What does it take to set up an online store in 2024?
E-commerce is simple. You just put the products online, set prices, build a website, and sales happen. Right? Many people who don’t work in e-commerce have a glorified view of building an online store and managing one. While managing and turning a store into a business will generally take up a lot of work, sweat, and tears, starting a store in 2024 is not that challenging - or expensive. At best, I have built a functional store in less than 12 hours.
In this short blog, I will go through what it takes to set up an online store, but this is not a definitive guide, and I will not get too deep into the subject. If you are considering opening up an online store, this blog will give a quick glossary of what you should expect.
Choosing a platform for your online store
As mentioned, I will not list all options or explain each platform's pros and cons in detail. People have done that better before. While there are dozens of cart/store providers in the market, the following seven would likely be your option when running a store. I recommend Shopify as it is easy to set up and manage, and there are plenty of available resources to develop your business further. It also scales well with your business as you grow.
Tier 1 - Simple systems for individuals and small businesses
WIX With a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) based editor, WIX has made a name as one of the easiest website builders in the market.
Squarespace Squarespace offers a very intuitive builder and a lot of ready templates for websites and stores alike. They have stepped up their service in the past few years, and their latest editor is very intuitive.
Shopify Shopify is a versatile platform in that true e-commerce novices can build functional stores with relative ease. At the same time, it also functions as a decent platform for even large enterprises.
Tier 2 - Store platforms for medium-sized companies
WooCommerce WordPress-based WooCommerce is a decent option if you have experience with WordPress. However, I ranked it as Tier 2 since you need understanding and experience with WordPress and need to handle hosting separately.
BigCommerce While BigCommerce has a starter plan and can be used by even small retailers, it can showcase its capabilities better when building an extensive catalog or a more developed business.
More complex options for larger businesses
Shopify Plus Shopify Plus is the enterprise solution offered by Shopify with additional features like Shopify Wholesale, Shopify Launchpad, and Shopify Scripts, among others.
Magento / Adobe Commerce Magento is a widely used, heavily customizable store option. However, building and managing a store with Magento requires in-house software developers.
Prestashop Akin to Magento, Prestashop is a bit more resource heavy, but being an open-source platform, it has a lot of themes, modules, and features.
Build your online store
The actual store build is the most time-consuming task. For a simple store with 1-5 products, I would reserve at least 12-15 hours for the steps below. For a larger store of 100+ items, you would likely need to spend anywhere from 20-40 hours adding the products and building the navigation.
Add products - Create unique descriptions and visually compelling images for your products. Having unique, clear, and persuasive descriptions not only helps your customers but also helps bots and crawlers understand what your products are about.
Choose your sales channels - Will you only sell online? Would you also want to sell in marketplaces or social media? Consider your product and market and where you may reach them the best.
Design the store One of the most time-consuming aspects of store building is drafting the overall layout. Consider contrasting color palettes. Many providers like Shopify, Squarespace, BigCommerce, and WordPress offer templates to build on, making this step much easier.
Build navigation The store menus and categories are a crucial part of the user experience, which can break your user journey if implemented poorly. Find a store that does this well and get inspired by them.
Add content pages Terms & conditions, privacy terms, and other content pages are there for a reason. When a customer purchases an item from you, you enter into a legally binding contract.
Add payment gateway Some companies like Shopify offer payment gateways that are easy to enable, while with others, you need a separate 3rd party payment provider like Stripe to manage your payments.
Add shipping options Shipping and logistics need to be thought of and set up from day 1. Consider the delivery time and possible customs and taxes if you are selling internationally. If you don’t want to ship the items yourself, the easiest way is to partner with a 3PL company that offers pick & pack services.
Store settings Depending on the platform, these can range from a few simple settings to a large variety of settings ranging from accounts to currencies to search functionality.
Set up notifications Building transactional emails that communicate to the customer the progress of their order is time-consuming, but many platforms have ready templates that can be used for this. They are also often available in multiple languages.
Test test test! Test your store once you feel it is complete. Try mobile and desktop with various browsers to see flaws with the design or function of different areas.
Domain and name of your business
While many people start with the business’s name and only then consider the actual business around it, choosing a domain and a name should be something to spend time on. Consider Googling the name or parts of it, seeing what comes up, and checking variations of the domain using services like Godaddy or Namecheap.
As a personal example, when considering the domain for this website, I initially settled on crotrain.com. CRO train, Conversion Train, makes sense. However, then I started thinking whether Crot means anything as then the name would instead be Crot rain. Urban dictionary revealed that crot could in some slang, mean feces, so I bought a domain equivalent of poorain.com. Smooth.
One of my favorite names and domains belongs to a large Finnish electronics store called verkkokauppa.com. The name in Finnish translates to onlinestore.com. The genius of the name comes into play when people search for anything like “Apple online store” or “Refrigerator online store.” No surprise they rank very high with all of these keywords.
Hosting and tracking
Several platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, and BigCommerce offer ready hosting through their servers. The connections are generally fast and you don’t have to worry about servers. However, if you build your site or store with WordPress, you must consider hosting services. Hostgator and Bluehost are perhaps the most popular ones for this. Hosting is affordable but still something you do need to set up.
Tracking your website performance is something you should do from day 1. Google Analytics is free to use and, depending on the version and platform, easy to set up. There are other analytics platforms available, but you cannot go wrong with Google in this case. There are many guides on setting up tracking and using it to gain insights into your site performance.
Marketing your store
The common misconception that some people who don’t operate online stores have is that once the store is set up and launched, it will begin to generate traffic and sales. However, even after the page has been indexed by search engines and everything is set up, you are unlikely to receive any traffic unless you have a ready customer base. Below are a few considerations for channels to use for marketing, but in reality, you would want to build a mix of channels and a funnel where some traffic channels focus on raising awareness while others focus on the conversion. Consider your marketing budget when pricing the items. It is common to have a marketing budget of between 5-15%.
Email Start collecting an email database as soon as you begin. This can be one of your best channels if done well. If you are new to email marketing, Mailchimp is an excellent tool to start with. It is easy to use and affordable.
Social marketing offers easy access to large audiences that you can further define and filter into a suitable audience. However, as people are not there to shop, the ROI of social marketing can be challenging. It generally works better for lifestyle and fashion products and branding.
SEM Google Ads holds a dominant share in most markets, but Bing and Yahoo are also considerations for this. Google has made advertising very simple with AI-based campaigns where you mainly set the budget, languages, and the goal you want to achieve, and the AI handles the rest.
Affiliates and influencers Affiliates were a dominant part of marketing in the early 2010s, but their importance has since then declined to some extent, and the space has been taken over by influencer marketing. At best, you only pay for actual sales, so the risks are relatively low.
Price comparison sites usually operate on a CPC basis and work best for popular products like electronics and consumer goods.
Although the thought of building a store can seem daunting, many helpful resources are available. I have added below some of them. If you still feel you would instead prefer someone to help you with store building, don’t hesitate to contact me for a free 30-minute consultation.
Further reading:
Shopify 12 best e-commerce platforms compared (2022)
Forbes How to start an online store in 8 steps (2022)
Skillshop Google Analytics 4 course for beginners