quite work like that.
Why did I say that?
Because if people knew their target market, and how to get them to come to any website url, then we wouldn’t be asking this question, wouldn’t we?.
The question I posited is a real question that start up always struggle. I hate to see ecommerce website that starts off so promising only to see it shoved into the shelves after a few months. In my almost 2 decades of internet experience, this is almost always the case.
Follow the steps above in How to Start a Successful Ecommerce Store. After doing that, review and reread the 2 tips I shared above. Do not under-estimate location. In the web, location is your website traffic. Your traffic is where your sales will be coming from and the success of your ecommerce store will be determined by how much your put in the work to get people to your website.
Let us know what you think of this article. Am I correct in my take?
