Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Successful Ecommerce Business

The secret to establishing a profitable online store is to focus on a niche.

Don’t try and sell everything because that’s what the most established brands are already known for.

Aim to be known for a very specific niche, product, or service.

In the same way, your target audience should be a niche market so you only address a specific group of people.

What’s more, to create awareness for your business, branding becomes very crucial.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at each of these aspects of establishing an ecommerce store.

It’s unlikely that, as a small business owner and startup, you’ll have the budget to offer hundreds of products in every industry available.

Not to mention having the technical know-how to manage all that.

Therefore, the best way to start an ecommerce business is to focus on building a store that can stand out in the already crowded online space.

Niche-ing down is the first ingredient for such a successful online business.

So what is a niche anyway?

A good place to begin is by identifying your passions, interests, and/or skills. Answer the following questions to jumpstart your brainstorming:

Now note down all the answers to these questions.

This exercise can generate about 10 niche ideas to start an ecommerce business.

Research each of the ideas you’ve listed to find out if there’s a market — basic keyword research will do.

Begin by brainstorming some search terms related to each niche.

Plug them into a keyword tool (e.g. KWFinder) and note down the suggested words and phrases.

Having narrowed down your niche ideas to the ones with in-demand keywords, it’s time to check out potential competitors.

Take some of the keywords, one at a time, and do a Google search.

Check out the websites that appear on page 1 of Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Here’s how to analyze your findings:

Now you have your niche selected. On to the next step.

Before choosing a product or set of products, remember, the more specific you are, the better.

Offering a unique product or service is more beneficial than offering a wide range of generic items.

Selling a niche product means your business is able to provide specialized offerings or solutions for a particular set of customers in a way that a generalized store cannot.

This can make up your unique selling proposition (USP) and increase your chances of success.

So how do you choose the right product for your store? Here are a few ideas:

Once you have a list of a few niche-specific product ideas, search for each of them on Google Trends.

Go with the products that have a significantly higher search volume.

You can choose to create your own products, but that requires you to come up with an original product idea.

If that isn’t your speed, consider drop shipping or a print-on-demand business.

Ideally, setting up an ecommerce company (LLC, LLP, or Corp) is the best route since it protects you and your personal finances in case of any business losses or other liabilities.

The following are the basic things you’ll need to do to register your business:

Whichever business structure you go with, ensure you meet all laws applicable to your business — locally or internationally.

Finally, always pay the required taxes for your business when the time comes.

Educate yourself about ecommerce sales tax or consult a CPA, attorney, or tax professional to ensure you’re being tax compliant.

After registering your business, the next thing on any small business owner’s to-do list is branding.

This requires you to choose:

Let’s take a look at some of the top ecommerce platforms available:

Systeme.io is one of the most affordable tools you'll ever come across and can be adapted to suit a brick-and-mortar business too if that’s what you’re into.

Try our affordable monthly membership that starts for free and will never exceed $97/month.

This ecommerce software offers 3 plans which cost: $29.95, $79.95, and $299.95.

On the downside, UX with BigCommerce may not be the best since they offer only 2 themes which you can customize to 7 different variations.

This limits your options of how you’d like your store to appear.

BigCommerce also has no 1-click selling.

On the flip side, Shopify has a few shortcomings:

Shopify’s pricing plans include:

Let’s expound on each of these 3 areas.

People won’t automatically come to your business just because you’ve built it.

You need to actively create awareness of your ecommerce brand and attract your target audience to your store.

Here are 4 traffic sources that can increase visitors to your pages:

Yes, social media is for socializing, but you can also use it to drive traffic to your own online store.

Content is the backbone of social media marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Remember, for effective content marketing, focus on offering free, valuable information and educating your audience.

Once you’ve created one type of content, you can, later on, repurpose it and publish it on other platforms.

For example, you can turn a blog post on your website into a video and upload it on YouTube.

All in all, learn how to set up a successful email marketing strategy, and your business will thank you for it.

As the name suggests, this is the cost of landing one customer.

If the cost of acquiring one customer is greater than your customer value, you’re making a loss.

To calculate CAC, divide the monthly expenses by the number of customers acquired.

You can improve CAC by:

This indicates the average amount of money you make per order on your ecommerce store.

If the value is high, you’re generating good revenue. AOV is important because it helps you understand customer buying patterns and trends.

Here’s how you can improve AOV:

Do you know that acquiring a new customer for your store can cost up to 5X more than retaining an existing one?

That’s why it’s important to always put effort into retaining your customers.

Here’s how to calculate the lifetime value of the customer:

You got into business in order to make money, right?

If you’re not making a profit, you're not in business.

Here’s how to calculate gross profit margin:

Gross Profit Margin = (Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue x 100

The final tip for succeeding in your online business is regular page optimization.

You need to have higher conversion rates at every step of the customer’s journey towards making a purchase.

These are some of the most crucial pages for any ecommerce business:

You need to optimize these pages in order to experience higher ecommerce conversion rates.

You can use these tips to optimize your pages:

As long as you monitor and regularly optimize your online store, your online business will take off and scale tremendously.

Here are a few of the most common questions that other aspiring online business owners in the ecommerce sector ask:

Starting any business without money is difficult, but there are ways you can manage it:

Eventually, once your business will take off and start bringing in some profit, you can hire people or change platforms to help you scale further.

To make your ecommerce website popular, your brand needs to gain more visibility.

Engage with your audience more on social media platforms, optimize your content marketing, and boost SEO efforts.

Moreover, leverage the power of email marketing and use paid advertising, if you have a budget for that.

Building your own ecommerce business is as exciting as it is challenging.

You will have to adapt and adjust quite quickly once you get into the marketing world.

The process of sorting out legal documents, product selection, running an online store, and ensuring your customers are aware and satisfied with your product can seem like a very involved process, but it’s rewarding all the same.

If you really want to know, we think systeme.io is your best bet ― we offer you by far the most features for the best price.

This will help to relieve some of the pressures of setting up your ecommerce business.

Give our free version a go if you’re not sure!

Then, use this guide to help you build the perfect product and store to set out on your journey as an entrepreneur and new business owner.