Setting Up an e-commerce Business
If you are new to the world of online retail and are looking to step into e-commerce for the first time, there can be a lot of learning required. It is not immediately obvious what’s required to get a new online business off the drawing board and into production.
Setting up an eCommerce business these days are in boom and are flourishing at the rate of knots. Everyone is looking to get online and shop. Getting online and shopping is like a hot knife through butter. Suppose you want to purchase a pair of sports shoes just go to any eCommerce website and select your shoe, select payment mode, make the payment and that’s it, you are done. Within a couple of working days, it will be delivered to your doorsteps.
But it is easier said than done. It takes loads of planning and continuous work on the website to achieve the goals. So the most important challenges for startup eCommerce business are:
Customer Acquisition – That requires Marketing/Publicity dedicated team means continuous investment.
Reliable Logistics and Supply Chain – Delivering the product is also big challenge while maintaining the quality and with COD factor.
Payment Collection – Dependent on bank and payment gateway. Failure in online transaction can cost a big potential customer, so this is big challenge
Customer Service – Before and after sales support to provide quality service. This also helps in building the trust between the customers and company.
Raising Funds to Scale – There should be backup funds to run the operations successfully as there is a continuous investment in the form of salaries, marketing, advertisement and maintain the business.
What are the reasons for online shopping boom?
User-friendly shopping experience – Mobile Apps, Attractive website.
Loads of discounts and offers – Email marketing, TV commercials.
Comfortable Payment Modes – COD, Credit Cards, Net Banking, Debit Cards etc.
Good Policies for trust building – Refund and Replacement Policy.
Due to these features it makes the user get attracted and buy online instead of tedious shopping while going to market.
So now if you are planning to set up a new eCommerce business, so what should you keep in your mind?
Setting Up an eCommerce Business
First thing for setting up an eCommerce business is selecting a Domain Name for your eCommerce website. Select your domain name relevant to your business and try to register country specific domain also. For example if you are from India, do purchase .in domain name along with .com and .net domain name.
The second thing is developing a website. It should be user-friendly, socially equipped, complete company details with company address, vat number, email id and contact numbers. This built trust as the company grows.
The third thing is choosing the best hosting provider and type of server that suits your requirement. For the eCommerce website, it is always recommended to go for VPS or Dedicated Server. This helps in maintaining the load time for the website. Lower is the load time higher will be the traffic and higher will be the sales. So choose wisely your hosting provider and Hosting plan on which you are going to host your business website.
Wrap Up:
For setting up an eCommerce business, we need eCommerce hosting. Technically it should have good Domain Name, Web Server, Email Solution, Payment Gateway and SSL Certificate. In this Web Server is the most important part as that will contain the files for your website. Apart from this, you should have decent funding for marketing like PPC, SEO, Social Media and Email Marketing. All these need money, so you technically need good financial backup. After that good backend team for customer satisfaction like before sale queries and after sales queries handling, logistic partners and good term and condition policies.