A Beginner’s Guide to setting up an eCommerce Business from Home

Recently I wrote about how to run your own thrift finds online store, and today I’m carrying on that theme with my top tips for how to set up an eCommerce Business from home. As someone who has worked in online retail for many years, I like to think that online shopping (both the buying and selling!) is something I am pretty damn familiar with, so hopefully some of these facts can help you out if you’re looking to start up your own business from home.

When Amazon started selling books on the internet in 1995, few people realised that we were at the beginning of a revolution in the way that we shop. 25 years on, the online shopping market in the UK alone is reckoned to be worth around half a trillion pounds.

What this means is that if you’re setting up a retail business, you can’t afford to ignore the internet, as the closure of many big high street names in recent years ably demonstrates. 

What it also means is that the eCommerce arena is a fertile ground for startups. Whether you want to promote your own products and services or sell concert tickets, the internet gives you access to a worldwide audience of potential buyers.

Platform

The first thing you need to build your own online store is an eCommerce platform. There are a number of options available, with Shopify being one of the market leaders. A platform gives you all of the functionality you need to create an online store, without you having to code your own website.

This doesn’t mean that your store will look exactly like everyone else’s; there are lots of customisation options so that you can give your eCommerce store its own unique look and feel. It’s important that you take time over designing your site. Take a look at what your competitors are doing and aim to make your site stand out. Also, consider carefully the fonts and colours that you use; you want your site to be accessible and easy to read. You want it to be easy to navigate too, so take care over your page layout, positioning of menus and so forth.

Crucially, the platform will provide the payment options that you need to do business online. Whether it’s using a debit or credit card or a service such as PayPal, your customers are looking for payment methods that are familiar and secure. A good eCommerce platform takes the hassle out of providing these.

Search Friendly

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the art of making your site attractive to the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. To many, SEO can sometimes a bit like witchcraft and there is indeed a lot to consider, but at the start, you need to stick to some basic rules.

Firstly consider what your customers are going to be searching for in order to bring them to your site. Again, take a look at the competition to give you a clue. Make sure these keywords and phrases are included on your site. Don’t just create a string of keywords however; search engines increasingly penalise sites with grammar issues or poorly written content.

Other things that will help you in the search engine rankings are ensuring that your site loads quickly which might mean ditching those high-res photos. You must also ensure that your site works across a range of browsers and devices. More people now use the internet on mobile devices than on desktop PCs so it’s no good having a site that looks great in Edge on your widescreen monitor if it won’t load properly on a smartphone.

Spreading the Word

Your site is up and running, it looks good and it’s search engine friendly. So why have only three people and a dog visited it in the past week? “If you build it, they will come,” may well have worked for Kevin Costner’s character in the film ‘Field of Dreams’, but it doesn’t apply online.

If you want people to know about your website you need to promote it. You can do this on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Set up a Facebook page linked to your site for example and get all your friends to ‘like’ it – this is the online equivalent of word of mouth marketing. 

You might also want to look at allocating a budget for some online advertising, whether it’s on social media or on other sites. There are lots of options available.

There’s a fair bit more to selling online and you’ll find you learn as you go along, but follow the basics above and you should get your eCommerce startup off on the right foot.