How to Make an Online Store — the 6 Key Steps to Starting a Successful Ecommerce Business

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

BUT…

Creating an online store is fairly easy. Selling isn’t.

So, this post isn’t just about what ecommerce platform to use. It also spells out the 6 key steps you need to take to get a successful online store fully off the ground.

There are two ways to use this resource — you can either watch our video about how to make an online store, below, or read the whole post (which contains more detail on doing so).

Let’s kick things off by discussing something very important: your products.

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 the uniqueness of your products.

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

And generally, you are going to have a tough time selling products if you are simply offering stuff that is already widely available on those kinds of sites.

So, to create a successful ecommerce store, you need to find a niche – identify a product range that is not being sold by every online retailer out there, but for which there is enough demand to sustain an online business.

For example, instead of selling a guitar that is widely available on Amazon, you might consider selling an instrument that is harder to find online — but for which you know there is strong demand.

Now, finding a niche typically involves performing keyword research.

Let’s take a look at how to do that.

Using keyword research to help you find your niche

The simplest way to identify a niche is to use a keyword research tool (like Semrush or Ahrefs) to find niche markets and see what sort of competition is operating in them.

Keyword research tools allow you to find out how many searches per month are performed for particular phrases (or products), and how hard it will be to rank highly for them.

Let’s say you’re thinking of creating an online store to sell musical instruments, and you’re wondering what type of instrument you should focus on.

By using a keyword research tool, you’d learn that there are 8,500 searches per month for the search term ‘buy guitar’ and only 1,300 for ‘buy banjo.’

This might make you think “hey, there’s a much bigger market for guitars, so I’m going to sell guitars,” but stop right there — think of the additional number of guitar sellers you will be competing with!

The data from the keyword tool indicates that banjos are definitely much more of a ‘niche’ product — but one with a decent enough number of people interested in buying them every month.

The question is whether there are already a lot of retailers dominating the search results for this product — people might have beaten you to this niche.

To find out, you need to look at ‘keyword difficulty.’ This is a score given — in one format or another — by keyword research tools.

The lower the keyword difficulty score, the easier it will be to appear in searches for that product name — and thus generate sales.

As the screengrab above shows, it should actually be pretty easy to rank for the ‘buy banjo’ phrase.

So, the trick is generally to find products for which there is

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.

Which brings us onto the next step — sourcing stock.

2. Source your stock

There are two main options available when it comes to sourcing stock: 

The advantage of the first option is that you can

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

The disadvantage of this option is that you will need to invest cash in purchasing 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 fulfilment method 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, and you might never see the majority of goods you’re selling online. The big advantage of this approach is that no upfront investment is required.

But 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 and where their goods are produced.

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 for Shopify and Spocket for BigCommerce.

It’s probably fair to say that Shopify offers the most options when it comes to dropshipping, however — simply because its app store is extremely large by comparison to its competitors, and it is stocked with a very large number of dropshipping apps (over 440 at time of writing).

Print on demand (POD) is a good way to get started with dropshipping. A POD service lets let you create products based on your own designs — clothing, wall art, prints etc. — and, when an order for one of these products is received via your online store, it is manufactured (printed) and shipped to your customer.

Popular print-on-demand services include Printful, Printify and SPOD (you can learn more about Printful in our review of the platform).

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 for your project

Once you’ve identified your niche product and 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 route, make sure that your developers to give you access to a content management system (CMS) that lets you edit your site easily and manage your store’s inventory yourself.

This means that after your store has been built, 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, however — 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 platforms to choose from – popular options include Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace and Wix.

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 straightforward ecommerce platforms 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 below for more in-depth overview of the pros and cons of the platform, or grab a free trial of it here.

And we have a full video review of BigCommerce below too.

The good news is that all these solutions offer free trials and support to help you get going – just follow the links below to access them:

What if I’ve already got a website?

If you already have a website (for example, a WordPress site) and want to add an ecommerce store to it, a ‘plugin’ store builder like Ecwid can be a good solution.

Ecwid lets you create an online store by adding a snippet of code — a ‘widget’ — to an existing site. Once added, users will see a fully-functional online store appear on that website.

(You can also add the Ecwid widget to any other online presence that facilitates the addition of HTML code — social media pages, blog posts etc.).

Check out our Ecwid review and our Ecwid vs Shopify comparison for more information about this tool.

4. 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 your online store to cater for it, you need to make it visible on search engines.

You can use keyword research tools like Semrush again here to find out exactly what kind of searches are performed for your type of product, and ensure that your site contains all these keywords in all the right places, namely:

Additionally, make sure 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). If you opt for one of those products, make use of this functionality!

5. Drive traffic to your store via blogging

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 basically known as ‘inbound marketing’ — and if you don’t engage in it, you are potentially missing out on a huge 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 have greater confidence in vendors who clearly have a passion for, and understanding of, all things relating to their goods.

6. Use online ads to promote your store

If you have the budget, it’s definitely worth running some ecommerce ads to promote your online store’s products and put them in front of online shoppers. 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 – let’s say a TV – retails at $1000; but if you end up spending $50 on ads to sell one CD that retails at $10…well, a different approach might be needed.

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

But, used well, Adwords can help you sell a lot of products.

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 told Facebook what they are interested in.

For example, using Facebook ads you could advertize 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).

Accordingly, it’s worth getting a full 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.

Free trials of ecommerce platforms

Or…just buy an existing online store!

If all the above sounds a little like hard work, the other option is to buy an online store that’s already generating a profit.

This is actually easier to do than you might think, thanks to services like Empire Flippers, which allow you to browse online businesses that have been vetted by experts before being listed for sale (meaning you can buy them in relevant confidence).

For more information on how to do this, visit the Empire Flippers website.

Did you know? This article is now available in French. Check out our “Comment créer une boutique en ligne en 6 étapes” post on the Style Factory France website.