Andrew Youderian
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July 18, 2012
Once you’ve made the decision to make an online store, the process of launching it can be confusing and overwhelming. There are a lot of decisions to make, and focusing your efforts in the wrong areas can lead to months of wasted effort.
Fortunately, you don’t have to blindly guess at the best approach. Based on my successes and failures founding numerous eCommerce stores, these guidelines will help make your own eCommerce launch a successful one. If you want to learn how to make an online store, you’ve come to the right place.
The more time you spend wrestling with a complicated shopping cart, the less time you’ll have to focus on what really matters: creating valuable content, interacting with your customers and marketing your business. So make picking an easy-to-use platform a priority when launching. You can always change/upgrade later if you need to (just make sure you don’t botch your website migration).
The easiest way to build an online store is to use a fully hosted, subscription-based cart. These services take care of all the hosting, payment integration and technical details, allowing you to quickly get a site up and running.
There are numerous options to choose from but I strongly recommend Shopify (aff link). It’s the cart that I migrated my own store to and have been thrilled with the features, performance and support. Here’s a full list of popular hosted carts on the market:
You’ll pay a monthly fee for just about any hosted cart, but it will be a small price to pay for not having to worry about security patches, server configurations and regular updates.
If you’re technically inclined and want a bit more control over your store, you’ll want to pick a self-hosted cart. My top picks for self-hosted cart for a new store owner are WooCommerce and OpenCart.
WooCommerce is a plug-in for WordPress which transforms the popular CRM into a shopping cart. It’s fairly easy to install and has a number of themes available for it.
OpenCart is a stand-alone openhttps://www.ecommercefuel.com/shopping-cart/
source shopping cart that’s known for being lightweight and easy to customize. If you’re a bit more comfortable on the technical side I’d recommend going with them.
I do NOT recommend Magento for new store owners despite it’s popularity. It’s a very powerful cart but is overly complex and extremely difficult to host. I used to be a Magento user and moved to Shopify due to the complexity and problems it caused – particularly for a small team without a dedicated programmer on staff.
Here’s a list of the most popular self-hosted carts on the market today:
I recommend staying away from ZenCart and osCommerce, as they are old platforms that people are moving away from. You can read more about the best eCommerce carts in our shopping cart comparison guide.
It’s time to kill your perfectionist tendencies! Making an online store and launching it quickly is one of the best things you can do for your fledgling business.
If you’re new to your niche, you likely have no idea who your customers are or what they need. Oh, you may think you know, but you don’t. So trying to invest in creating the perfect store to address your customers’ needs, wants and problems is almost certainly a waste of time. Instead, build a basic store online as quickly as possible to start interacting with your customers to learn more about them.
Once you have a better idea about your niche, then you can improve your website based on your new knowledge. And while you’ve been collecting all this information, you’ve almost certainly rung up a few sales, too.
Another reason to launch quickly is because it takes a lot of time and effort to market your store. The sooner you have a storefront up and online — even a really basic one — the faster you can start telling the world about your business, building links and marketing.
In order to launch as quickly as possible, I recommend:
1) Using stock descriptions and pictures – If you’re new to the niche, you likely know next to nothing about your products! So use the manufacturer’s information to launch quickly and come back to write unique copy when you actually have something unique and authoritative to say.
2) Using a pre-built template – I don’t care what world-class graphics designers say; you do NOT need a fancy $5,000 custom-built template to do well with eCommerce. One of my most popular eCommerce stores uses a built-in template, and I have never heard a single customer say, “Hey! Is this a stock template? I’m not sure about you guys ….” Even if you use the most popular template in the world, 99.9% of your customers will have no idea.
When making your first online store, I strongly recommend doing as much as possible yourself in the beginning. If you don’t understand how your business fundamentally works, you won’t be able to effectively train a team in the future. And having to rely on paid contractors (programmers, web designers, etc.) every time you need to make a change is an expensive and helpless position to be in.
Doing things yourself also makes you prioritize what’s important to move forward and what can wait. It’s really easy to throw money at a problem instead of really analyzing whether it’s: 1) really necessary and 2) a good investment. When you do most things yourself early on, you’re less likely to waste money on nonessential items.
I learned this lesson the hard way when I launched TrollingMotors.net. In the past, I’d done just about everything myself, from building the site to marketing and SEO, when launching an eCommerce site. When it came time to automate the business, I knew it inside and out and was able to competently train a team to manage it for me.
But when launching TrollingMotors.net, I figured I could simply pay someone else to do all the hard work for me! So I outsourced the site design to an expensive developer and invested a significant sum on a long-term SEO contract for marketing and traffic. Overall, I invested more than $15,000 getting the site up and running. With other people doing all the work, I figured this was going to be an easy, painless process!
But then I started running into problems. When I needed to make a simple change to the site, I had to contact my developers for help. I wasn’t familiar with the new shopping cart they used, and had to rely on them to make basic changes. And because I wasn’t spending as much time marketing and connecting with others in my niche, I didn’t understand my market nearly as well.
Finally, more than a year after I hired my SEO firm, the site’s traffic took a huge nosedive when rankings dropped precipitously in Google. The reason? The firm I’d entrusted with SEO and marketing had used some sketchy tactics, and we’d been penalized by Google.
I’m now much more involved with TrollingMotors.net’s site design and marketing, but it was an expensive lesson. Don’t make the same mistake! You don’t have to do everything forever, but make sure you’re intimately involved with the major aspects of your business early on. It’s a much cheaper option in the long run.
Most people grossly underestimate how much marketing is required to build a viable eCommerce business. Especially in the early days, it takes a LOT of effort to get your business on the map and noticed. For the first six months of any new eCommerce site, I’d recommend the following time priorities:
That’s 67% of your time spent exclusively on marketing! Not A/B testing, business streamlining or crafting a strategic vision. Not improving your site design or logo. Fanatical marketing. The majority of eCommerce sites fail because they underestimate how crucial early stage marketing efforts are and don’t gain enough traction. Don’t let that be you.
You may be thinking, “Chill out with all this marketing hype! I’ll just run some advertisements.” It’s true that advertising is a great way to kick-start your eCommerce business in the beginning, when no one knows about you. And you can instantly drive traffic to your site to learn about your market by interacting with customers. But advertising, especially pay-per-click models like AdWords, is usually a poor long-term strategy for generating traffic.
The most effective advertising methods, like PPC Google ads, are expensive and will severely eat into (if not eliminate) your profits. Pursuing SEO and other organic marketing efforts will provide a much higher return on your investment, more sustainable traffic and ultimately significantly higher profits.
Like any business, there’s a LOT to know and learn when starting a successful online store! If you’d like to learn more check out the free six day mini-course on how to build your own profitable store. There are also plenty of great eCommerce conferences with lots of useful information.
Photo by Jurvetson
124 Comment
Makes sense – it is all to easy and tempting to focus your energy on the site mechanics, especially for developers and engineers. Even if you are making no sales it still feels like you are making some kind of measurable progress (without really doing anything to boost sales).
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Marketing seems to be the hardest/scariest part, especially in a post Panda/Penguin world. It seems like a big black hole, with out a clear place to begin.
Over-optimization and tweaking can be a huge pitfall – you’re right! And next to picking a niche, marketing IS the hardest element of eCommerce success. I’ll be creating more resources about this in the future to provide additional guidance. Thanks for the comment!
Andrew,
Please help me understand more on how to start the online store. I see and understand the above but its not specific on how to begin the the online store. What complexing the above is terms used to describe the business and platform to follow. the truth is I have no idea on what an online store is n how it works… by knowing it and knowing how it works I can be able to launch my online store.
Great post! And thanks for validating my choice of Shopify. They are great!
We took this advice last week and went fully operational while waiting on the designers and already got a few sales! Check us out for nutritional supplements at http://www.healthychimp.com
Congratulations on your launch and your first few sales – that is fantastic! Site looks good, and best of luck…
I’m starting to move away from Facebook Ads with my ecommerce store Andrew. The conversion rate is very low and it can get quite costly.
What I would recommend is contacting the bloggers in your target niche. Many are very happy to bring the news of a new store/product and some will do a review for you if you send them a sample.
Not only does this get your website in front of the right people for free, but the backlinks you’ll get are great for SEO.
Thanks for the tip – I’ve wondered about the ROI on Facebook ads. I’ve also had a lot of success with guest blogging, and it’s one of the best ways I’ve found to build traffic and SEO authority for a site.
Great tips here and I quite agree.
I have been thinking of switching over to Shopify as I’m yet to hear anything negative about this company.
Thanks Owen! I think you’ll like Shopify. Please drop me a line if/when you get a store live with them….
I used shopify for 3 months and then switched to big commerce. Big commerce has better seo features, more custom cart features, a built in contact us page, easy to use invoices and several other features that shopify can’t come close to.
If you need a simply basic shopping cart then shopify works fine….but big commerce is better all around.
Thanks for the feedback and experience, Gabe! That’s really interesting to hear. I hope to do some side-by-side shopping cart reviews in the future or – possibly – even provide a venue for other store owners to share their experience with different carts. I’ll look forward to trying out BigCommerce.
How hard was it to do the switch from Shopify to BigCommerce?
Not sure – have never done it! Currently I run my sites on Magento. However, for those starting out, I think Shopify makes the most sense due to it’s easy-of-use and simplicity.
Shopify is for sure the way to go if your just getting started. I worked with Volusion for over a year now and I’m still learning something new everyweek but with shopify it’s very simple and was able to get a store up and running in 2 days, Try doing that with Volusion lol.
Haven’t used Volusion, but I’d tend to agree on Shopify. Anyone getting started should strongly consider it.
please write more about seo for our stores, since it is so important.
Planning to in the future! Thanks Matt.
Thanks, I like your post.
Just as Mustafa above mentioned, what do you think about the Facebook ads? I recently had a conversation with a fellow friend who mentioned that if people use google/yahoo, they are more likely to be on Facebook and some say Facebook will open up the eCommerce “want” platform which have been long untouched.
@Owen – Don’t delay, definitely do it!
They also have Shopify 2 coming up, which looks pretty exciting.
http://www.shopify.com/2
Your awesome! I’ll be launching my site very soon after reading this.
-Paul
Thanks Paul! Best of luck with the new site. 😉
Good insight! It would be nice to hear more about the product, specifically how you found and built relationships with manufactures and distributors, pricing, margins, etc. Many post you read online simply state success stories with marketing, seo, etc… but not enough emphasis on the actual products being sold, and how to obtain such products. Great post and would love to hear more on the product side of the business.
Thanks, Brent! Building relationships with suppliers and pricing issues are great post ideas, and I’ll add them to my list. Appreciate the suggestions.
I’ve learned first hand how difficult it is to get traction. I think it’s absolutely essential for an early e-commerce start-up to generate traction/sales right away. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see people actually paying to purchase your product. I’ll have to say, the first sale is the hardest.
So true! I remember EXACTLY where I was and what I was doing each time one of my new sites got it’s first sale. There’s nothing quite as thrilling! And the first sale is the hardest. Once you’re past that, it gets easier and things scale much more quickly.
Hi! I followed the link in your name from a comment on a 4HWW post =) Your blog is great! I’m really enjoying the tips so far, keep it up! If you have any suggestions about my (very new) shopify store, I’d love to hear them. I’m getting decent traffic from Google AdWords, but my conversion ratio is crap. Is it the cost? the content? I can’t figure it out! Any insight you (or other fellow readers!) might have would be great.
Cheers!
Thanks Melissa! And congratulations on launching your new store! It looks really, really nice. I definitely don’t think design problems are at the root of your conversion issues.
My recommendation would be to make your value proposition clearer. $15 for a pair of socks IS pretty expensive, so you need to make sure your visitors instantly know why they are worth that premium. It needs to hit home within 5 seconds of visitors seeing your homepage. Currently, what jumps out at me is:
– “BigSocksBigFeet” Logo. Are these socks only for people with big feet? Not sure…
– The Slider Bar, which starts with “Bamboo + Charcoal” and a picture, but I’m not sure what that means.
…so while I’m looking, I’m not seeing WHY these socks are different, and the benefits they offer. If your socks are superior at stopping stinky feet, you should have in huge, bold letters on your homepage:
“Socks that FINALLY keep others from smelling your feet!”
Or something like that. You only have a few seconds to sell visitors before they hit the back button, so make sure they understand immediately the #1 benefit of your offering.
Best of luck!
Thank you so much for your reply! Your advice was great. I am working on my SideBar graphics this weekend, I think you’re right: it’s not clear from the firs t second who the socks are for, and why they’re the best. Thanks again!
I’m receiving a lot traffic through fashion bloggers but no sales! Please take a look at my site. I’m all ears with any advice you can give. Pretty frustrating!!!
Andrew,
Great tips on the starting up.
I tried to launch as quickly as possible and had a deadline I wanted to meet (to keep myself from procrastinating). However, I relied too heavily on the website development and when I wanted to make small changes I ran into a lot of problems.
I think I got caught up in the outsouring craze (due to inexperience). However, for you to teach someone how to run your business you have to know how to run it as well. So for my next site I’ll be doing everything myself – keyword research, website development, email marketing,
Lesson learned.
Great story and very well said! You usually can’t effectively outsource what you don’t know / understand. Otherwise, you have a hard time managing the process and knowing what’s an acceptable level of work.
I think your plan to do everything yourself first – and then outsource it – is a solid one.
I had the same problem. Out sourcing to much.
I didn’t see any mention of Tomato Cart in your article or in the comments and was wondering if you had an opinion on it.
Not familiar with it. I’ll check it out and consider it for future updates. Thanks!
Overall I find 3dcart easier to use than Volusion, especially for editing/adding product variations.
Thanks for sharing, Janine! Good to know.
Andrew,
Can you provide your advice about inventory levels if we are not able to use a drop shipping method.
Our suppliers are overseas and it will take them 7-10 days to deliver the items via express and it will also cost quite a lot for single orders as we will be paying international shipping for each order. We have opted to purchase the products in bulk and use a local fulfillment house to do this.
As a result we have run into our first major dilemma – We are selling small accessory items and are wondering how much we should be stocking up on? Should we be focusing on 3 of each, 10 of each etc? Ultimately we do not know how much we can sell, but we also do not want to lose momentum if the sales start coming through for popular products and have to make our customers wait approximately 14 days in total to receive their product.
Our market will be mainly within the same country so by normal or express post will usually reach the customers within 1 – 5 days. I don’t know how happy people will be waiting 14 days for an item to be restocked and delivered but at the same time we do not want to pay additional hundreds of dollars on inventory if we cannot sell.
Your feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
The only way to gauge what your demand will be is to put them for sale, start to market, and see how many sell! I would recommend ordering a minimum quantity of your products at first and see which ones sell best. Then, when you have a bit of sales track record, you can start purchasing more inventory for your best selling items.
You may have some temporary shortages, but I think that’s better than buying a bunch of inventory that you can’t get rid of. Good luck!
Great post! I have and I am sure many others have benefited from your pragmatism.
My site has almost zero traffic. Don’t know why? About to hire a SEO specialist but I guess I would take time to familiarise myself but where do I start? I am a “dummy” in these things.
I am also setting up an ecommerce store. If I use a fully hosted (like Shopify) service, my understanding is that it would be difficult if not impossible to switch to self host in the future. Would appreciate guidance here.
Cheers
Lim
Lim,
In terms of traffic and SEO, these two articles will give you a solid foundation to work from on building a stream of visitors:
https://www.ecommercefuel.com/ecommerce-marketing-strategies/
https://www.ecommercefuel.com/ecommerce-seo-guide/
With hosted platforms like Shopify, it is a little difficult to migrate but not impossible. But I think if you’re just starting out the primary problem most people face is getting a decent cart online quickly. Worrying about migration before you’ve built a business or proven viability is, I believe, putting the horse before the cart. Or stated differently, I think the benefits of getting a site online quickly with minimal fuss outweigh any difficulties in the future IF migration needs to occur.
Great tips! I currently haven’t launched an e-commerce store. I have quite a few more challenges than the average person being deployed in Japan. Going on 6-9 month deployments without internet makes it quite a challenge.
Despite that, I’m hoping to get set up so I can launch a web store by the end of the year. I found what looks to be a great niche, lot’s of searches (60,000+) and the top website on google has about 80 backlinks. I only found one website that is specific for this niche, and it’s not even in the U.S.!
My only challenge will be to find suppliers.
As far as fulfillment goes, have you any experience with Amazon? I feel like if I use Amazon for fulfillment the free super saver shipping will be huge.
Thanks Adam! In terms of Amazon Fulfillment – or Fulfillment by Amazon – I haven’t used them, no. However, I’d definitely consider it if / when I expand into a niche where I stock my own products. Worth looking into for sure. Best of luck as you’re looking to get your store up-and-running!
I totally agree with getting your products out there, if no one know about you, you can’t sell!!
Exactly. 😉
Hi. Thank you for all your great, relevant information. I launched a ecommerce site late last year and am trying to figure out the best marketing plan. I too have spent too much on Adwords with little conversion. Now I am working on link building. Any suggestions would be appreciated. FYI: I am using Volusion.
In terms of AdWords, you’ll have the most luck if you focus on exact match searches that are focused on individual products – and NOT on general terms. Then, as you test for profitability, you can expand into phrase and broad match IF the exact match campaigns are profitable.
Best of luck, and glad you’re enjoying the site!
Great article! I totally agree on the ‘do it yourself’ since ‘you’ know more about your business than SEO experts do. You also get a chance to learn from you mistakes. Let me get to marketing while I learn more about SEO…
Thanks Partha!
Thanks Andrew for your insightful tips.
I am an SEO and have handled everything online over the years, but for my own e-comm start-up I too was considering getting a custom design and hiring an SEO Writer to do the marketing for me. However after reading your post I think I’ll try to do as much stuff as possible by myself, specially at the early stages of business development.
Thanks once again!
I think that’s wise, Ashish. To grow, you eventually have to start outsourcing and delegating. But the more you understand, the better you’ll be able to delegate and manage others.
Best of luck and thanks for reading!
I really wish I read this article much sooner. I just realized that I wasted over $11k on web design, google adwords and Prestashop modules within the past 4 years. Totally sucks, but we live and we learn.
Thank You!
Don’t feel too bad, Tierra. Even if you did spend $11K, you still learned a bunch of stuff about design, AdWords, and other issues. It may not have been worth your total investment, but you did likely get more out of it than you might think AND you’ll be much better prepared next time.
Hi Andrew:
Great article, really. Unfortunatley I read after we launch our Online Store however good luck for us that in a intuitive way, we just did it as you recommend in the article 🙂
We launch it the past week and now we’re focus on the Mktg Strategy, focus in our target market and studying our post statistics, ohh I realize that I forget to mention that is a Online Store ON Facebook, you can access it from anywhere but we don’t have an own domain or url web site.
My big concern at this point – keep in mind that we’ve just one week open – HOW LONG WILL TAKE TO SEE THE FIRST SALES?
Thanks in advanced for your response
Congratulations on your launch! The time to first sale really varies, and depends on a number of things including your marketing, offering, pricing and a number of other factors. But personally, I’ve always seen the first sale within a week or two of opening.
Best of luck!
Andrew,
Great article, it was very informative. I am trying to research to launch my own ecommerce site and I have a question about inventory. How does trollingmotors.net manage its inventory if you don’t mind me asking? Drop-shipping? Large warehouse? I’m just confused on how to launch a successful business as far as inventory goes. I’ve heard mostly cons about drop-shippers but have no experience.
Any information and advice would be extremely appreciated.
-Nathan
We drop ship 100% of the products from TM.net and use eCommHub.com to sync our inventory with our suppliers to reduce the chance we’ll sell something that’s out of stock. Drop shipping definitely isn’t perfect, and cons include low margins and fierce competition. But if you’re good at marketing and adding value, it’s a low-cost way to startup a business and run it from anywhere.
Hope this helps!
Hi Andrew,
I have found your blog just a few days ago and I have to say that I am quite impressed and I am regreting that I did not find it earlier.;) Almost all the information you have here I already know by finding by myself over many months. But here all the information needed is on one place. It’s simply awesome.
I am from Czech Republic and last year I have set up business in US in order to sell on Amazon to make some cash to build and run my own online store. The process of setting up everything legal and finding supplier took almost a year, but in January I finally started to sell products on Amazon via FBA. After three months on Amazon I got really sceptical to be able to make decent money due to very low margins. But in any way, I tested several types of products this way so I got a clue of what sells good. After those three months I started working on my own online store and just a few days ago I launched it. You can check it, it is about lighting – http://www.lumibo.com
It took me less than two months ( omg, I just count it! It is really only less then two months. Seems to me like a year! ) and I know it is not perfect. Many things are not finalized – I would like to add some banner on the home page about free shipping, adjust descriptions ( Im using feeds from my supplier, but he has really poor descriptions ), etc.
What I am really proud of is that everything I built to automate everything. So, I dont need to care about importing products, pictures, inventory, etc. The store is build on OpenCart platform ( I did not want to pay monthly to anyone, even commission. 😉 ) using one stock template for 30USD. In total, to run the store I pay only for domain and hosting.
I would like to concentrate now about promoting the store using Facebook, Pintereset, blog and other techniques you describe here. In the meantime I want to improve the design, descriptions, etc.
I must agree with you in one thing you mentioned in the post. Do it yourself! This is not important only when building online store, but in any other job. When you know the basic processes, you can beat anyone later with your knowledge. Also, with strong base, your house will not fall down. My favourite saying is – when you want to reach the top floor of the house, you have to step on each stair.
Wow, great story Lukas. Thanks for sharing! I checked out your light shop and I think it’s a GREAT start. Clean design, good pictures and you didn’t spend years getting it online. Well done. I think getting a site up quickly is important, so you can start marketing it and interacting with customers. Then, once you have some traffic coming in and know a bit more about the niche you can invest the time to really make it a valuable resource.
Best of luck with your new store and thanks for reading!
Andrew,
thank you very much for your feedback! I appreaciate it!
Currently I have in the store few main categories, but subcategories are just Manufacturers, which I dont like to have it this way. It is quite messy and I am worried, that if I start marketing the store now, no one will place any order. What do you think about it?
I actually already started analysing all the products to separate them in other subcategories – e.g. in case of baterries, the subcategory will be type of the baterry ( AA, Rechargable, etc ). I think this will add value and also help customers to easily find what exactly they need. I have to say also, that this way ( to sort out how to manage subcategories ) one can get many ideas of what to write about on blog, or so, because I am currently like a customer – trying to go through products and pick the one I need. That is great to get to know everything about the niche.
Thanks so much for your advice! I will be applying it to my site very very soon!
You’re very welcome, Amos!
Andrew!
Amaizing tips I must say.. I am planning to start a webstore in China and wanted to ask if shopify and ecommhub.com would work since the content will be in chinese. Also I am very confused in deciding a marketing strategy due to non existence of facebook etc. Your any information or advice about chinese online market would be highly valuable.
Thanks
P:S: This is going to be my first Web store experience.
Hi C! Yes, I’m fairly sure eCommHub and Shopify work together. Don’t know too much about selling within China, I’m sorry. Best of luck!
Hi Andrew, great article! Thank you so much!
I’m a bit down as I’m struggling to get that first sale. My site has been online for about 2 months, I have checked the competitors prices and I have some deals that make me competitive. I think the site looks professional as I hired both designers and developers to help me build it.
I’ve been running Google Adwords for few weeks with CTR around 16%, but no sale yet so I had to stop that as I don’t have any budget for it anymore.
Can you suggest any recommendations? I’ve started social media campaigns about 3 weeks ago, so far have about 270 fans, but they seem to stick for free stuff and giveaways only….
I would be really grateful for any suggestions.
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