If current crisis showed one thing in the business aspect of any type of business that can have this as an option, is that it is good to have a online store. It doesn’t matter if you are small owner or a big business, online ordering and selling became the norm and will stay long after this Covid-19 crisis is over. Those who were used to online shopping before, quaickly adapted but many who didn’t use online stores had to get familiar with it for the first time and probably going to keep them using in future. And that spike in online traffic is a sign for all businesses to get serious and invest in the online store, not just website.

So now is a great time to talk about the process of building an ecommerce website from early research to what you need to make things happen even if you already have a website.

Building an ecommerce website from scratch

If you know already what you want to sell and what you want your ecommerce business to be called than lets start from the begining.

Step 1: Make sure your domain is available

Now, what you need to do is check if your desired domain name is available. You can check that on websites like Godaddy.com. If the domain you want is available, great if not, browse the recommendations and select one that fits best. But if you are planning to use some paid website builder like Shopify, Squarespace or WordPress.com you can use their domain buying service which makes all process a little easier.

Step 2: Check out the search volume for products you want to sell

Use tools like WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool to see how often consumers are using Google and Bing to search for products that you are going to sell. That of course is only if you are going to rely on Search engine optimization for consumers to find you. Search volume is not relevant if you are going to use paid adverts.

Step 3: Figure out how you’re going to grow

Now it’s all about putting together an online marketing strategy. If you have the online store now, it is a waste to just leave it for people to find it when you can push it in front of them. There are two methods, Organic search marketing also know as SEO, it’s a free but slow process and it focuses to drive you store and the keywords of the products to the first page of Google (second page drops by 90% of traffic) to get good traffic to your website. Benefits of SEO advertising is free, the shoppers find you and it generates a lot of visits.

Second method is Paid search advertising. Done right, organic search marketing will get your ecommerce website in front of high-quality prospects and attract a lot of traffic. But here’s the problem, that is a long, labor-intensive process. With paid search advertising, commonly known as PPC or pay per click, you can get your message in front of those high-quality prospects quickly. But it will cost you since in difference with SEO, all those product keywords you want to people to look for, now you will pay to send your products in front of people who would be interested in those keywords. Benefits of PPC is that it drives results quickly, attracts high quality prospects and it scales easily to target more people.

Under paid strategies falls also Paid social media advertising. Having your ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Because these platforms have access to an enormous amount of user data, they enable their advertisers to target prospects with incredible precision. Benefits of social media ads is that you can reach far more people with very precise targeting and ads usually cost less than Google ads.

Step 4: Build your ecommerce website

Last step when you did a research on other aspects of your online business is to actually make a ecommerce website. Best way is to use some of the paid options like Shopify, Squerespace or WordPress WooCommerce since they already come with done solutions for many things your website needs to do, like themes, plugins, card processing.

Ecommerce can seem little overwhelming, so it’s best to make a plan what you want from your online business and hire someone to build you well functioned online store since you will save a lot of time and nerves.

So you decided to build a webshop on your website but you don’t know where to start. Setting up a new eCommerce website might seem like hard task to do yourself if you never crossed path with it and you would be right, it can be a little overwhelming, but here are some tips how to maybe make the process just a little be easier.

The problem with eCommerce websites is that you have to make sure that website is set up correctly before you go live with it. While for example, if you wanted to set up a standard website or a blog, you could have the website live quicker, and then make small enhancements to it while you slowly building it up. An eCommerce website needs the have process of buying 100% working for it to even consider going live.

Use a Subdomain for the Ecommerce Website

Although it seems the sensible thing to make your webshop on yourdomain.com/shop, it might actually make your main websites have a few problems if you decide to go down that path.

For one, making any website an eCommerce website takes a lot of WordPress plugins to work. This is a lot of extra code that is added to the website, increasing the websites requests and general loading time of it and make your website respond time affect others parts of website and user experience that are essential for your work.

Instead, it’s much better to make a subdomain like shop.yourdomain.com and start a new WordPress website which would be entirely dedicated to just eCommerce.

Use Woocommerce if you are using WordPress

There are many different ways you can turn a website into an eCommerce website. If you are using wordpress platform the best way is to go with Woocommerce.

Woocommerce is free and the most popular way to turn a WordPress website into a shop. It comes with a load of compatible platforms, and has a range of free plugins to help your shop have the right functionality for what you need. The problem might be for a beginner to set that all up, so if you are struggling consider to pay someone with experience to set it up for you.

Read up on Taxes

Selling products and services online might sound like a simple concept. You provide something to your visitors, they buy it on your website and you make profit. However, it’s not that simple after all. When you sell anything online, it is important to know what legislation and taxes you might have to take into consideration, after all the moment you are thinking about webshop you should consider becoming a proper business with taxes to pay.

Dropshipping Works Best

Dropshipping is a way of selling online where you don’t have to worry about your stock since it all on the side of the manufacturer and your job is just marketing and selling the products. When you sell the product the manufacturer will send the product to the address they got from you, take their money cut and give you rest depending on the price you set up.  This saves a lot of time in the long run, but be careful what dropshipping company you choose to go with. Today most used dropshipping company is Aliexpress due to high number of products available and easy to use.