Starting an online store can be a daunting task, but with the right tools and guidance, it can be a rewarding and profitable venture, too. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, creating an online store can help you reach a wider audience and grow your business.
In this article, we’ll lead you through how to start an online store, from choosing an ecommerce platform to designing your website to launching your first product. With the help of this comprehensive guide, you’ll be well on your way to building a successful online store.
How to start an online store
1. Decide on a target audience
A target audience is the group of people your marketing efforts are focused on. When starting an ecommerce store, knowing your ideal audience is critical. It helps you find new customers easier and attract interested buyers to your website, resulting in higher conversion rates and more sales.
You can make an audience of any size or attribute, depending on what products you plan to sell. However, there are three main categories to look at as a new ecommerce entrepreneur:
- Demographics: Includes characteristics such as age, gender, occupation, education, and income.
- Location: Groups that divide the market based on geographic location, so you can serve a specific area better.
- Interests: Built around psychographics and includes attitudes, personality, opinions, and the lifestyle of your audience.
Ask yourself: Who buys my product? What are they like? What’s their age? Compile that information into a buyer persona and include it in your business plan. You’ll want it when you create your website copy and marketing campaigns. If you don’t have a product, you can still narrow in on a target market and build a product around it.
2. Find a business idea and choose your products
One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is finding profitable products to sell. Coming up with product ideas is a bit tricky, but if you have an audience in mind, you’re one step ahead. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to find products to sell online, whether you’re manufacturing, reselling, or dropshipping.
You can find profitable products to sell online in a number of ways:
- Appeal to enthusiastic hobbyists
- Go with your personal passion
- Capitalize on trends early
- Look at what’s trending in online marketplaces
While this article is dedicated to helping you start an online store, you can refer to our comprehensive guide to starting a business to learn more about topics like branding, writing a business plan, choosing a product, and finding a manufacturer.
3. Choose an ecommerce platform
When you’re learning how to make a website to sell online, one of the biggest decisions is which platform you will use. An ecommerce platform lets you build and start an online store experience, make sales, and fulfill orders.
When considering how to make a website to sell online, think about your ecommerce platform as the control center for your entire business, controlling everything from inventory to marketing, giving you all the tools you need to sell online and provide customer support.
Key features to look for in an ecommerce platform include:
- Usability: Your ecommerce software should be easy to use. Look for a tool that is intuitive and uses a drag-and-drop online store builder to easily create your online store.
- Accessible customer support: Look for a platform that offers support the entire way.
- Friction-free checkout: Streamlined checkout is critical to making sales. Find an ecommerce platform that makes it easy for shoppers to buy your products.
- Web hosting: You need web hosting to let people access your online store. Some ecommerce software offers web hosting built-in, while others require you to use a third-party solution.
When choosing your ecommerce software, consider your current and future needs. Some platforms may be the best solution for today, but a powerful platform like Shopify can get you started quickly and support your future growth.
4. Design your brand
Before you begin designing your ecommerce website, you’ll need to consider branding. Create a brand identity and develop brand assets to use throughout your online store and across other channels. Be sure you’ve developed the following elements to plug into your store design.
Before Verve designed its online store, it made deliberate choices around fonts, colors, logo design, tone of voice, and other aesthetic elements to ensure consistency in branding across its properties:
- Brand values and mission: Before designing brand assets like a logo or color palette, decide what your brand stands for, your purpose, your unique selling proposition, and your brand promise to customers. These decisions will help shape the visual look and feel of your brand.
- Business name: Choose a business name that represents your brand, whether it’s your own name, a made up word, or a literal description of what you sell. If you’re stumped, try Shopify’s free domain name generator and run your ideas through a tool like Namechk to see if your business name ideas are available on social and as a domain.
- Logo: Whether you work with a designer or design your own logo, it is an asset that will represent your brand across a number of surfaces, from your online store to your packaging. Be clear about what you want your brand to represent, including your mission, values, and tone, as these will help a designer nail your look.
- Lifestyle and product photos: Clean product photography helps you put your best foot forward. If you’re on a budget, you can shoot your own product photos with your smartphone camera and use free stock photos until you can shoot your own custom lifestyle photos.
5. Determine your business structure
You’ve finished all the fun parts of starting an online store: choosing your name, building your site, finding products, writing product descriptions. But before you launch, you want to make your new business legal.
While it’s not the most enjoyable job, incorporating your business is a must. A legal entity recognized by the government protects your personal assets if something goes wrong. It also helps you:
- Potentially receive a lower tax bill
- Secure business funding more easily
- Create retirement plans
- Separate credit rating from your personal score
Common business structures for new business owners include:
- Sole proprietorship: An unincorporated business without legal distinction between the company and the individual running it. It qualifies as a non-employer business and is the most straightforward to set up and manage.
- Partnership: A single business with two or more owners. Each owner contributes to the business via funding, property, labor, or skill. Partners share responsibility and profits.
- Limited liability corporation (LLC): A hybrid business structure that combines partnership with the liability protection found in corporations.
6. Set up your ecommerce website
Now you’re ready to start building your ecommerce site. Follow these steps to make sure you’ve completed every task on your ecommerce checklist before you launch.
Add your products
In your ecommerce platform, head to the “Add a product” section. Here, you’ll add all the content, assets, and details about your product.
Writing product titles and descriptions
Your product title should make it clear what the product is. This is what customers will see as they browse your store and what will help them find what they’re looking for in your catalog. Try to keep it short and use your product description or variants to surface other specific information or product options, such as colors or sizes.
Product descriptions describe and sell your product. When writing them, keep the following in mind:
- Know who you’re speaking to. Think about what your customer needs to know to feel confident buying your product and try to communicate it in your description.
- Highlight incentives. Consider what features, benefits, and offers really matter—and cut the fluff. Many stores mix text and icons to quickly communicate these selling points on their product pages.
- Anticipate common questions or objections. What might make a customer hesitate to buy? Are they afraid of buying the wrong size? Do they need allergen information?
- Make your text easy to scan. Make your descriptions easier to read with short paragraphs, bullet points, subheadings, bolded text, etc. Or use nested navigation to organize information into tabs.
- Help customers see themselves using your product. Customers can’t taste, feel, touch, or try on your products. List the materials you use, include a size chart, etc.
In this example, skin care brand Frank Body uses its product description to talk about the product’s benefits and ingredients, while also maintaining the brand’s tone of voice.
Uploading product photos or other media
On most ecommerce platforms, you can upload visual media that helps you share richer details about your products: photos, GIFs, videos, or even 3D models.
Presentation makes all the difference. Help customers imagine owning your product. Help them see it in action or proudly displayed in their space. Here are a few points to remember:
- Use high-quality photos. Avoid blurry, poorly lit, or low-resolution images.
- Maintain the same aspect ratio. A consistent aspect ratio ensures that all your photos appear the same size. This creates a cleaner, more professional appearance when you create your online store.
- Use the tools you have. If you’re on a budget, many smartphones are capable of shooting high-quality product photos. Use free photo editing tools to touch them up.
- Add necessary details. Edit the alt text for accessibility (describe your photo visually so it can be accessible to screen readers).
On its product pages, ReFramed uses several clean product shots on plain backgrounds to show every detail without distraction.
Farther down the page, customers can see lifestyle photos that help them envision the brand’s bed frames within the context of their own lives.
💡 Tip: For products where the customer might need more visual information, such as clothing or jewelry, using multiple photos that offer additional angles or details can help improve customer trust.
Setting your price
Several variables can influence how you price your products, such as shipping costs, raw materials, overhead like rent or employees, the cost of your time, and, perhaps most important, the perceived quality of your products.
You can always revisit and adjust your prices based on what you learn after you start marketing. You may discover that customers are actually willing to pay more for your products, or you may find creative ways to cut costs and increase the average value of every order you get.
While there are some exceptions, businesses that sell goods and services have to collect taxes each time someone orders from them, so be sure to configure your tax settings.
Managing your inventory
Depending on your business model, you may need to track, store, and manage inventory. Some exceptions include dropshipping and print-on-demand online stores. When building your online store, you can use features or your ecommerce platform (and third-party apps) to help you.
Some terms you may encounter in your online store admin:
- SKU: A stock keeping unit (SKU) is used to track and manage your inventory for specific products and variants. Create a consistent system using numbers or letters that makes it easy for you to identify what the exact item is at a glance.
- Bar code: Bar codes (UPC, GTIN, etc.) are typically used if you’re reselling products or eventually want to add scannable bar codes to your items for easier inventory management.
- Quantity: This is how much of a specific product you have on hand. If you have multiple locations holding inventory and have them set up in Shopify, they’ll display here.
💡 Read more: What Is Inventory and Why Is It Important?
Setting shipping details
In the shipping section of your online store admin, you’ll enter details that will automatically calculate shipping rates and print the appropriate shipping labels for each order. Setting the actual shipping costs and options that you’ll offer to your customers will come later on in this tutorial.
Adding product options
If your product comes with different variants, like sizes or colors, instead of adding each one as its own product, you can simply add them as variants of the same product. Each option can have its own image, price, tracked inventory, and individual settings associated with it.
You can even drill down further on your options, for example, offering multiple colors that each come in different sizes. In this example from LNDR, a pair of its athletic pants has layered variants for size, length, and color.
Organizing and tagging your products
Your ecommerce platform will offer other fields on the product page builder to help you better organize your catalog. On Shopify, some of the fields include:
- Product availability: Set your product to “available” (you can toggle sales channels on and off later).
- Product type: This is a product category that you can use to identify certain products (e.g., t-shirt).
- Vendor: This is the manufacturer, wholesaler, or third-party vendor for the product (if applicable). You can filter your product list by vendor, which can speed up ordering inventory.
- Tags: Tags are keywords that you can associate with your product. You can add multiple tags to a product to help customers find it through your online store’s search bar.
- Collections: Collections are important. They let you organize and curate your products for specific purposes and audiences.
Grouping your products into collections
Collections can be created to curate products to target a specific audience, a theme, or product category. Organizing products this way can help you feature products on your page by event or season, like highlighting candy before Halloween, or make changes to a group of products such as putting a whole collection on sale.
Most importantly, collections help with navigation and often appear in the main menu or top navigation of an online store. This example from Cocofloss shows collections by popularity (Best sellers), type (Cocofloss), and audience (Kids).
Setting search engine listing details
You can improve the discoverability of your products through search engines like Google by using best SEO practices to write a page title, page description, and URL to represent your product page.
If you know what keywords your target customer is using to search for products like yours, you can work them into these fields to increase your odds of ranking in search results.
For the example above, here’s how the search engine listing looks for two Cocofloss products.
💡 Read more: Keyword Research for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide
Create key pages for your online store
Aside from product pages, there are a few critical pages to set up for your online store. These pages help build trust, tell your brand story, answer common questions, and let customers know how to reach you. These include:
- Contact page
- About page
- FAQ page
- Policy pages
About page
About pages are a great way to embrace the “small” in “small business” and earn trust as a new merchant while you create your online shop. You can have a video introducing yourself as a founder, links to awards and press mentions, images that explain your supply chain, or anything that helps this page tell your customers who you are and what you’re about.
Contact page
Your Contact page is what customers will look for to ask a question or get support. A physical address, phone number, email address, contact form, and customer support hours are all helpful pieces of information to include. There are also live chat apps you can install to make support even more accessible to shoppers.
Policy pages
Policy pages are standard practice for online businesses. They give your customers a place to understand how you conduct your business and what to expect from you. They also help protect you in case of a customer dispute. These include:
- Return policy: What’s your policy regarding returns and exchanges? A generous return policy can help customers buy from you with confidence.
- Privacy policy: A privacy policy describes how you collect information about your customers.
- Terms of service: Your terms of service policy is an agreement between you and your customers outlining how you will operate and what rights you reserve.
- Shipping policy: A shipping policy helps you set customer expectations around shipping costs, manufacturing times, and delivery speeds for the regions you ship to.
💡 Tip: Just like you did for product pages, customize the search engine listing details for your pages based on what you want the URL to be and how you want the page to appear in search engine results.
Create an online store that’s completely customized
Now that your ecommerce store has some products and content, you can customize its overall design (and see how those changes look on various pages).
Choosing an ecommerce theme
The first step is to choose a theme: an ecommerce template that you can use as a starting point for design as you build your own online store. Most ecommerce platforms have a suite of themes you can choose from. For example, the Shopify Theme Store is home to both free and paid themes, each with its own set of styles and features.
Here are some key points to consider when choosing the perfect theme for building your own store:
- Filter themes based on your business size, catalog size, volume of orders, industry, and product type. Some themes are better suited to fashion stores, for example, while others are designed for high-volume businesses.
- Consider whether the theme you’re looking at has any built-in features you need, like a search bar that auto-completes queries or a section that displays press mentions.
- Don’t pick a theme based on colors or fonts. These are all things you can customize later.
💡 Read more: How Do You Pick the Best Theme for Your Online Store? Take Our Quiz
Designing your homepage
When determining your homepage design, think about the goals a homepage needs to accomplish and determine how they apply to your specific business:
- Prioritize first-time visitors and help them quickly understand what your business is and what you sell.
- Accommodate returning visitors and make it easy for them to navigate to the products and pages they’re looking for.
- Try to build interest in your products and trust in your business with every scroll.
- Create clear paths for your visitors to take based on their intent to purchase. Avoid clutter.
This uncluttered homepage by Allbirds prioritizes full-width lifestyle photos and a clear path to shop the brand’s two main collections.
Customizing your navigation menus
There are three main forms of navigation you can set up for your online store:
- Main navigation: This is the top menu where you can prioritize the main navigation paths you want to offer customers.
- Footer navigation: This is where you keep links to non-essential pages that might distract new visitors but still need to be available for those who need to find them.
- Search: You can enable the search bar in the header to help visitors directly navigate to what they’re looking for.
You don’t want to overwhelm people with too many options from the get-go. Instead, you can organize your navigation to prioritize the actions you want visitors to take—with a focus on shopping, of course.
Setting brand colors, typography, and other design elements
Colors and typography play a big role in your brand’s visual identity and should be a top consideration when you build your brand and your own online store.
Even if you’re not a designer, you can still build your own store and pick font and color pairings you feel good about using the following tips:
- Most themes allow you to customize colors and fonts. Use those from your brand guidelines or style guide.
- Consider psychological design and how different colors make people feel.
- Use contrast to highlight important features of your homepage, such as buttons.
- Try to pick two fonts (a maximum of three) to use across your store.
- Choose a body font that is easy to read (sans serif fonts like Helvetica are generally easier to scan on a screen).
- Add your logo to appropriate places across the site, including the favicon.
In this example from Then I Met You, the brand’s homepage features limited fonts that are easy to read, a color palette that evokes calmness and self-care, and branded elements like a page logo and product packaging.
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