Have you ever thought to set up your own very first online shop? If you want to start it onward, it is now easier more than anything. With a massive free tools & cheap web hosting, there's actually no reason that you can't have your own shopping cart or online store on the web if you have got something worth selling. Thus, all credit goes to e-commerce- this is one of the most spic & span business trends! It is a just simple process that allows to send payments to the world through internet in fractions of seconds. You are now able to sell any sort of products to one planetary stop.
That being said that Enterprise mean trade and trade mean transactions. Every individual really care about security as there are excessive issues happening across the world. Therefore, setting up an online store is not about to start up as your own blog. It demands robust security feature and careful planning anyway. Nonetheless, setting up an online store is not something that is hard to achieve. This content strives to offer quirky & helpful tips that will surely guide you to triumph your business.
Hosting your own online store
There is a slew of online places where you can easily sell stuff online, including Amazon & eBay. However, hosting your own online store empowers you and bestowing more control over the shop. And this is a tremendous opportunity for business branding and must be cost-effective, by adapting this kind of things, you can easily avoid listing & transaction fees.
Building Your Own Strategies
If you want to shape your thoughts into reality then you should think away from the computer and building your own strategies. You need to consider these things such as:
- What kind of products will you be trying to sell?
- How should your website's UI (user interface) look like?
Here's another thing that you should consider is that setting up few profiles such as Google Account. It can help your enterprise on multiple levels for a new enterprise.
Gathering What You'll Require
Apart from company's name, the products & services, you'll need to gather some essential tools for starting up your online shop. Here's the list of essential tools:
- The Domain Name & The Web Host
- Dedicated IP Address
- The Shopping Cart Script (free): Zen Cart & osCommerce are the two critical backbones of so many online stores and offering free shopping scripts. As most of the web hosts will offer the open source osCommerce script that is quickly installed. But, there are loads of scripts are available, you can install a script manually on the website. For instance, if you an individual use osCommerce, due to it is most widely accessible.
- The Payment Gateway: You'll also need an online payment processor so you can accept credit cards until you want people to mail checks. Moreover, payment gateways authorize the credit card information as well as the procedure the transaction in real time and taking a cut of the transaction and depositing the rest into your bank account.
- PayPal: it accepts all major credit cards and obvious plus an easiest solution, integrating with most major shopping carts. It has zero setup charges or monthly fees and is very quick, too.
Setting Up The Website
Once you are done with a domain name registered you can set up your website's homepage & other static pages such as information of your products). Moreover, the script can stand alone as the entire website of your business if you prefer. Instead of cart & product pages, the script is able to create static pages with company's background.
Opting For The E-Commerce Package
Generally, there are two chief categories to choose from for creating an online shop:
- Hosted eCommerce Solutions
- Bespoke-own Scripts
Hosted eCommerce Solutions: Well, there are numerous hosted solutions are out there and providing an amazing experience for the visitors. The administration panel is uniform for all other scripts that provides an easy interface to upload images & other categories. Here're the top three hosted eCommerce solutions that are stand out among all:
#1 Shopify: The website- Shopify is designed beautifully and containing some alluring demos. If you are the one who is willing to start up your online store then Shopify will be spoilt your for choice. It includes-
- SSL security
- Unlimited Server Bandwidth
- Personal App Store
- Customized Mobile Template
Shopify- the script that offers a lot to “user customized” than any other. In the admin panel (backend), you can choose among tons of themes to utilize your own website. If you have a little bit knowledge of HTML/CSS then you can also edit the raw website design online. It is also offering simple yet alluring UI for beginners. This is not everything regarding Shopify, it also includes Live Chat & Contact 24x7 support.
If you have some standard knowledge about HTML then go for Shopify.
#2 BigCommerce: This is the software that could be compared to Shopify with clipped features. It offers clean UI (User Interface) that eliminates a lot of turmoil in the procedure of Signups. With BigCommerce, you can easily add new features, users, products as well as take payments online in just couple of minutes.
You will also able to include details from so many accounts across the web as in Facebook, PayPal, MasterCard. It also offers customized templates to choose from so that you'll never be worried regarding branding.
#3 Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (YMS): For young startups, Yahoo merchant solutions can be your foremost choice. The layout is completely straight forward and very easy to bespoke. It also provides customized traffic analytic plus split testing that is just start from the admin panel of yours. The most popular payment gateways supports, including money orders, PayPal, Checks & Credit cards. This will be an ultimate choice and it can manage entire store deployment & launch.
Bespoke-own Script: For developers, it may be easier to work within their own boundaries. There is a slew of online scripts, but we recommend you four among so many. These are featured open-source e-commerce shopping carts such as:
Zen Cart
Magento
Interspire Shopping Cart
WordPress eShop
Takeaway!
This utter guide explained the simple yet essential things to set up your first online store. We have explained myriad things about it. But it's not a cakewalk to start to finish since even professional web developers still find it a little bit tough when it comes to open e-commerce stores. Nonetheless, once you go through with these above guide then you'll surely cope up with things if you are new in this.
