An Online Store can help you sell your own manufactured products or third party products over the internet and reach, potentially, thousands of customers. Here is the complete guide on how to start your Online Store:
Before You Start
Pick a niche. We really recommend staying away from selling multiple products similar to Amazon. The most successful Online Stores we have created are those that focus on a specific niche or market. The biggest problem with starting a store that sells multiple products to multiple markets is that people are less likely to trust your brand. You are also not going to be able to compete with websites like Amazon that can afford to sell products at much lower costs than you.
An example of a very specific niche would be to sell Cell Phone cases. It only sounds as one single product but you must understand the quantity of variables can be in the thousands! A variable would be for example Cell Phone cases with country flags, for a specific brand like Apple, or cases with accessories included.
Source Your Products!
If you are manufacturing your own products, you can skip this section and head over to marketing & advertising. If you don’t have products you need to find them before you start your online store. There are multiple ways to do this, here is a list on how to find them:
- Google them! Simply run searches on the biggest online search engine. Make sure you add the words “Distributor” “Wholesalers” and “Dropshipping” to the products or market that you are searching so you can find the ones that will dropship for you.
- You might find Distributors that might have your product but don’t dropship, so you might want to get a 3PL (Third Party Logistics) to store and dropship the products for you. Visit our Third Party Logistics page for more information on this topic.
- A lot of these manufacturers or distributors will not advertise that they Dropship their products, but it doesn’t hurt to ask either! some of them might not advertise this option just because they don’t like to feel overwhelmed by dropshippers.
**IMPORTANT**
Avoid sourcing Branded Products from AliExpress or any other Chinese-based suppliers! This goes back to our Fundamentals advice of keeping clean the integrity of your business. If you outsource Branded Products from China, there is a very likelihood that these will be counterfeit products. You can legally get in trouble for selling counterfeit products and you will run into many issues such as Payment Gateways avoiding taking credit card payments, Online advertisers dropping you, and other more troublesome issues.
An example of a counterfeit product can be the purchase of a Gucci Bag and when it ships to your customer, they will know it is a counterfeit product and will denounce you all over the internet and thus shutting down your business. This happened to us, we set up a store and we got in trouble when a customer received a counterfeit product and left some nasty reviews online. We refunded the customer but our reputation was damaged. The problem with these outsourced products is that you never know what you are going to get or the quality of the product.
Nonetheless, there are very legitimate brands and products that can be found on AliExpress that are legitimate. If you decide to go with the AliExpress route, we have set up a page that can be found here with a more detailed analysis of how to use AliExpress in a legitimate way that will not hurt your Brand or online reputation.
Conclusion
If you happen to find a reliable dropshipper, it is best that you at least purchase some products for yourself so you can gauge the quality of the products. Remember, this will help you maintain your reputation as a reliable seller.
Choose Your Online Store
So hopefully you have picked a Niche and found a way to source your products, what is next? Well it is time to build your Online Store and here are some low cost options you might want to consider.
- Shopify
We have used Shopify from the very beginning with all the products we have used and it is extremely smooth, fast, quickly to set up, and relatively cheap. Aside that, Shopify integrates many third party applications that you will most likely need to connect with your inventory. You can get it for a merely $29 USD a month, which is a bargain when you consider everything that comes with it. Lastly, if you are not seeing any success, you can close your store and there is no contract to tie you down. - WooCommerce
This is the second best option we believe there is, in terms of price and customization. The only drawback is that unlike Shopify, you have to do much of the set up yourself. This means you will have to set up your SSL Certificate, Set up the hosting services, domains, and other things that might be too technical. If you are familiar with these definitions, it shouldn’t be anything too hard. The biggest advantage WooCommerce has over Shopify is that you can customize your website with more freedom than Shopify. However, you must have a lot of technical knowledge.
These are the two most popular options to start an Online Store, we will cover more options in the future but so far these are the options we have worked with and we can provide the best information about these two.
What about Amazon?
We are not going to discuss Amazon because we have decided to stay away from it for two reasons. Amazon has the customers and relatively easy set up, but the drawback is that they have too much leverage over you. This means they can shut down your store for any small mistake you make. It will be also be way more competitive since it is a market and you are not going to be the only person selling cell phone cases. We don’t believe Amazon can be bad and you can probably make very good money on it, but we are focusing strictly on independent Online Stores.
Picking a Domain Name
Once you have decided which service to use, it is time to link your Domain Name to your Online Store. If you choose the Shopify option, it should be very straightforward. For WordPress, you might need to do a bit of technicality but it shouldn’t be too difficult. We are not going to focus on the technical aspects of how to set up your Online Store since this is something you should be learning on your own. Nonetheless, you can visit our Resources page for more information.
What we are definitely going to focus on is the name you should be buying for the Domain Name. This is extremely important! For example, take our website’s domain name. It defines what the website is in two phrases that are commonly known, the 101 gives you the idea that it is for beginners. It’s only drawback is that it might be a bit too long.
If you are focusing on a specific niche, make sure you pick a Domain Name that has the niche or product’s name on it. This is going to be very important and we recommend choosing an ending in .com since it is more common than .co, .info, .store, etc. We only recommend choosing a .com ending but it won’t make or break your business! So feel free to use what you think will work. Lastly, remember to represent authority so choose a good combination of words.
The Essentials
Here is a list of essential items you should have added to your store:
- Google Analytics: This will help you track your customers’ data and see how they use your website. It is very important you set this up.
- Recording Application: There are ton of recording applications that can help you see where and how people browse your website’s pages. You can visit our Resources page to see the list of recording apps we recommend.
- Submitting Your Sitemap to Google: This can help you show up on Google’s search engine organically. If you have great content and people are reading it enough you won’t have to worry about spending money on advertising.
- Have a professional review your site: You should have a professional look at your site just to make sure it is set up properly so you can avoid problems in the future and increase the reputation of your site. We can have a look at your page for a fee, please visit our Contact page for more information.
- Set up a Facebook Page: Even if you don’t like social media, by having a Facebook page you can run remarketing campaigns using your Facebook Page. You can make a lot of sales through this by collecting your customer’s Pixels.
- Set up a Google Merchant & Adword Account: If you are going to be advertising through these channels, it is important you register with both Google Merchant & Adword.
Once you are set up, make sure you follow our Branding guidelines in order to create a more professional outlook to your potential customers so they can trust your brand.
Advertising
Hopefully you followed and have taken care of everything above. Your domain name is great, your webstore is set up, your branding is on point, and hopefully you have set up Facebook Pages, Google Merchant & Adword accounts. Now it is time to set up your Ads.
Google Adword & Bing Adwords are the most popular choices to get your products out there. Advertising itself on these two platforms is a whole section on its own. This is the breakdown of things that you must do in order to buid your advertising:
– Set up a Google or Bing Merchant’s Account.
– Provide a Feed (A list of products with vital information) either via an app through your website or by creating an excel spreadsheet.
– Create a Google or Bing Adword account and link up your Merchant’s account.
– Create your first Shopping or Text Campaigns.
– Monitor your ads and configure their bids.
Hopefully, you have set up your Facebook Pixels in your website. For more information on Pixels, please visit our Pixel page. Once you have captured enough pixel data from the people visiting your website, then you can start creating Remarketing campaigns on Facebook. These campaigns will retarget the people that visited your website through the Google or Bing Ad Campaigns you created. This is a very vital part of the advertising part since your products will be shown again to the people that already visited your site and will be more likely to make a purchase.
This concludes the basic tutorial on how to get an online store up and running. It might not seem like it is a lot but you will encounter many roadblocks along the way. The best way is to tackle each roadblock that will take you to the next step on the list. It also doesn’t end when you start to get sales, you must maintain very good relationships with your customers. Building an email list is the ultimate goal since you won’t have to pay as much for advertising.