So You Want to Open an Online Store?

So You Want to Open an Online Store?

So, you want to open an online store but you’re not sure how to do it? That’s okay because the process is like opening a bricks-and-mortar store. It’s not as complicated as you may think. Of course, some things are different. But the process is the same. Thinking about your online store as if it was a store in a mall makes it easier to plan the stages and get through them.

Find the Premises

The first thing you need to do when opening a bricks-and-mortar store is to find the right premises. You need:

·         A location that has the potential to bring you customers

·         A shop that is big enough to display everything you are going to sell;

·         And a storeroom to keep your excess stock.

In the online world, this is your website hosting. Hosting is the servers that store your website files. You need a hosting package that is big enough and fast enough for the amount of traffic that you expect to get to your store.

Display Shelves and Stock Control System

Once you have your premises (your website hosting) you’ll need display shelves for your customer areas, a storage system for your storeroom, and a software program to manage your stock and process orders.

You call this a cart in the online world. Sometimes your cart is your website, while in other situations you add a cart to your existing website. The cart displays the items you have to sell and offers your users the opportunity to buy. It helps you process orders and it manages stock levels.

There are a number of carts to choose from depending on the type of store you want to open. Popular examples include:

• Ecwid – an ecommerce plugin for your existing website or blog, also works with Facebook.
• Shopsite – easy to set up and use cart for online stores of varying sizes
• Woocommerce – for online stores built using WordPress
• Opencart – modern looking, flexible and suitable for stores of any size

These examples are low-cost and for many shops are free to use. In fact this applies to most of the cart options that are available. The only time you should spend money is if you need specific functionality that is different from the norm.

Method of Taking Payment

In a bricks-and-mortar store you might take cash payments or card payments. If you take cards you need a point-of-sale terminal. This takes payments from your customers’ cards and puts the money into your bank account.

When you are building an online store this is called a payment gateway. If you have bought anything online you will have used them to make payments. One of the most common is Paypal – if you’ve made purchases on Ebay you will probably have made the payment through Paypal.

You have a range to choose from but there are some things to consider:

• Will your customers trust it? Often this is why many online stores stick with the big and well-known payment gateways.
• What are the charges? Most payment gateways charge you a percentage of every transaction so you will want to minimize this.
• Does it offer your customers a user-friendly experience?

Once you have decided on your hosting, platform, cart and payment gateway – and you have your stock – you are ready to open your online store. There is one final stage of the process though.

Marketing

Promoting an online store is not really any different to promoting a bricks-and-mortar store. You need to tell as many people as possible about it – through as many channels as you can. That means you shouldn’t rely on a single source of traffic (particularly search engines – you need traffic from other sources too). And you should not focus all of your efforts on online marketing only. Just because it is an online store doesn’t mean it won’t benefit from offline marketing.

Now that your store is open, your success depends on the same things that determine the success of offline stores – competitive prices, good customer service, and getting customers through the door.