How to Start an Online Store — Essential Checklist

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In this post, I’m going to show you how to start an online store.

But creating a store is fairly easy. Selling isn’t.

So, this post isn’t just about what ecommerce platform to use (although you will get my take on that). It spells out the key steps you need to take to get a successful online store fully off the ground.

Let’s start by discussing something very important: the products you’d like to sell.

1. Pick the right type of products to sell

This may sound obvious, but picking the ‘right’ type of products to sell is absolutely essential to the success of your store.

However, I’m not talking about ‘quality’ here – you should clearly avoid selling poor-quality goods. Instead, I’m talking about making sure that you find something unique to sell.

This is because when you set up a new online store, you are competing with a large number of hugely popular sites — eBay, Amazon, Etsy etc. — selling a vast range of products.

And generally, you are going to have a hard time selling products online if you are simply offering stuff that is already widely available on established marketplaces or stores. These sellers’ websites will usually outrank yours in search results, depriving you of arguably the most valuable source of visitors available — organic search traffic from Google.

So, to create a successful ecommerce store, you need to find a profitable niche – i.e, identify a product range that is not being sold by every online retailer out there, but for which:

For example, instead of selling a guitar that is widely available, you might consider selling an instrument that is harder to find online — but for which you know there is still strong demand (banjos or ukeleles, for example).

Finding a profitable niche typically involves performing keyword research using an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush — these tell you how many people are conducting searches for particular product names, and how hard it will be to rank in search for those queries.

To get a quick understanding of how to perform keyword research, I suggest watching our short video guide to the topic below.

Once you’ve found your niche, and decided upon the products you’re going to sell, it’s time to think about where to get your inventory from. So let’s move on to that.

2. Source your stock

There are two main options available when it comes to sourcing stock for your online store:

The advantage of the first option is that you can

(Of course, if you’re making your own products, you are the supplier!).

The disadvantage of this way of sourcing stock is that you will need to invest cash in purchasing or manufacturing goods which — if your business is not a success — you may never end up selling. You may also face costs associated with storing your products somewhere.

The second option, dropshipping, is a business model where you don’t keep what you’re selling in stock. You take the order, send it to a supplier, and they deliver the goods to your client — your store becomes, in effect, a ‘middle man.’

With dropshipping, you might never meet or have direct dealings with your supplier, or even see the majority of goods you’re selling online.

Now, the big advantage of this method of selling products is that no upfront investment is required.

The downside is that dropshipping is a very competitive activity, and you may end up selling products that are already being marketed aggressively by many existing online retailers.

Additionally, there may be some ethical concerns to consider — not all dropshipping suppliers have the best track record when it comes to how their goods are produced.

In terms of how to get started with dropshipping, most of the major ecommerce platforms — which I cover in more depth below — offer add-ons or integrations that allow you to dropship goods produced from a wide range of suppliers. Popular apps include DSers, Spocket and Syncee.

It’s fair to say that Shopify offers the most options when it comes to dropshipping, however — its app store contains a very large number of dropshipping apps by comparison to its competitors (I counted a total of 639 at time of writing).

Now, let’s take a look at the online store builders that you can use to create your ecommerce site.

3. Choose the right online store builder app for your project

Once you’ve identified your niche product and target market, and you know where you’re sourcing your stock from, it’s time to think about getting your online store off the ground.

You have two options here:

If you go down the agency / developer route, insist that they give you access to a content management system (CMS) that lets you edit your site easily and manage your store’s inventory yourself.

Having access to a CMS means that you won’t have to pay a developer on an ongoing basis to update its content or add or remove products.

(You may still need to pay them to maintain your store in other ways, though — for example to update plugins and themes, field general support queries etc.).

The other option is to use an online store builder and just create your own store.

There are lots of these to choose from – popular options include Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace and Wix. You can try any of these for free using the links below:

These store builders work by letting you select a theme for your store as a starting point, which you then customize so that it meets your branding requirements.

After that, it’s usually a simple case of adding some products, choosing a payment processor — Stripe, WorldPay, PayPal etc. — and launching your store.

Of the store builders that I have tested to date, I have found Shopify and BigCommerce to be the most obvious options for users without a lot of experience of building online stores or websites – they strike the best balance between features and user-friendliness, and they’re also good for selling in multiple currencies.

Wix isn’t quite as fully-featured as these two, but is a good all-rounder and does have the advantage of being one of the cheaper ecommerce solutions available.

In my view, Squarespace is probably the easiest to use out of the bunch, but lacks multi-currency and some other ‘power user’ selling features.

You can watch our video review of Shopify for a more in-depth overview of the pros and cons of the platform, or grab a free trial of it here.

4. Define your brand

Once you’ve got your stock and your ecommerce website builder sorted, it’s tempting to just add a bunch of products to your store and hit the publish button. But it’s worth taking a step back here and giving some serious thought to the brand you’d like to build for your new venture.

Here are a few key questions to consider:

In an ideal world, it’s good to get some professional advice on all the above from a graphic designer or brand consultant. But if you don’t have the budget for that, there are various tools that can help, including:

5. Sort out any legal or admin issues

Yes, this is the less sexy side of setting up an online store, but making sure you’re ticking all the legal and admin boxes for your business is important — doing so can save you a lot of heartache and financial difficulty down the line.

These sorts of tasks typically include:

For a full overview of the tasks that are involved in setting up a new venture successfully, I’d encourage you to read our comprehensive checklist on how to start a business.

6. Add your products

With your stock, store builder and brand all in place, and all the legalities sorted, it’s finally time to add products to your store.

It’s important to do this in a particular way however. Ensure that…

Tip: our guide to launching a Shopify store gives you a full rundown of the key things to watch out for when adding products to an ecommerce website.

7. Sort out your store operations

Getting your store operations right is an important but often overlooked aspect of creating an ecommerce website.

Our guide to building a Shopify store tells you exactly what you need to do on that front, but a quick checklist of key operational tasks that you’ll need to complete before pushing the go-live button includes:

Getting these operational aspects right will make the day-to-day aspects of running an online store much more straightforward.

8. Optimize your online store for search engines

Search engine optimization (or ‘SEO’) is absolutely vital to the success of any ecommerce project.

So, once you’ve found your niche market and designed a website to cater for it, you need to make it visible on search engines.

You can use keyword research tools again here to find out precisely what kind of phrases are used by people that are looking for the sort of products you’re selling.

You’ll then need to ensure that your site contains all these keywords in all the right places, namely:

Additionally, try to ensure that your online store is fully accessible to those with a visual impairment. Not only will this help users with disabilities access your content more easily, it can bring SEO benefits too.

The online store builders mentioned above give you a lot of control over SEO (with BigCommerce and Shopify probably coming in tops in this regard).

9. Market your store

Once you’ve built your store and covered the SEO basics for it, it’s time to market it! Let’s take a look at some of the key ways you can do that.

Content marketing

A key way to attract traffic to an ecommerce website is to blog regularly about topics related to what you are selling.

This type of activity is usually known as ‘content marketing’ — and if you don’t engage in it, you are potentially missing out on a large number of sales.

By posting high-quality, keyword-rich blog posts related to your area of business, you are doing two things:

Potential buyers of your products will much more confidence in vendors who demonstrably have a passion for their area of business.

Online advertising

In addition to employing SEO and content marketing tactics to promote your online store, you’ll usually need to create some paid ad campaigns for it too. The starting point for most people with this involves Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Google Ads

Using Google Ads involves identifying and paying for relevant search phrases that will display adverts for your store/products alongside ‘organic’ Google search results.

In my experience, Google Ads campaigns generally work well when you are selling relatively expensive products.

For example, you might be able to live with a Google Ads ‘cost per acquisition’ of $50 (i.e., where you spend $50 on ads to generate one sale) to sell a product if that product retails at $1000. But if you end up spending $50 on ads to sell an item that retails for $10…well, a different approach is clearly needed!

It’s a question of looking at your margins and trying out different keyword strategies to ensure that the cost of advertising doesn’t eat into your profit too much.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads work in a different way to Adwords: rather than paying to display your ads to people who are entering keywords into a search engine, you are paying to display your ads to people who have a;ready told Facebook what they are interested in.

For example, you could use Facebook to advertise Beatles T-shirts to people who like The Beatles; VW key rings to people who drive Volkswagens and so on. 

Facebook ads are very powerful and let you target audiences to the nth degree, but use them incorrectly and you could find ad account disabled (with serious implications for your online business). Additionally, Facebook’s recent removal of proper content moderation and fact checking on its platform may now make it less appealing to certain types of businesses.

Both issues make it important to gain a clear understanding of how Facebook ads work — and how to avoid contravening the company’s advertising policies — before you start spending money on them. Facebook’s own guide to advertising on their platform is a good starting point here.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to promote an online store — and one that can offer a particularly good ROI (return on investment).

To get going with email marketing, you’ll often need to buy a suitable marketing app (like GetResponse or Mailchimp); but that said, some online store builders (for example Shopify and Wix) include email marketing features as part of your plan.

Check out our guide to creating e-newsletters to find out how you can promote an online store in sophisticated ways using email, or read our guide to growing a mailing list for advice on how to generate leads for your store.