The Complete Guide That Makes Starting an Ecommerce Business Simple

Are you a burgeoning internet entrepreneur?

Starting your own eCommerce business is a fantastic way to make some side cash, or if you’re dedicated enough, make a lasting career doing what you love. There are things about eCommerce that make it easier to get up and running than a traditional business, and things that make it a bit more difficult. If you’re going to make it a true success, then you’re going to have to start planning.

The Complete Guide That Makes Starting an Ecommerce Business Simple

In this post, we’re going to give you the complete guide that makes starting an eCommerce business simple. Even if you’ve got virtually no business experience or savvy, keep reading and we’ll set you up with the knowledge and skills to get everything up and running without much hassle.

• Perform Market Research to Find Your Niche

Before you give your new company a name and create all of your social media accounts, you need to figure out what it is that you’re going to do. Starting any small business without performing market research is going to end in failure because you need to identify where your niche is going to be and who the audience is for it.

Every business starts with an idea, whether vague or concrete. Take your business idea and see if there are already similar companies operating in your area. If so, this should signal the need to adapt your vision to something that isn’t going to get squashed by the established competition within weeks or months.

This isn’t to say that you need to switch ideas completely. Let’s say you wanted to open up an online business to sell hand-embroidered hats out of your home, but you quickly see that there’s a person, two blocks over, doing the exact same thing. You can easily adapt that idea to be hand-embroidered shirts or any other type of clothing.

It’s all about coming up with an original idea, or failing that, identifying and exploiting a hole in an already existing market. This simply takes a few hours, days, or weeks of thorough market research to figure out what’s going on in your niche.

• Come Up With a Good Name and Write a Business Plan

Having done a good amount of research, you can start formulating more concrete plans for your new eCommerce business. The first thing you’ll want to do here is come up with a catchy name for your business. Make a long list of names and slowly whittle away at it until you’ve got the one that really sticks with you – when you’ve got a name, you’ve got a business.

Next, it’s time to write your business plan. Any small business owner will be able to tell you how important these are, but if you don’t know, a business plan is a written list (or plan) detailing every aspect that goes into opening your business – an overview, sales plans, marketing plans, operating plans, action plans, and financial plans, among other things.

You can find business plan templates online to get you started. This is incredibly important because it gives you something to refer back to as you’re navigating the launch of your eCommerce business. Business plans aren’t meant to be set in stone, so you can alter things as you go, but you should put a lot of thought into laying out everything you need to do to get things up and running.

• Register Your EIN and Licenses/Permits

Even though you’re entering the eCommerce industry, you still need to abide by the normal rules that every small business owner abides by. Since you’ll be making money from your business, you should get yourself an employer identification number (EIN) to help keep your business and personal finances separate.

It’s free through the IRS and you can quickly do it online. The EIN is also important for filing taxes for your business, which, if everything goes well, you’ll be doing the year after you launch.

• Get Your Site Up and Running

Here’s where eCommerce business ownership and regular small business ownership part ways. With a regular business, you’d think about what materials you need and where to get your brick and mortar set up, but with eCommerce, it’s all about setting up the best possible website and online store to shell out your products and/or services.

You have to treat your website as you would your physical storefront – this is the first thing people are going to see when they come to your business, so it needs to look the part. It should be attractive, easily navigable, and quick-loading.

When it comes to an eCommerce platform, there are dozens to choose from. Most of them are extremely customizable, so you can achieve a cohesive look with the branding on your site and social media accounts. You’ll need to do some thorough research into each one and make a list of your needs so you can figure out which one is best for your business.

• Finding Those First Customers

Getting your eCommerce business set up is one thing, but it’s all going to be pointless if you can’t attract customers. You’re going to have to do considerable amounts of marketing to get things off the ground, which you can do on your own or with a hired-gun digital marketing service.

The first thing you should do is obtain accounts on all of the social media platforms that you plan to use to promote the business. Create business accounts for all of them and start following friends and family, as well as like-minded businesses in your area. It’s going to take time, but with the right branding methods and engagement, you can build up a small audience that could become a much larger one depending on how much time you put in.

Those first customers are the hardest to get, so you’ll need to hustle and learn as much as you can about digital marketing. Once you’ve got a few onboard, you can get really in-depth with targeted social media, phone, and email ads, so look here for more information.

• Have Patience with your eCommerce Business

Now that you know how to get an eCommerce business up and running, you can take the first steps and start doing market research. It takes time and dedication, but there’s no reason that you can’t make your eCommerce idea a real moneymaker in the long run. Use these tips and get on the path to success today.

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