How to start an eCommerce business with Shopify

The online world is a great place to do business as you can generate cash flow and build a more resilient business. However, the first time starting up an eCommerce business can be hard work and challenging despite the bulk of information you can access online. So before you start, you will need to research before launching if you want to grow your eCommerce business into a profitable one.

Trying to get everything right, especially the not-so-important thing, before you launch could be a waste of time for you. This uncertainty is why a guide on starting up an eCommerce business is a great idea. Platforms you could use include Shopify, BigCommerce, Amazon, Etsy, Squarespace, Wix, RedBubble, and a host of others.

Shopify is a web application that allows you to create your online store. It aims at helping persons with zero coding or design skills own a website without needing a professional developer. To develop a Shopify business, users need to pay a monthly fee and are free to customize their store as they want. There are several other steps and decisions that you need to bring together at the right time for your business to start well and grow.

Choose a product to sell

You cannot start a business with no product idea. So the first step is to know what products you want to sell online, wholesale or direct-to-consumer. If you do not have an idea, you could check for inspiration from a business-idea list. Different types of products include physical, digital, and services.

After selecting a product to deal on, you need to research the marketability and profitability of the product to know if it will sell well. After choosing a product to sell, you will need to figure out where and how you will obtain the products to market. There are different ways of procuring products to sell, each depending on the type of product.

Conduct a research

If your product is not a new idea, you will have to research your competition and figure out how to make your brand and business unique. Having determined to be unique, you will need to write down a business plan. This plan is the roadmap that helps you determine what is most important to you in your business and choose how to reach your target audience.

Set up your business

Here, it would help if you started a 14-day free trial of Shopify. The trial period will be enough time for you to build up your store and improve it. The next decision is determining your business name and what logo to create for your shop. Your business name should be memorable so that customers can easily find out and recall you when they want to make a re-purchase.

Since you are starting on Shopify, you will need to decide and register a custom domain name immediately or later on. There are free online business and domain name generators you could use to generate and choose a name. Your logo should also be remarkable and should give customers an idea of what your business products are. For a professional look, you could assign a designer the task of coming up with a logo.

A well-planned launch

Launching your business includes adding your products, writing product titles and descriptions that sell, using beautiful product photography, setting your listing price, and optimizing your product pages. Your product title should be specific to that product and should be short. Depending on your product type, you could have different collections to organize and showcasing the different varieties of products you have for a wide variety of audience.

Your collection acts as a catalog and helps customers easily navigate your store and spot what they are searching for. For instance, a women’s clothing store could have different collections for new arrivals, bestsellers, summer, winter, office, and casual wear. You could include the same product in more than one collection if you so wish.

Your product descriptions need to be detailed with information on the right pricing and sizing. It should be easy to read with bullet points, bold texts, and short paragraphs. A good idea of what your customers expect could be obtained by looking at other stores in the same business as you, especially the well-known ones with great sales.

Marketing your store

You may have zero sales or a few here and there, but if you are serious about generating a dependable cash flow in your eCommerce business, you will need to consider marketing it. To improve your marketing tactics and convert your traffic to sales, you will need to learn different types of ads and decide on the ones most suitable to your business. The different ways you market your product is by:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

The next step is to learn about SEO (search engine optimization). You need to understand the fundamentals of SEO so that you can make your site and pages easily accessible to customers on Google and other search engines. A search engine listing preview helps you customize how a page appears in search engine results. To optimize your store, you need to know and use the keywords your target audience will type in when searching for products like yours. A keyword research tool will guide you in understanding what keywords people use to do such searches. Use keywords as tags to also increase your chances of been discovered by customers.

• Facebook pixel

A pixel is an intelligent code that learns from how people interact with your brand and your website and makes it possible to personalize how you advertise to them. By setting up Facebook pixel for your Shopify business, you can easily promote your products on Facebook and other social media platforms.

• Promotional Offers

Offering incentives such as free shipping and using visuals may communicate your description faster to the customer. For a t-shirt store, you could add a sizing chart and include the color variants, maximum quantity, and whether customers can customize it with a print or text.

Note that low prices do not equate to more sales. Your product’s perceived quality is also dependent on the price, so if your product is of excellent quality, do not be afraid to justify it in the pricing.

Bringing it all together

Clean product photography helps you sell better, so you could use generated mockups or shoot your photos with a clear camera. You will need to upload a high-quality visual idea of your product to help your audience know what exactly your product looks like. There is an option for using multiple photos so you can add angles, back views, mockups, videos, and even GIFS of your product.

You also need to prepare for shipping and fulfillment elements and define your key performance indicators. The listing price for your product is what customers pay to buy your product. Here, you will consider your raw material cost, rent for using Shopify, your profit, shipping charges depending on your customer’s location, promo sales, and taxes. If your product requires dropshipping, you will also account for the drop shipper’s cost.

On Shopify, you have the opportunity of designing your homepage and creating other key pages where your customers can get to know you, trust you and find what you can offer. These pages include

• About page
• Contact page
• Policy page
• FAQ page

Conclusion

Anyone with a desire to learn can launch and build an eCommearce business, especially on Shopify. The primary thing is to get started and perfect your store along the way as you get feedback from your customers.

Bio

Dominic Beaulieu is an expert writer who specializes in writing services reviews,  various training and professional upgrade courses, materials and manuals. He mainly writes on development, digital marketing, design, business strategies, etc. This breadth of specialization allows him to write expert columns on the most pressing topics in today’s society and create a writing reviews page.