Andrew Youderian
•
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://old.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
Andrew! I’d just like to say that I’ve really enjoyed reading what I stumbled upon above. Not only are you clearly a Pro at this stuff, you are thorough as well as thoughtful. I like the fact that you listen to people and also respond to their questions/comments, it says a lot about you. I am just starting to learn about online business and how to open and operate my own online store, so I’m sure glad I found you! I’m not in a position to pay much upfront, trying to get it going on a shoe string, but I won’t let that hold me back. At the moment what I have is a desire, a domain name and time to learn how to make those things work together to provide a modest income. Part of me wants to do a small handmade craft store (or LARGE!) selling items I create (5-7 different types of handmade and small batch items) and the other part wants to start big with a drop ship type of business selling items manufactured by someone else. Any ideas, input, advice from you would be greatly appreciated. I already have a few pages of notes from your above replies and when I can afford it will be buying your ecommerce book! Thanks for being a solid guy in a world of internet confusion and craziness!
[…] starting out, the best way to go involves subscribing to services like Magento Go, according to ecommercefuel.com. Other fully hosted carts include 3D Cart and Volusion. But if you want more control by using a […]
I wish I had seen this a year ago…I wasted so much money hiring a web designer that did nothing but cost me. To top it off he made me believe I have to go purchase hosting and after spending all that money…everything died. But now after reading and picking myself up again I have restarted using shopify and I’m doing it all on my own. I’m only just now beginning but that article has given me the encouragement that I needed. Wish me luck!
[…] WooCommerce and Magento are just two options you can use to host your shop on your own server. Others would be OpenCart or 3D Cart. Andrew Youdarian wrote a great article on launching an online shop. […]
That’s awesome. I built an eCommerce website (Rakfirst) and still in it’s early stage, but yet to be lunched. I believe this article will really help me in perfecting a better pro launching strategies.
I use Tomatocart for my design and hosted by ipage, i believe starter’s can take advantage of this platform. Is really simple and looks professional.
Thanks.
Great ~~ BEST AWESOME~~~~Article.
I was struct with this article very.
I encouraged great. I’ll try my ecommerce site again.
sorry my pooooooly english ! (I am japanese)
Oh, I forgot! one more thing.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH !!
Hi I’ve recently done a web site as I’ve been selling at fairs, shows etc and people keep asking if I have web site. So I done it and although I seem to have people going to site (368 in 3wks) no one seems to be buying I made web site myself as haven’t got resources to pay someone can u help me with tips to get people to my site
Many thanks karen
Loved the piece. How do I get over being a perfectionist though? I’ve got a vision, it’s not over the top but I want to atleast have a great start with quality. Also, I’ve been told to start small with my products. Now that’s not quite possible as I have a big range. What do I do about the risk of stocking more products?
Every success is in the marketing. You should be marketing as soon as you have at leas 5-10 items on your store. Becoming a social media ninja is a MUST! and that means not just on Facebook, EV-ER-Y SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM. if you spend at least 20 hours per week on marketing you are still not doing enough, pull your finger out and make success happen
Hello there, OMG! i found your article at the right timing, i was just getting ready to give up on my online purse store store i’m trying to set up on shopify, everyone keep saying shopify is easy but for me its not, i was suppose to launch my store on March 27th but i haven’t been able to do so.. i tried editing the theme store my self but i cant get the right look, i’m so frustrating, Shopify customer service is not that great every time i call they keep saying they have a high call volume and hang up on me….i’m paying $29 every month, i feel like i’m giving free money away.. I even thought about switching to “Weebly” do you have any info about them… because i need a hosting page that’s cheap and that has the most minimal amount of work to be done by me. i wish i was a computer geek instead of a fashion guru.
We are about to start a ecommerce market place portal in India and would need some recommendations, answers to FAQ’s related to this business.
1). What platform is best suited for a ecommerce market place in India, looking at big players already in the market.
2). If we get this developed from a vendor , completely outsourced and hire a team simultaneously to maintain, update, look after the site on day to day basis , will the procedure be helpful
3). I want to go by pace of a tortoise and not run along side big fishes and end up my small capital
4). Being new to this business with no background, the big question in my mind is I see thousands of products one com market places already existing, and how will our new portal bring in these products online.
5). Can you advise more tutorials online where I can study about the portal basics and know what my team / outsourced partner is doing.
6). While planning for a team, do you think a team of 2 Technical guys updating and maintaining site on day to day basis + 2 guys looking after content management / merchant management / new a/c set up etc + 2 guys for post sales logistics
looking for your comments.
I agree on all aspects of your blog. I just Launched my website about 9 months ago and it has been a really rough road. I use I use PrestaShop for my e-commerce Platform. Great Post!
[…] you to learn the system if you need to someday train others, and it also allows you to prioritize what is important to have on the site and what can be added later so that you can launch quickly and start generating […]
My version:
1. Buy domain and hosting.
2. Free download WordPress and WooCommerce.
3. Buy theme.
Total = 21$
Done;)
121.182.228.24
How to Build & Launch a Successful Online Store | eCommerceFuel.com
Andrew, I have quite the opposite issue from most. I have been a long time marketer with much success. Radio, print and personal appearances. At 63 years old I am not an internet novice but I am certainly not up to par. Where and how to aim my marketing is my issue. When I find the arena and know how to navigate it I will be fine. Hope you can help. Oh yes, you gave the gal with the sock store good advice. Everyone should heed it. “It doesn’t matter what venue you are marketing in, you have precious little time to catch the consumers attention. Don’t get caught up in being cute, funny, fancy or any other time wasting effort, first and foremost state what your product does, then why its best, then why they should buy it and then the name, unless you did the most important thing in marketing first, made the name describe the product. If you don’t have a zillion dollar McDonalds ad budget, make your name describe you product or what you are doing specifically. Then you can see conversion happen. Works the same in all marketing. Thanks Again Andrew.
I enjoyed the post as well! I will have to spend some time coming up with some marketing strategies now. Also, I would love if you check out my site and give some feedback, it’s fairly new and I so have o work on the product images. But other than that, what would you recommend? Trying to get my first sale but it hasn’t happened yet. Fingers crossed! Thanks for the info.
Hi,
I’m desperate for some help. My own online brand of supplements has been available to buy for over a month but still no sales! Am I wasting my time? My supplements are suitable for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free diets!
Any help appreciated, thankyou x
Hi Crystal,
If you don’t mind me asking , what marketing techniques are you using to reach customers?
Thanks,
Sadia
http://www.cenglobe.com
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I also recommend Shopify for start-ups! Easy of use, affordable package plans, awesome and modern themes to choose from, and excellent customer service! This is really a great platform if you are considering to open an online store.
Please click the link below to know more what Shopify can offer to your business:
http://www.shopify.com/?ref=shopfie-designer
Any advice on integrating all selling sites to be managed thru the one site. One that is compatible with Australian sites like eBay, quick sales, gumtree as well as personal website?
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Good points you round up here Andrew.The most critical part is selecting the platform on which you want to work to develop your website.Shopify services are no doubt excellent.If I have a choice of selecting the hosted solutions than I will for sure select the Shopify.
Anyone have thoughts on free shipping? I watched this expert who has some pretty good stats that suggest i should http://youtu.be/Hi6OMhmDI3c Thoughts?
Hello,
Thanks for the tips. my store is 2 months old exactly and I don’t think we are doing so well, is there something I am not doing right? we get lots of abandoned carts and so many visitors who just look around and leave. I put so much into this business and also hired web developers who only started coaching me on uploading photos just last week. I quit my job to start this business and I have spent a lot already. please help!!!!
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Makes perfect sense.
Am just curious to know about the logistics part too. The shipping retainer fees that I am getting proposals for for my upcoming online marketplace are far more than I would make any profit for the whole year.
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