How to sell online – Build your business from zero

With the increase of the eCommerce market and sales year after year, it is clear that eCommerce is the present and the future of how people will do business and shopping. Now it is so easy to have your online store created and built within 5 minutes that everyone is joining this sector and starting to sell online with eCommerce Ads. No matter if you already have a physical store or if you are just a business newbie, having an online store is considered a must because of the numerous benefits that it has to offer:

• You don’t have to pay rent.
• Your online store will be available to make sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• You can add as many products as you want to your store.
• You can reach far more customers compared to a physical store.
• Online marketing actions you make have a much higher impact.

These are some of the main reasons why you should create and build your eCommerce store.

If you’ve already decided to open your online store but don’t know how to go about it, this is definitely the post for you. 

Which platform to choose: Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Wix

A CMS, Content Management System, will allow you to easily create an online store with almost no coding skills. These CMS platforms are what make creating an online store so easy and accessible for everyone. There a lot of different CMS platforms but in this post we are going to talk about five of them, Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Wix:

Reasons to choose Shopify as your platform

• • The creation of the shop is instant, takes as little as 5 minutes.
  • There are 3 types of paid plans you can choose from.
  • It is a cloud solution, which means that you don’t have to worry about getting a hosting for your store.
  • It has a drag and drop feature that allows you to easily customize your online store and give it the touch that you want.

Reasons to choose PrestaShop as your platform

• • There are more personalization options since it can be done through coding.
  • You don’t have to pay because it is an open source platform, but you have to find a hosting in order to make your store available online.
  • Prestashop is known to be SEO friendly as it offers so many customization options in terms of SEO.

Reasons to choose WooCommerce as your platform

• • There are a lot of themes you can choose from to customize your store.
  • Same as PrestaShop, there are no paid plans but you will need to find yourself a hosting service to make your store available online.
  • Huge active community of users.

Reasons to choose BigCommerce as a platform

Wide range of features and tools: BigCommerce offers a wide variety of features and tools that make it easy to create and manage an online store.

• Scalability and flexibility: With BigCommerce, you can scale your store as your business grows. 
• Security and reliability: BigCommerce prides itself on offering a secure and reliable platform for your online transactions.
• Technical support and active community: BigCommerce has a dedicated technical support team that is available to help you at any time. 

Reasons to choose Wix as your platform:

• Ease of use: Wix is known for its user-friendly interface and intuitive editor.
• Variety of templates and layouts: Wix offers a wide selection of pre-designed templates and layouts to help you create an online store that perfectly suits your style and brand. 
• Third-party integrations: Wix offers a wide range of third-party integrations that allow you to add additional functionality to your online store. 
• Affordable pricing: Wix offers a variety of pricing plans to suit different budgets.

How to create your store: Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Wix

Now, let’s see how to create an online store on the various platforms:

How to create a store with Shopify

Shopify is a leading platform for creating online stores. Here’s a basic guide to creating your store with Shopify:

• Sign up for Shopify: Visit the Shopify website and sign up for an account. Provide the required information and follow the steps to create your store.
• Choose a pricing plan: Shopify offers several pricing plans, from basic to advanced. Choose the plan that best suits your needs and budget.
• Customize your store: Use Shopify’s theme editor to customize the design and look of your store. You can choose from a variety of professional themes and customize them according to your preferences.
• Add products: Use Shopify’s admin panel to add your products to the store. Fill in detailed information for each product, such as description, price, images, etc.
• Configure payment and shipping methods: Configure the payment methods you want to offer to your customers, as well as shipping and delivery options. Shopify offers a wide range of payment and shipping options so you can choose the ones that best suit your business.
• Optimize for SEO: Use Shopify’s SEO tools to optimize your store and products for search engines. This will help you improve your online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your store.
• Launch your store: Once you’ve set everything up according to your preferences, you’re ready to launch your store. Announce the opening of your online store on your social networks and start promoting your products to attract your first customers.

How to create a store with PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open source platform for creating online stores. Here is a basic guide to create your store with PrestaShop:

• Download and install PrestaShop: Visit the PrestaShop website and download the latest version of the software. Follow the installation instructions to install PrestaShop on your web server.
• Configure basic settings: Complete the basic settings for your store, such as currency, language, payment and shipping options, etc. PrestaShop provides a setup wizard to guide you through this process.
• Customize your store: Use PrestaShop’s theme editor to customize the design and appearance of your store. You can choose from a variety of pre-installed themes and customize them according to your preferences.
• Add products: Use the PrestaShop admin panel to add your products to the store. Fill in detailed information for each product, such as description, price, images, etc.
• Optimize for SEO: Use PrestaShop’s SEO tools to optimize your store and products for search engines. This will help you improve your online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your store.
• Configure advanced features: Explore PrestaShop’s advanced configuration options to add additional features to your store, such as additional payment options, integrations with shipping service providers, etc.
• Launch your store: Once you have configured everything according to your preferences, you are ready to launch your store. Announce the opening of your online store on your social networks and start promoting your products to attract your first customers.

How to create a store with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a popular solution for creating online stores with WordPress. Here is a basic guide to create your store with WooCommerce:

• Install WordPress: If you don’t already have a WordPress website, install it on your server. You can download WordPress for free from its official website and follow the installation instructions.
• Install the WooCommerce plugin: Once WordPress is up and running, install the WooCommerce plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. Activate the plugin and follow the setup wizard to configure your store.
• Configure basic settings: Complete the basic settings of your store, such as currency, units of measure, payment and shipping options, etc.
• Customize your store: Use WooCommerce customization options and WordPress themes to customize the design and appearance of your store. You can choose from a wide variety of free and paid themes to create a unique and attractive store.
• Add products: Use the WooCommerce admin panel to add your products to the store. Fill in detailed information for each product, such as description, price, images, etc.
• Optimize for SEO: Use WordPress SEO tools and SEO plugins to optimize your store and products for search engines. This will help you improve your online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your store.
• Launch your store: Once you have configured everything according to your preferences, you are ready to launch your store. Announce the opening of your online store on your social networks and start promoting your products to attract your first customers.

How to create a store with BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another popular platform for creating online stores. It offers a wide range of features and tools that make the process of creating and managing a store quite simple. Here is a step-by-step guide to creating your store with BigCommerce:

• Sign up for BigCommerce: Visit the BigCommerce website and sign up for an account. Provide the required information and follow the steps to create your store.
• Choose a pricing plan: BigCommerce offers a variety of pricing plans to suit different needs and budgets. Choose the plan that best suits your requirements.
• Customize your store: Use BigCommerce’s customization tools to design the look and feel of your store. You can choose from a variety of themes and templates, as well as adjust colors, fonts and design elements according to your preferences.
• Add products: Use the BigCommerce admin panel to add your products to the store. Fill in the relevant information for each product, such as description, price, images, etc.
• Configure payment and shipping methods: Configure the payment methods you wish to offer your customers, as well as shipping and delivery options. BigCommerce offers integrations with various payment providers and shipping services to facilitate this process.
• Optimize for SEO: Use BigCommerce’s SEO tools to optimize your store and products for search engines. This will help you improve your online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your store.
• Launch your store: Once you have configured everything according to your preferences, you are ready to launch your store. Announce the opening of your online store on your social networks and start promoting your products to attract your first customers.

How to create a store with Wix

Wix is an all-in-one website creation platform that also allows you to create an online store quickly and easily. Here’s a basic guide to creating your store with Wix:

• Sign up for Wix: Visit the Wix website and sign up for an account. You can choose from a variety of plans, including a free plan with basic features.
• Choose a store template: Wix offers a wide selection of templates designed specifically for online stores. Explore the available options and choose the one that best suits the style and theme of your store.
• Customize your store: Use the intuitive Wix editor to customize the design and appearance of your store. You can easily change colors, fonts, images and element layout.
• Add products: Use the Wix admin panel to add your products to the store. Fill in detailed information for each product, such as description, price, images, etc.
• Configure payment and shipping methods: Configure the payment methods you want to offer your customers, as well as shipping and delivery options. Wix integrates several payment providers and shipping services to facilitate this process.
• Optimize for SEO: Use Wix’s SEO tools to optimize your store and products for search engines. This will help you improve your online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your store.
• Launch your store: Once you have configured everything according to your preferences, you are ready to launch your store. Announce the opening of your online store on your social networks and start promoting your products to attract your first customers.

Get traffic to your store

Once you have decided which CMS to use, created, customized and uploaded products to your store – it’s time to start bringing traffic to your website so that you can start driving sales. You must know that there are many different kinds of traffic to attract customers:

• Paid Traffic: as its name says, it refers to the traffic that we bring by using paid platforms such as Google Ads, Facebooks Ads, Instagram Ads, etc. It is definitely a great way to bring initial traffic to your website.
• Organic Traffic: it is the traffic that comes when someone searches for our website on Google, Bing… This is the kind of traffic that we will be getting if we work on our SEO strategy. This is a really important traffic that we should be working on because it is mainly free! That means that if we improve our store the right way, we will be getting free traffic and customers.
• Referral Traffic: this is  the traffic that we get from other websites. For example: maybe someone talked about us and put a link to our store on his or her blog. All the people that come to our website through that link will be considered referral traffic.
• Social Traffic: traffic that comes from social media. For example: We made a giveaway on our social media and we put a link to our online store.
• Direct traffic: It is the traffic that you get when people directly type your URL on their browser.

Improve your store’s conversion

So by now, we have our online store and we are bringing traffic to it. Now it is time to optimize our store so that we can sell more with almost the same traffic. This is what we call improving the conversion rate of your store. There are many ways to do it, but here are some of our recommendations:

• Build your store well, avoid using aggressive colors such as dark red or dark orange. Also avoid using colors that have no synergy between them. It is really important to build your store well because you have to gain the trust of your potential customers.
• Always use high quality pictures, never use blurry ones because people won’t be able to see the product they want to buy and will also make your shop look like a scam or phishing page.
• Try to offer a lot of different payment methods, the more you offer the better for the customer!
• Make contact information visible to customers, make them feel that they can contact you at any time.
• Make sure that your store is responsive on different devices. There’s a huge increase in people that use their phone and tablets to surf the web and make purchases. So a good optimization is making sure that you don’t lose mobile and tablet customers.
• If your customers have to sign in if they want to make a purchase, make sure that the process is as smooth and painless as possible. Offer them to log in using their Google or Facebook account.

Improve your store’s retention & gain customer loyalty.

The final step is working on your store’s retention strategy and trying to make loyal customers. It is known that it’s way more difficult and expensive to turn a non-customer to a customer than making a pre-existing customer buy from us again. This is the main reason why you should also focus efforts to make your current customers comfortable and have them come back to buy from you in the future. Here are some of our recommendations:

• Make sure that you are selling a quality product. If you don’t, you risk losing customers from buying again. 
• Make sure that your post-sale attention is great. Many people think that once the sale is done our relationship with the customer is also over, which is a huge error. Be always available for the customer when they have any kind of problem or question.
• After buying a couple of times from you, offer that customer some kind of gift or a generous discount!
• Interact with your customers using social media, post comments or give likes!
• If there’s an issue with a customer, be sure to solve it within 24 hours. Errors can happen, but if you prove to the customer that no matter what happens you will be ready to solve the problem as fast as possible, this is definitely a big point for you.

Did you like our guide of how to start selling online? Did we miss any information that you wish to know? Let us know in the comments section below! Btw, have you had a chance to explore the PMAX campaigns initiated by Google and Microsoft? They’re certainly not to be overlooked!