For a newbie in online business, starting one could be very serious hard work as you will have to sort through lots of information gotten from long and stressful hours surfing the net.

With so many steps and decisions to make on virtual almost every single issue, it is easy to get overwhelmed with the process.

The idea that you should work with is that the whole process of ecommerce is simply

• Manufacturer = Product= Retailer= Consumer=Profit.
• All you are doing is to get a PRODUCT from a manufacturer to the final consumer.
• Hence the First thing is
• Choosing your Product
• Finding a Product

Choosing a product that will be quick to sell at a profit could be said to be a right product. This is the first step to building an ecommerce business. Often this could be a very challenging task as a newbie will just end up wondering how on end he will know a product that is right for him.

• A simplified way of finding a right product is by following the trends.
• Product opportunities often are found when you explore the market places and find out what is trending.
• Evaluate your Product
• The moment you have gotten a product idea in your mind, you need to evaluate both the market demand and the viability of the product.
• Obtaining the Product
• The next step is for you to make arrangement in order to have access to the product.
• Getting your product could be by any of the following methods;
• Making it yourself
• From a manufacturer
• Buying Wholesale
• Dropshipping

Preparation before Startup

After you have located a product, evaluate its market potential and gotten a ready supplier, it is then time to prepare for the business setup itself.

Check out the Competition

In this phase of the business setup, you need to research and analysis the competition around your intended product sale.

An important method is by using keywords within the niche you found yourself. Using any very effective keywords tool will allow you know most of what you need to know for you campaign.

Business Plan

• A business plan is essential for you to know how to arrange your ideas and carry them out.
• Your Business Setup and Registration
• Domain Name, Registration and Hosting
• Getting your online business name is then next. This should be as close as possible to the keyword that answers to the niche in which your product is located.
• You could easily search for domain name among the major sites that provide for domain names and web hosting.
• We personally recommend using different providers for the domain name and the Web hosting.
• Once this is done it is then high time to officially register your business.

Building your Site

This used to be an area where you could spend days just trying to understand hml or other codes necessary for web building.

Now WordPress simplifies all that.

Simply create a website in minutes using wordpress or get a paid estore from any leading player in the business.

Estore Launch

One of the easiest way to handle this is using websites like Shopify that gives you a comprehensive package as there are many vital components that need to be taken into consideration launch an estore.

Writing product descriptions that sell

Marketing Strategies to acquire customers

Configuring payment gateways

Logistics

Order Fulfillment and Inventory Management

All this will help you in arranging for successful sales and shipping of good to their final destination.

Don’t forget, if you run into any problems getting your store set up, you can always hire help from the Experts.

Marketing your Estore

We decided to throw more light on this as most of your success depends on how well you get potential buyers to view your products.

Email and mobile marketing are very essential tools for your estore and also your online presence in other social media platforms.

In Summary

Setting up an active and viable online ecommerce business is no small feat. Right from choosing a product and building an estore to the marketing and selling of the product it is filled with making various decisions.

There are various ways to achieving the same level of success in ecommerce business but we do advise find on e and stick to it.

One of the Real Home Based Business Opportunities is Starting Ecommerce Business. Let look at Six Simple Steps

Part of the fast ways to make money online is e-commerce, according to the U.S. Census Data, this mode of doing business is increasing at a rapid rate than the conventional offline retail sales.

It is said to have ranked in over $190 billion in sales in a single year. Hence it has become a magnet to all entrepreneurs who wishes to explore the opportunities that abound online.

One of the challenges with the boom in internet marketing and ecommerce is the availability of volumes of information (ironically this ought to be a good thing) that you will have to sieve through in order to get the precise information you want.

You only need to Google starting e-commerce business and see the number of webpages on it.

With the huge interest on starting an ecommerce business, we have decided to summarize six simple and straight forward steps to starting ecommerce business, along with some useful links that will be of great benefit.

1. Define your Niche and Business

Defining what your business structure will be is paramount in ecommerce, what you will be selling and why should people buy from you is key to your business plan. This could be simply be as Where to sell, What to sell and Why will people buy from you.

Where to sell – You need to define if you will be selling on your Website or on somebody else’s site.

To build your own website, it is advised that you used the known major players in the industry in Domain Name Purchase and in Website Hosting

Godaddy is the leading name in domain name sales while for website hosting is known as Ipage. Both are good and you could use either of them.

We do prefer using different service providers for the purchase of the Domain Name and Website Hosting.

Remember to first find out what Niche you want to focus on and then search for keywords that will help you choose a name for your website.

A very good Niche and Keyword search tool you will find useful is known as Jaxxy.

What to sell – Knowing what to sell is critical to the success of your ecommerce business. You have or be as specific as possible and find a niche that you have passion for or you can build up yourself as an authority on the subject matter. You should be able to get across to the right customers and also encounter the least competition. You also need to decide if you are going to do the actual sale or be an affiliate to the one selling.

Remember, selling products means you will have to include logistical issues like shipping, storage and initial purchase.

Why will people buy form you – You are expected to be able to offer what will give you the extra edge over all your competitors. This could be in the form of customer service, technical support or information on products.

Get a Blueprint or Plan

It is logical and business wise to come up with a business plan. Without one, you will not be focused and will not be able to accomplish your tasklist in the time line you are using. You could end up overspending, or putting effort on unnecessary issues.

The advantage of ecommerce business is that it could be very cost effective as the startup could cost you next to nothing. Major cost is for your domain name which we do advise you get. It is strongly advised that you don’t put in much until it has started bring in some revenue stream and is established in the Niche you choose.

Build a Website

Most online marketers will tell you that it is 99% better when the website you are has your domain name. These days it is very easy for you to build a website using different platform but wordpress still remains at the top of the pack. You could also build an estore using any of the platforms available.

For ecommerce stores, one of my top recommendations is shofity

Generate Visitors’ traffic to your Website

One of the major activities you will be involved in is to drive traffic to your website in order to create opportunities for site visitors to be able to see your products and buy them. Search Engine Optimization is also very essential in order for your website to be ‘found’ in search engine results.

There are SEO service providers that can help you enhance your SEO. One free SEO enhancing tool is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Lastly, Follow the Rule Book!

It is important that you familiarize yourself with the laws that govern your starting a business online and you abide by them.

Starting and growing any ecommerce business does not flow as most individuals conventionally think and believe.

A lot of people feel that making a website SEO complaint, having a social media presence and doing some form of advertisement could lead to an overnight success of the ecommerce business.

Sorry to burst your bubble if you are of that mindset!

Before you can maintain traction as it affects your Ecommerce Startups, you have to first sort the problem of generating early traction.

Every Ecommerce Startup is faced with getting its products and services to the attention of the potential customers.

Without getting your Ecommerce products to the real people who are interested in them, you might end up not having any real grip on your ecommerce business.

What has been the Norms

Opening and maintaining a related page on your ecommerce business in any social medium may not always be an answer to generating traffic or traction to your ecommerce business or Estore.

Imagine posting to articles to your facebook which might contain very few of the relevant potential customers.

Also, it is no longer news that search engines like Google do not usually trust new websites. It takes a while to rank well with them.

Instead of depending more on SEO, Social Media, Family and Friends to spread the word on your ecommerce business, you really need to roll up your sleeve and get a grip on your ecommerce startup.

How will you go about it?

To get traction on your Ecommerce Startup, you will need to:

Reach out to bloggers

Most ecommerce start-ups usually expects that building traffic is through creating active presence in the social media and having Search Engine Optimization of your website.

Note! Building traffic usually is through building up backlinks that will also help to optimise your search engine ranking.

Conventionally, doing business involves showing up door to door, dialling individuals, sending letters and any other forms of hustling.

Now with the advent of the internet, hustling online has gone a step further. You have got to reach out to bloggers, send out emails and carry out mobile marketing.

Individuals that responded to your articles and your customers can then be directed to your social media accounts. Usually the process is once you have sales, you can then build an advertisement budget and experiment with the budget for the best effect.

Requesting guest posts

Apart from reaching out to bloggers, another way to get early traction is to be a guest blogger on an authoritative site.

The more you write on any subject matter, the more site visitors “sees” you as an authority on that subject. This makes it easier for them to take to your advices or recommendations.

Asking for product reviews

Apart from the two methods above, you could also put out your product and ask individuals to examine and review your product(s).

The idea is to generate alot of backlinks to your set and thereby causing it to rank favourably on the search engines.

Also when people rate your product(s) very well, it tends to build potential customers’ confidence to buy such product(s)

Reaching out to potential cross-marketing partners

A great way of getting traction for an ecommerce startup is by quickly building partnership with leaders in the niche you are operating within.

Starting Ecommerce Business is strong on this as it believes to hit the ground running you have to “Sit on the shoulders of Giants”.

In operating our Ecommerce Businesses, we make uses of the services of ecommerce giants like BigCommerce for their great platform to create successful online stores, which including a securely hosted site, shopping cart, product catalog and more.

Another giant we make use of is 3dCart which is an Inc. 5000 company, a Visa PCI Certified provider, and a pioneer in mobile commerce and social media marketing.

Knowing we are directly partnering with Ecommerce Websites who tops the chart as service providers gives us the necessary edge.

Getting featured in videos

Having your website or Ecommerce business featured in videos and another medium especially in the news or video by any authority in your niche. This will definitely generate target traffic to your website or Estore. Partnering with authorities in your market niche could get them to feature you in one or more videos in order to boost your business since it will be of mutual benefit.

Getting on the shelves of local stores

You should still note that not every individual rely completely on the internet when it comes to product search. It pays to use the conventional retail stores to pass across information about your product(s).

Get your products unto the shelves of retail stores and where it is related services you provide, hand out bills on your services and the website to visit.

Pulling a stunt that gets press

For those that can pull it off, nothing generates quick traffic to your site as creating a sensational stunt that gets you media attention.

Creating a buzz online or offline is great for business as it generates traffic and creates more awareness about your products and services.

Mindset for all Startups

We believe you have heard of hard-nosed hustling, that is the best way to start and stay in business.

Social media, SEO and Advertisement should only be tools to enhance your business and not the main vehicle to drive your business. Their involvement could increase with time but not you depending on only one form to generate backlinks.

When starting an Ecommerce Business why post to an empty or new Facebook page and “Pinning” to empty boards?

Very Ridiculous! That is if you ask me!

On the Social platforms, partner with people who run active pages or group and get featured on an active Pinterester’s board. Always talk to people with reach or should I say sit on Giants!

If you want early traction, you need to reach out and take it.

Learn to hit the ground running by “sitting on the shoulders of Giants”.

When starting ecommerce business, you need to understand your options, you could either use any of the free start up web stores or you could use the paid version.

To really kick the ground running you will have to make use of any of the top ecommerce websites.

Thankfully this eliminates one major headache of the ecommerce newbie, getting your own online store up and running including the search for products and operating payment gateways.

Using any of these platforms adds all other necessary functionalities for your website.

With any of these shopping cart services you could have your online store launched in easy steps with all the functionality you desire.

Let quickly consider a couple of them.

Big commerce – This is an online ecommerce website that provides a lot of functionalities and cool web store.

Each Big Commerce Estore could be easily built with a drag and drop functionally. It also contains alot of W3C compliant templates which has also been optimised by experts in SEO.

Shopify – Easily one of the best ecommerce platforms in existence.

They offer some of the amazing tools to allow the creation of an online store from the design, hosting and up to the security of the Estore.

Shopify provides services to make your ecommerce experience worthwhile.

You could easily grow your ecommerce business using their marketing tools, scalable storage Google adwords credit and other such features.

1st Shopping Cart – This is another great and efficient platform to use.

They provide various online tools to enhance your ecommerce operations.

They also provide you with a centralized and automated solution to help you in managing all your ecommerce business activities.

3d Cart – 3d Cart provides you with a software that will easily build you an online store.

The ecommerce platform is complete and robust with hundreds of features build directly into the software, It is easy and effectively to operate.

The 3d Cart ecommerce Platform is highly recommended

One of the best ways to starting an ecommerce business is by creating the estore using wordpress.

You could easily install the wordpress, choose any theme that suits the purpose, with an ecommerce plugin and some extensions.

Using this you could build your online ecommerce store and include all the features that will be needed to sell your products and maintaining an excellent marketing experience.

We will consider all you need for your ecommerce store to be operational with WordPress, from the domain name and hosting payment to any additional features you might want to add to the store.

Although wordpress is absolutely free, some of the themes, plugin and extensions are not.

In building an effective estore with lots of the needed functionality, you will have to at least add some of the paid plugin and extensions.

This post is simply to let you know how to spend as little as possible to build the estore of your liking.

Remember! We are looking at building an effective functional estore while incurring minimum expenses using wordpress as the platform.

In this post the actual cost likely to be incurred right from getting a domain name and paying for hosting service for the wordpress platform, to getting all the recommended extensions that will be needed will be listed.

This is to help make it easier to plan for and build your own estore.

From Domain Name to Installing WordPress

Looking at installing wordpress as your estore platform, you could use any of the following to get both the domain name and hosting services. These are some of the best service providers online with minimum cost implications

Godaddy

Ipage

Namecheap

Cost: Hosting from $3.95 per month + domain name ($10)

Most web hosting service includes a free domain name, but it is preferred your getting your domain from another provider.

You do have lots of options to choose from but like we said in our ‘about us’ page, one of the objectives we have is to assist individuals hit the ground running and avoid spending ages going through the net for options. ipage is our recommended Domain and Hosting Service Provider

Ecommerce Theme

Ecommerce themes available for your wordpress platform are numerous but it is advisable to get a theme that is well supported and cared for by its creator.

That been said, there are lots of ecommerce themes that you could find to use but we do recommend a paid theme.

Investing in an ecommerce ensures a long shelf life and a support team if any problem arises down the line.

Usually we recommend starting with a free version of the theme and later upgrading to the premium version.

Cost: $50 to $100

WordPress Ecommerce Plugins

There are lots of free ecommerce plugins available for wordpress. Depending on what type of products you intend to sell. Two free ecommerce plugin are recommended.

WooCommerce for physical products

Easy Digital Downloads plugin for digital products

Cost: free

Brand Estore Logo

This is an important aspect of branding your business. It is essential to all businesses. With your online ecommerce store, you could simply place an order for your logo on Fiverr

A logo is necessary to portray a good image online of your estore to your potential customers.

Cost: from $5

Ecommerce Extensions

Getting the needed ecommerce extensions usually do incur cost.

Most of them do usually give the main core plugin for free but charge you for adding the extra features to your online store.

Most add-ons for ecommerce plugin are not free so it is not just peculiar to the wordpress platform.

WooCommerce Add-on is very popular and effective.

Getting the core WooCommerce plugin will allow you to accept payments for purchases of your products.

However the additional extension allows you to offer your customers the additional details of more payment options and it also streamline the checkout process.

This at the end of the day makes the whole process more users friendly and more professional.

Some add-on for the core WooCommerce plugin includes

Having this add-ons are to able you be able to add more payment options to your store and also be able to set multiply shipping rates based on the individual details supplied.

Adding the WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is important. There are also add-ons which detect abandoned shopping carts and then emails the shopper to prompt them to complete the transaction. These plugins can help you recover what would otherwise be lost sales and revenue, making them a worthwhile investment.

Conclusion

From the above stated estimates in the various components of your estore, you could easily plan and start your ecommerce business spending very little capital. You could also decide and use shopify complete ecommerce business building package

The total cost for your shopify estore is $99

Most people on the internet are out searching for how to make money fast online!

While other are on the internet making money off those searching for ways to make money fast online!

The deciding factor to which category you fall into is your having the right information or not.

There are actual lots of ways you could make money online, simply by selling your services or products.

With the emergence of the internet, transacting business online has rapidly overtaken all conventional ways of doing business.

Smart entrepreneurs have taken to the internet like a swamp of bees to grab huge chuck of the internet pie.

Fast Money Online

Are you really interested in starting an ecommerce business?

For those of you thinking of exploring ecommerce business opportunities, we will be briefly looking at starting an ecommerce business.

One of the fastest ways of making money online is trading in FOREX! You could make tons of money overnight, playing the market.

You could also get burnt! and badly too.

I know because I do trade in it. Make some cool money but also did lost my investment.

Throughout the years, the preferred way of making money online is by building multiple streams of passive income or building an ecommerce store.

Real Online Money?

It is still surprising that some people actually exist that takes online success stories with a pinch of salt. We still do have lots doubting thomases!

It took me over two years to come to terms that any serious minded individual can actually make money online.

The simplest way of making money online is by selling a product using the internet as a medium and getting paid. The process could also be modified to various complex forms to achieve the propose.

We would not be looking at this as I believe you want to see how you could make money on the internet and fat too!

Best Money Online

Since I discovered that you could actually make money online, I had felt I have to break off my own chuck of the pie and build myself an online empire!

I tried most of the free stuffs and services rendered but a lot of them were a mere waste of time and effort.

I candid advise, when it comes to building your online financial presence, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.

You might have to spend some money to really build something reasonable and secured.

The best money making ecommerce business online is selling dropshipping products!

How does this works!

You purchase the products that your customers demand from your estore from a third party and have the third party ship the product directly to your customer.

You never get to see nor handle the product. A major advantage is that you the merchant do not do any inventory nor stock up your products.

Usually you get to buy inventory as the need arises from the third party to fulfil your customers order.

The third party who usually is the wholesale supplier also gets paid for the product when the customers effects payment.

This is my best online money making model as it requires very little money for your ecommerce business startup. You could launch your business without investing thousands in products inventory upfront.

We at Starting Ecommerce Business has used this to our advantage hence launching a couple of Estore on the Shopify platform while partnering with world wide brand for one of the world’s largest directory of dropship wholesale suppliers.

More reasons for Dropship Estores

It is for me, one of the easiest to setup. You can hit the ground running as you build an ecommerce website or store with millions of certified products.

Like I hinted earlier, with dropshipping you don’t handle order fulfillment and product inventory. You also have low overhand as you are spared the cost implications of shipping the products

And like me, you could operate and manage your business while still in your pyjamas!