Create Your Own Online Store An In-Depth Guide for Beginners

Why Start Online Stores of Your Own?

That’s a fair question when you consider the many, many places online where people can buy things: Amazon Marketplace, eBay, and Etsy all offer platforms where anyone can sell products online. And that might not be a bad idea for starters, either: You can use their visitor numbers to your own advantage without investing into advertising.

There is a problem, though: Depending on the products you’re selling, the brokerage fees you have to pay the platform may be anywhere from 5% to 20%, and over time, that’s a lot of money. You also don’t have access to customer data, so you can’t invest into the customer relationship afterwards (e.g. through an email newsletter).

By running your own online store, such fees will no longer be an issue for you. Instead, you have to keep payment provider and hosting costs (e.g. PayPal) in mind. But ultimately, this will cost you less than staying on a marketplace platform. Obviously, you can try and run both strategies at once and try and shift customers from the platform to your own store over time.

In the long run, a website and starting an online store of your own are, by far, the best way of creating brand recognition and winning over steady customers.

Finding the Best Products Niches

If you aren’t quite sure about what to sell, there are plenty of different ways of finding interesting niche markets.

The easiest option will always be to start off by focusing on an area you are already familiar with. Perhaps flying drones is your hobby? Maybe you have a passion for fine coffee? Or you might be a fan of retro headphones?

In all of these cases, there are small, very specific niches just waiting to be tapped into alongside the major markets. If we take coffee as an example, we might be looking at portable espresso machines or something along those lines. The key is to make sure that there are enough people showing an interest while ensuring that there are relatively few existing providers.

Researching product demand

You can look for these kinds of niche markets, for example, using Google Keyword Planner, KWFinder, Google Trends, or, best of all, Ahrefs. That way you can find out how many times in a month people are searching on Google for a particular keyword and/or product. Not to mention that all the aforementioned keyword tools generate related keywords that you may not have thought of otherwise.

The screenshot shows an Ahrefs analysis of the keyword “portable coffee maker” as an example. You can see that there are around 2700 searches on Google every month in the USA. Ahrefs is a practical tool in that it also works out how difficult it would be to rank in the top ten on Google for a certain keyword (on a scale of 0 to 100). As you can see, this would apparently not be too tricky in this example.

And, of course, you also have the option of building up demand yourself. So if you want to sell a product that doesn’t really get a lot of hits on Google, you can also choose to advertise on other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. If you want to go down this route, though, you have to make sure that the product lends itself well to social media and can be relied upon to incite impulse buys.

You also might consider selling digital downloads like graphic design files, website templates or ebooks.

Dropshipping

The idea of dropshipping is simple: you sell the product via your online store and a third-party provider will take care of handling the order, shipping and returns (e.g. AliExpress and FBA - Fulfillment by Amazon).

Shopify is a great platform if you are planning on dropshipping, the DSers app comes with thousands of products and integrates with AliExpress. And two good solutions for dropshipping with WordPress are WooCommerce and the AliDropship plugin (read review).

What’s your USP?

Once you’ve come up with an idea for a potential product, it is absolutely essential that you give some thought to the USP (unique selling proposition). In other words, why exactly should customers buy from you? Here are a few examples:

• You are the only supplier of a particular product (such as a T-shirt with a completely unique design).
• You are always top of the Google search rankings and therefore attract an extremely high number of visitors.
• You are a pro when it comes to paid advertising (e.g., Google Ads and advertising on Facebook), which enables you to reach your specific target audience effectively.
• The sales channel: You are the only supplier of a product in the USA.
• You have superiority when it comes to positioning: You have a better understanding of your customers’ pain point, meaning you can describe your product in such a way that customers feel more inclined to buy from you.

Next up, we are going to be looking at a range of ecommerce platforms you can use to create your very own online store.

The Online Store System Requirements Checklist

Complexity and budget:

This is a fundamental decision. How much time, and what amount of resources are you willing to put into this project? We put the providers into three categories:

There are some differences here: A simple shop like the one offered by Wix is easy to set up in no time. Anyone who knows their way around the Internet should be able to figure out how the interface works in just a few hours. Often times, a weekend is plenty sufficient to get an online store up and running. For a small store with a handful of products, you won’t need more than the Wix Business Basic plan for $27 CA per month.

The shop systems of medium complexity offer a much wider array of features. Integration and payment methods, however useful, require a steeper learning curve and a higher budget, though. Unlike the simpler systems, these will allow you to manage much larger stores, and you have better marketing options, too (such as cross-selling, price search engines, etc.). Two good examples are Shopify and BigCommerce.

Complex online stores such as Prestashop or Magento in particular are a project of a completely different magnitude. Beginners without technical skills will most likely not be able to set something like this up because these open-source systems have to be installed and configured by hand. You also need web storage of your own. The less complex shop systems don’t have those requirements – the providers host the shops in their own cloud infrastructures. How long this setup procedure lasts can vary greatly, and it depends mainly on the contractors you choose and how much you want to customize the design and the code.

Some Other Shop Features You Might Find Useful:

An Overview of Various Shop Systems

Check out our guide to the best ecommerce website builders to find out more about a variety of providers. Here’s a brief introduction of the ones we thought were the most interesting to start an online store with:

Legal Requirements for Online Stores

Please note: This advice was not written by a legal professional. Please be sure and consult a lawyer.

In order to start an online store, you need to register a business. The simplest form of business is the sole proprietorship, also known as sole trader. You need to be 18 years of age to do so.

Tip: If you want to try out your online business idea, you don’t need to register a business right away. We know from experience that the bureaucracy can be a bit daunting in the beginning. So we’d recommend testing your concept first, and sitting down with a tax consultant once the first couple of orders have come in. You can then register your business after the fact.

Important legal documents for your online store

This information mainly refers to the US, however, in the sources at the end of this section you can also find further information for online stores based within the European Union.

Any US-based online store should provide the following three documents in a place that’s easily accessible (e.g. the website’s footer):

1- Privacy Policy

This document explains how the user’s data that is being collected on your website will be used. There is no general rule of how a privacy policy has to look like in the US.

However, in general, you should cover the following information:

• What information you gather and how you share it;
• The process the customer can follow to review and make changes to the information you have on them; and
• The policy’s effective date and a description of any changes since then.

Check this guide for more information.

2- Terms and Conditions

The terms and conditions are made for your customers. It explains what they must or must not do in order to use your service.

This would usually cover clauses such as:

• Definition of keywords;
• Customer rights and responsibilities;
• Proper or expected usage of the website;
• Intellectual property protection;
• Accountability for actions, behavior, and conduct;
• Payment details;
• Disclaimers and warranties;
• Exclusion or Limitation of Liability; and
• User notification upon modification of terms.

3- Returns and Refunds Policy

This is another document that can vary widely within each US state. It’s very important to have a Returns and Refunds policy as not having one will oblige you to accept full refunds within 30 days for all your customers from California, for example.

Important Tips for Product Sites

Now, here’s two basic tips for your ecommerce store content:

Product images

Presentation is key, and it must be immaculate. You can’t afford to make mistakes on this. We recommend high quality images, made either by yourself, or even a professional photographer. Here are some tips on how to make a DIY photo studio at home. Or, for an even easier way to create high-quality product images you can also use an app like Pixelcut, which removes the background from your photos automatically.

More and more online stores have also started using videos. Please don’t use the manufacturer’s standard videos! Make your own instead. If it’s not about a product you made yourself, you can use the video as a kind of review and tell your customers about the advantages and disadvantages you see with the product. That makes you trustworthy and will make your customers want to come back.

Texts

The same thing applies to texts – don’t just copy the standard descriptions offered by the manufacturer. Your customers will get bored, and so will Google! Re-using a text that Google can find elsewhere, too, will reduce your chances of a good ranking. So either write your own texts, or get a professional to write them for you.

Another good idea is having an FAQ section about your products. Use real customer inquiries and add them to the product pages. This has two big advantages: First of all, the text is completely original, and secondly, you get to use the exact language used by your customers. This can improve your Google ranking significantly.

Which brings us to the next topic:

Generating Traffic – How to Get Customers into Your Virtual Store