Over the last few years, the ecommerce sales are increasing a rate much faster than offline retail sales, and this leads to the emergence of budding entrepreneurs and “bricks and mortar” businesses to take advantage of online shopping and are turning to ecommerce for effective business opportunities.

Ecommerce businesses are excellent to go with, if it is done in a right way by taking the time to study and research about the marketplace about the opportunities that can be utilized well. However, if you want to turn your online store into a massive business, you must start putting in your time and effort to scale it up!

Here are a five basic checklist required to run a successful ecommerce business:

#1 Have a Plan & Define your Niche

The most critical part of an ecommerce business plan is to know what you are going to sell, and who the customers are! Just like any other marketing, you must have a plan – a strong foundation that provides you with goals required to focus on and the budget to work with! Another important thing is the niche – finding the best item to sell in the marketplace.

Selling “women’s accessories” is not a niche, but “women’s vintage accessories” is a niche or even you can go deeper by selling nothing but women’s vintage necklace for a better selection and less competitive than generic ones.

“You want to be specific enough to the get the right kind of clients and the least possible competition”

#2 Testing & Funding at Low Cost

Before you start a business or website, you must test it in some variations before you invest your time and money! Two main things you want to test are:

• If there’s interest in your product/service
• If your offer converts

Starting an eCommerce website does not need to be costly, but it requires essential elements to drive sales and conversions as you expect, so make sure you have a clear set budget and efforts to building up a successful ecommerce business. Also, you want to allocate certain amount of money, by knowing the legal formalities before starting an ecommerce business that includes company registration, partnering with local vendors, setting up bank account, choosing payment gateways, and getting ready with legal documents to run your business.

#3 Choosing the Right Platform to build your Website

When it comes to building an ecommerce store, you will find a wide range of options to choose the best platform and software. Because, the platform you choose is something you need to be addressed and rely on when it comes to sociability, usability, sales and marketing tools and other security factors.

When it comes to ecommerce website solution, there are two basic options:

• A hosted ecommerce platform like Shopify, Etsy or Volusion
• A custom installation of software program like Magento, WooCommerce or Cs-cart

If you are looking for a low cost readymade online store with 100+ pre-built features to drive incremental revenue, we would like to recommend EWDC, one of the best ecommerce platforms built on Magento with fully integrated features to help your business flourish with sales.

#4 Sales & Marketing

“Build it and they will come” is not at all possible for ecommerce. Getting a business live is just a beginning; you need ensure you have the right marketing strategy in place to get the best traffic and customers on the go.

Get to know about your customer’s inside out like their age, geographic location, their income, their pain points, etc. and with so many channels to reach them out, use the right medium to grab the attention of your customer! Be it paid marketing, social media, organic search traffic, email markeitng or affiliate marketing; you must first place the very least ecommerce analytics tracking system to find what’s working and what’s not.

#5 Proper & Regular Maintenance

Once everything is up and running, the final and forever step is to maintain, and monitor your business on a regular basis. It may include managing stocks and inventories, making new decisions about having to continue or discontinue products, right customer service, and technical aspects that keep the website and business healthy.

Ecommerce is not a “set and forget” like other businesses, so once if you turn up doing, you must thrive to market and sell constantly in order to achieve outstanding results.

So, what are you waiting for?

Have some queries on how to build your online store? Get in touch with us today!