Getting Started with an E-commerce Business:

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By Eliana Ambrose

​Whether you’ve to make your first online business or you’re transitioning from a brick and mortar store to a digital one, here are 8 steps to help get you started. 

1. Choose your product or niche aka what are you selling? Make sure it aligns with your passion (what you want to do), expertise (you're able to explain it to somebody really well), and market demand (people want it). Make sure you aren’t getting drowned by competition by doing research in your market (your field or community of interest) to make sure you stand out from the crowd.

2. Create an online store so people can find you. There are plenty of platforms that can help you with this such as Etsy and Shopify. You can also build your own website on platforms like WordPress and Weebly. Either way, make sure that your website is attractive to the eye, user friendly, and phone friendly.

3. Sourcing and Creating (where are you getting the products from and/or how are you making them?) Make sure your products are high quality and make sure to research reliable suppliers. Try to get the most bang for your buck and find ways to save time for each step of the production process. 

4. Set Up Secure Payment Options: Set up a business account with PayPal, Stripe, or a similar service so your customers can easily and safely put money in your bank account. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials that can help you decide which company is right for you and set an account with them. 

5. Learn and practice Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Similar to step two, this makes sure you're findable online. Pretend you're trying to find yourself on the internet. Did your company come up on the first page of Google? If not, study your competition and observe what tools and SEO strategies they used. Then apply them to your own business. 

6. Develop a Marketing aka advertising Strategy: If you want people to buy your stuff you need to let them know you're available. The key to mastering the step is to master your audience; in other words you need to be a customer not a business owner. Once you step into the shoes of your target audience, you will be able to maximize your marketing strategy using social media, email, content, and influencers to drive to your website.
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7. Provide Excellent Customer Service: Chatbot and live chat are great ways to save time answering frequent asked questions (FAQs). You can also instructions that walk clients through the payment process. Make sure that customers have a way to reach you if they have any problems and you set aside some time in your day to address them and respond back to customers. 

8. Monitor and Analyze Performance: This is what's going to help improve the longevity of the company the most. Become familiar with analytic tools, and feel to review statistics on YouTube. By doing feedback analysis about your website, customer service, and marketing campaigns, you will be able to make the right adjustments to your brand and your company. 

We hope that this article provided you with a basic understanding of online business and gave you some tips on how to start. If you want a free resource on how you can get free website traffic to your website, join here.