A Great Beginner’s Guide to eCommerce
If you’re interested in starting your own business, you’ve likely looked into eCommerce at least once before. eCommerce can sometimes sound complicated, but really, it’s a catch-all term for any type of online store or storefront that offers products and services over the internet. There are all types of eCommerce stores and tons of different variations on simple designs and setups.
If eCommerce is what you’re looking to get into, look no further: this beginner’s guide to eCommerce will explain all of the basic (but important) information that you need in order to get started. Let’s jump right in!
How to Get Started with eCommerce
There are a few things that you need when beginning even a simple, basic eCommerce store. It all depends on what you’re selling, but generally, you need a few things to already be in place.
You need to have a product or a service – and it needs to be a good one, of course – that people are willing to pay for. This guide is assuming you already have basic business knowledge and understand how to price something, how to run basic number crunching and look at what your potential profit could be, etc.
Then you need a place to sell it (website, storefront like Amazon, Etsy, etc), along with a way to process payments. A reliable stream of steady customers, from marketing or some other source, is also helpful and probably necessary.
What Are You Selling? (Product, Service, etc)
There are thousands of different eCommerce stores. Are you selling cookies online? Other types of food delivery? T-shirts? Books? Are you selling services? Whatever your business idea is, or whatever you do, you need to figure out a way to commodify it fairly for the customer and make it easily understandable and digestible.
This means that if your service or product is too complicated, it could harm the start of your eCommerce business. If you have a dream of selling super specialized crazy medical equipment, for example – for a disease a family member once had – it might be wise to make certain there’s an audience for your product before you spend massive amounts of time and money on a site or even employees, along with various other fees associated with product development, or licensing fees, etc.
That example is very specific, but this goes for any kind of store or business you’re trying to open. If you wanted to do food delivery or healthy meal prep, you’re in for a hard ride, because trying to break into a niche that’s already extremely competitifve will be difficult.
Do some real preparation on this part before you move on to other sections.
Where Are You Selling It? (Site, Major Storefront, Amazon, Etsy…)
Once you’ve got your e-books made, cookies baked, and service ready to sell, you need a place to hawk your stuff. We’re not in super old times anymore, though, so you can’t just produce something and sell it on the street. The Internet is like the digital street, but you’ll likely still need a specific place to make the magic happen.
Your own website is often the best way to go, but depending on what you’re selling, you don’t need it. If you’re interested in selling e-books, for example, doing it on Amazon would likely be best, since they own a supermajority of the online e-book market. If what you’re doing works better with its own site, rather than creating a brand and storefront on a huge monopoly website, then invest the time and money into a good site.
Make sure users enjoy the site and that it’s well-made. You want a fast, reliable, clean, attractive website to entice and draw in customers. Especially online, where customers always have other options immediately available to them, appearance can be everything.
How Are You Processing Payments?
Payment processing is something that has to be considered when looking into eCommerce. You want to be certain that you have a reliable way to take people’s payments – as reliable and flexible as possible. It would be quite poor business management to lose sales purely because you were unable to take a common payment method.
We won’t spend too much time on this section, but just know that you’ll likely want a shopping cart feature if you have your own website, and you’ll also want to be able to take payments in as many ways as possible. Look into various forms of processing such as Stripe, Paypal, and others. Make sure you can take at least credit cards and debit cards – but if you can, be able to take almost any kind of payment.
Look into credit card processing companies for more assistance: for affordable prices, these businesses process payments for you. Find one in your industry and hire them.
How Are You Getting Customers? (Marketing)
Your eCommerce business is nothing if customers aren’t buying your product. Finding a source of customers is important for your business to be able to thrive. Consider what kind of people would want to buy your product. Are you selling something that college students need in particular? Does your business cater to seniors? Do middle-age workers benefit most? Or is maybe, instead, children who are most interested in your product?
You should determine who your ideal target audience for your product is – and how you can best try to market to them. One strategy for one particular group or age won’t be nearly effective as another marketing strategy. This area may take significant amounts of money and effort to get just right.
How Do They Get the Product? (Shipping)
Finally, one last core question you should be able to answer is how you’re handling shipping. There’s a few different ways to do this, but whatever you do, don’t take care of the shipping yourself unless you want to create a headache. You’d be driving packages to post offices all the time forever. Instead, consider which third party shipping option you’d like to use.
One great option is dropshipping and fulfillment shipping, which works well for eCommerce stores. This leaves you with almost no work to do on the shipping end, but makes certain that the customer gets the best experience possible.
Make sure that you’re ready to set up these essential, important functions before you pull the trigger on your eCommerce business. Otherwise, your merchandise – or services – may remain unsold, and your revenue will not be as much as you’d expect it to be. Execute a smart business plan, however, and an eCommerce business plan could be the best thing for you.