Setting up Your First Online Store

Online stores are great friends to small businesses. They’re an excellent way to get started in retail without investing in bricks and mortar or staff. If you already have a physical store, an online presence can extend your reach beyond your local neighborhood, while giving existing customers a more convenient way to shop.

With more and more customers shopping online, the web is a great place to do business – and potentially a lot of it. If you’ve thought about creating your first online store and given up because it was too hard, take another look. Handling online payments isn’t the chore it used to be. Secure, off-the-shelf services have greatly simplified what used to be a troublesome technical task.

What should an online store have?

At its most basic, your first online store needs to:

• showcase your products – including pictures, descriptions and prices
• include a shopping cart where customers can build their order
• process payments via PayPal or credit card
• protect important financial data, such as credit card numbers
• give shipping options

Three ways to start one

In the early days of ecommerce, you had to build your own shop from scratch. Most of the components were custom made, which meant you spent a lot on design and development. The backend tools that managed the exchange of money were also expensive and needed technical expertise to set up.

Now you have options, come of which give you point-and-click setup. You can:

• sell through a third-party platform
• host a store through an ecommerce provider
• host your own online shop

As with all choices, there are pros and cons. Let’s take a deeper look.

1. Selling through a third-party platform

If you choose to sell on a third-party site, all you need to do is set up a seller account. You won’t need to pay for web hosting or set up your own payment gateway. You’ll just need to cover the service fees – which are typically deducted from your sales.

With most platforms, you ship the goods direct to the customer. Amazon allows you to do this, too, but they also have a service where you send the goods to their warehouse and Amazon fulfillls the order.

Nearly half of the products that Amazon ships aren’t actually sold by Amazon. They’re sold by retailers like you who use their platform. Once you set up your account with a site like Amazon or eBay, you’re ready to start selling. It doesn’t matter if your monthly revenues are $100 or $100,000, they’ll handle payment and shipping for you. Just be aware that there may be a slight delay between when you finish creating your listing and when it goes live. Some platforms need to approve your shop before it’s opened up for customers to find you.

Setting up your first online store using a third-party platform is easy, but there’s very little room for branding. In some cases, you can’t really customize how the shop looks, aside from the product images. However, some platforms allow you to choose from different templates and change colors so take a look around. Before deciding on a platform, make sure you know what the design limits are and that you’re ok with them.

2. Hosting your store through an ecommerce provider

Dedicated ecommerce platforms give you a good balance of simplicity and flexibility. You’ll have more say in how the store looks and feels, and you’ll control how goods are sold and shipped. You can set up your own shop using sites like:

• Shopify
• Etsy
• BigCommerce

When you choose one of these platforms, you get access to a range of templates and themes that you can use to build your storefront. Then you drop the storefront into your existing website so it’s a seamless experience for your visitors. As a bonus, with some platforms like Etsy, your product also appears on their site.

You’ll pay a monthly subscription fee for services like these, but that covers hosting, payment processing with your designated merchant providers, and security.

3. Hosting your own online shop

If you want to build the store exactly how you like it, without being limited by templates, you can use a content management system like WordPress. It will take much more time but you’ll be able to choose the layout, the design, and the entire experience. You can teach yourself how to do it or hire designers and developers to do it for you.

If you go down this route you’ll also need to choose a:

• hosting provider, such as BlueHost and WPEngine (which are both popular for WordPress sites)
• a virtual shopping cart, such as WooCommerce or Magento
• a merchant provider to process payments, such as PayPal, Stripe or Authorize.net
• spam-protection from someone like Akismet

• SSL certificates and secure backup solutions for site safety and consumer protection

The monthly fees for hosting services start from between $10 and $30 a month. Costs go up depending on the number of sites you create and the number of monthly visitors they receive.