1. Pick a Niche Market and Define Your Target Audience
The first step in beginning an online store is determining the market you want your focus to serve. Many new business owners do not focus on profitability, searchability, and passion/innovation.
Profitability is important because as a business owner, you want to see a return on your investment and build a profitable online store that can maintain revenue. To ensure a profitable online store continue to invest time and resources into adjusting manufacturing costs or purchasing wholesale; you don’t want your product to cost too much to make to where you have to increase the price point.
Searchability is essential because the best e-commerce stores stock the products that remain in demand for consumers and their search history. SEO tools can ensure your store is accessible to consumers and the products they search for.
Passion and Innovation are just how it sounds, make sure the store you are opening is something you will continuously want to work on even if times get tough. You want consumers to enjoy your online store because you’re an expert in a service or product.
2. Choose Your Product Line
After determining your niche and target audience, it’s important to decide on the product or service you want to focus on. This will be the hardest part of starting your store because you want to make sure that the product or service you are selling is not too expensive to manufacture or that the consumer base is large enough to sustain profit. It is also important to think about resources you’ll need for your store such as store or shipping. Choosing a popular product is a good idea but yours needs to differentiate from others to ensure you can improve upon the existing product.
3. Create Your Brand Name and Assets
Once you have landed on a product or service to sell the next step is to consider a brand name that will reflect the mission statement, values, assets, and goals of your company as well as a logo that incorporates the same. Searching for available domains is important to ensure your name has not been taken and can be owned by you.
4. Register Your Business
For an online store, processing payments on the internet is essential. For this, you will need an employer identification number (EIN) which entails registering your store as a business in your state. Many small businesses register as a limited liability corporation (LLC) which helps to protect your personal assets should your company get sued. Refering to your state’s Secretary of State for more information is a helpful tip that will allow you to follow the process step by step.
https://www.ohiosos.gov/businesses/
5. Choose an E-Commerce Platform and Build Your Website
The platform you choose will be where you build and manage your store, there are plenty of platforms such as Shopify and Square that are great to use and have their own set of features that can benefit a business.
After deciding on the platform you want to use, the next step is to create an account and begin building your online store. Make sure you customize your homepage and select a template that best fits the look of your company.
6. Optimize Your Site and Store
Once you have completed setting up your store to the way you feel works best for you it is important to optimize it for search engines to increase its visibility. Things such as title tags, meta descriptions, H tags, and images will all help the optimization process run smoothly.
7. Marketing
After you feel like everything is completed to the full extent of your vision it is time to begin marketing and sharing your store with potential consumers. Building a business through SEO is important for a long-term goal and will help to bring in traffic. Several ways to promote your store include word-of-mouth, loyalty programs, content marketing, working with influencers, online advertising, and social media profiles.
Leah Fugate/ March 9, 2024