How to start online eCommerce store: eCommerce store complete guide

By Sarah Taylor

Want to build an online store? This eBook is a complete guide for you to start.

To begin, you have to understand the demand for your product or service so you can build your website on that product. This book kicks off with some main topics that will help you set your audience and create your products. This e-book will assist you to establish a payment processor with PayPal or other payment processors, ship orders, collect taxes, and securing sensitive data. Secondly, get bonus tips on selling your new website, bringing and engaging customers and building the value of the order.

Topics include:
1-Defining your audience
2-Organizing your products
3-Marketing your online web store
4-Increasing order value
5-Getting paid
6-Checking out with PayPal or Stripe
7-Handling and shipping orders
8-Handling tax
9-Protecting sensitive data

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Taylor
• Release date: Dec 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386025450

Sarah Taylor

Sarah Taylor has a BA in History and an MSLS. She enjoys reading and writing about history, playing piano, and going on park walks with her dog. You may find her at https://beautifuldreamerdotcom.wordpress.com and Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21550493.Sarah_Taylor.

Book preview

Introduction

In this eBook, l will look at everything that goes into an e-commerce website. I will start by explaining to you how to define your audience and create a website for particular customers. Then I will explain to you how to get customers to your site. I will discuss different approaches for bringing new customers and retaining repeat customers. There are many online payment processors. I will show various programs and payment gateways so you can see how to accept online payments using services like Stripe and PayPal. I will be covering all of these features plus plenty of other means and techniques, like WordPress e-commerce store, third party plugins, selling on Amazon, and so much more.

Choosing product to sell

In the last several years, E-commerce has enriched a very exciting space. Older E-commerce platforms were complicated, expensive or both.  Nowadays, you can set up an E-commerce store in a just a few hours and sell just about anything.

There aren't any right answers when it comes to E-commerce. Everyone is in a different situation and needs to make the best choice for themselves. The first task you need to do is pick an area of interest. This can be anything you want to look into. It could be a hobby, like running, games, sewing. It could be a passion of yours. Or it could be an industry, like home automation. Once you pick an area of interest, you want to explore the different ways you can sell products. There are two very broad types of products, physical and digital. eCommerce businesses are difficult to get started because you need some capital to make your initial order.

On the plus side, they're much easier to scale because it doesn't take much time to get more products, you simple re-invest your capital. A pretty popular option that has been getting a lot of attention on blogs and pod casts is drop-shipping. Drop-shipping is where you take orders on your site and send that information to the manufacturer or wholesaler, and they send the products to the customer. This option doesn't require a huge investment and it usually requires very little interaction with a customer. If you can find a drop-shipper for products that you want to carry, this is an excellent place for a business owner to start.

The downside of drop-shipping and wholesaling is that you will definitely have to do marketing to separate your store from the competition to sell the product. Another option is to manufacture products. You can contact a manufacturer and work with them to create products which you'll sell directly to the customer. Some business' that start out making products by hand, will later move to manufacturing. This can take quite a bit of time, effort and money to set up. You should make sure your products will sell before ordering a thousand units. We'll look at ways to validate that you'll be able to sell your products before placing a big order in a future lesson.

So far, we've only really touched on physical products, but that's obviously not the only things you can sell. You can also sell virtual products that don't take any space. These could be books, software, or membership to a website. Virtual products can take a while to create, but one they're ready to sell, they can be sold over and over again with very little upkeep. You can publish your own Ebook on Amazon and you can even create a physical copy via Create Space. Or, you can sell your book on your own website. Some authors, like Nathan Barry , have fine-tuned this process and sell their books with bonus material and charge a premium.

If you are a trusted voice in an industry, you can use your reputation to sell products. With affiliate marketing, you recommend a product, and when someone buys it, you get a commission. You have to bring traffic to your