Ecwid: How to Start Your Ecommerce Business and Sell Online for Free in 7 Steps

11 min read

Are you considering an easy way to start selling products online? Are you on the lookout for the right ecommerce platform to start selling whatever it is you sell online?

While starting an ecommerce business has its peculiar challenges as with every other kind of business venture, there are basic elements that make it work.

These include:

engaging websites with a great user experience (UX),
captivating product images of high quality,
premium customer support with empathy,
and good products with unique selling propositions.

The right mix of these elements certainly yields impressive results in your online store as you make money online.

Without further ado, here are tested and proven steps to follow as you begin setting up for your online business.

Step 1. Research Ecommerce Business Models

The first and most critical step to take before you start selling online is to adopt a business model. For your sales to be successful online, you need to understand the variety of business models available by making proper market research. This knowledge helps you make an informed and calculated choice which is key in building and sustaining your business.

While there are five methods to sell your products in the ecommerce landscape: D2C (Direct-to-Consumer), white label and private label, wholesaling, dropshipping, and subscription service, there are four conventional types of ecommerce models, including B2C (Business-to-Consumer), B2B (Business-to-Business), C2B (Consumer-to-Business) and C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer).

For instance, if you want to turn a profit without making a heavy initial investment at lower risk, print on demand or drop shipping model is a shrewd choice. Also, if you are big on up-front investment (like running a warehouse with stocked products), then wholesaling or warehousing (retail) model is a good idea.

However, regardless of the model or delivery system, you choose to service your potential customers, as long as you can control the content marketing and branding on focused products and services, you can then focus the rest of your energy on driving sales by monetizing traffic.

Step 2. Find and Occupy a Niche

After your research on the ecommerce business model, next, you need to find the right product with the potential for serious profitability.

In choosing a niche, start by identifying successful companies already working in this space because an absence of competition usually indicates that there’s no market, either.

On the other hand, it is important you avoid an overly congested niche or one dominated by major brands.

Your niche should ideally be something you already know something about and with which you are familiar.

For example, if you love cars and know a lot about them, car detailing products may be a great niche. If you like cooking healthy meals, keto or vegan cookbooks may be a perfect niche for you. Remember, when you drop ship, you do not have to maintain and warehouse cookbooks or car detailing products.
Another possible niche may be print-on-demand art prints or children’s books, both very popular. The advantage here is that you don’t have to keep an inventory of printed art but send any orders you get to a printer that will give you great discounts so you can keep your prices compatible.
Digital products are another great niche with the significant advantage that those products can be downloaded directly from your online store.

In addition, if your niche requires that you actually obtain your products, it is important to find the right vendors — best quality and best prices. This will be in your best interest because selling online is competitive; hence, your product quality or price may just be the difference between your gain and your competitors’ loss.

Step 3. Evaluate Your Target Market and Product Ideas

Having identified a business model and niche, next you need to know how to validate your target market and evaluate your product viability.

When selling online, you must have a target market — customers you cater to. You need to project a positive and consistent brand persona to your targetable audience — it has to match the expectation of your customers and the product you sell.

For example, if you want to sell skin care products, your target audience would primarily be women with a likely age bracket between 20 – 50. Wrinkle creams would appeal to older women, while acne creams would more likely appeal to teens.

So even without an extensive knowledge of who your target market would be, you can often just use common sense to isolate your audience. A good yardstick would be what you, yourself, would be interested in.

Asking friends and family members will already give you good insight into their buying behavior.

In addition, before investing in a product, carefully evaluate it.

Irrespective of the model you want to run, you want to test it carefully and have a proper product assessment so you can identify any potential problems and prepare answers to frequently asked questions for customer support. You can also ask family or friends about the product — did they use it? What did they think about it?

Looking for product reviews will help obtain a general impression about the product.

Relatedly, part of validating your idea is to determine the viability of it. Can your suppliers meet your pricing? What happens if your supplier falls through, is there a backup option? How much time will it take you to attain maximum sales?

All these things should be evaluated and researched before you begin the process of setting up an ecommerce business.

Step 4. Register Your Ecommerce Business

With your target market validation and product viability complete, it’s time to register your business. To properly set up your ecommerce store, you have to do the following:

Choose a business name. Ideally, your business name should be a search word for your product, so you can be found more easily. Also, remember that your business name could be reflected in your domain name. For example, for a print-on-demand service, your business name could be Great Art Prints, which then would translate into greatartprints.com as a domain name.
Register your company. The simplest way to register is to set up an LLC, and there are several very affordable companies who can do this for you.
Create your brand logo. Creating your brand logo is not just about crafting a visual identity, but it’s about embodying the essence of your brand in a single emblem. To start, think about what your brand stands for and its core values. This foundation will guide your design process.
Work out a great domain name which ideally is also a search word or phrase for your products, and get this registered. It may be that the domain you worked out is already taken. In that case, you can use a different extension such as .net or .biz or use variations of the name to get a domain that is available.

Depending on your business location or requirement, other necessary registrations may include:

Acquire business licenses. You need a business license to operate an ecommerce business, and the requirements vary from state to state. You can check with your state’s licensing board to ensure you get the correct license.
Acquire an employer identification number (EIN) which you can apply with the IRS and can be supplied in one day.
Apply for business licenses and permits as required.

Due to the peculiarity of most online marketplaces and businesses, the registration process may not be as demanding as that for offline stores, hence, one less thing to worry about.

Step 5. Write Your Business Plan

Now that your business is registered, it’s time to write your business plan. A business plan is a roadmap that helps bring your ideas and thoughts together. It is vital in determining your key performance indicators (KPIs), how to effectively reach new customers, marketing strategy to adopt, and projections to make.

Also, the business planning stage is where you make calculative decisions regarding details like your product sourcing, logistics, marketing budget, and workforce. It is important you understand all the financial resources available to you and how to fully maximize them.

Step 6. Build Your Online Store

With your financials properly analyzed and put in the right, it’s time to build your online store. In creating your online store, apart from sourcing products to sell online, there are fundamental elements to consider. From building a high-converting product page, writing appealing product descriptions, to taking attractive product photography, and choosing your store color or theme, all these and much more enhance the optics of your store.

While there are hundreds of ecommerce shopping platforms begging your attention, choosing the right ecommerce software is key to your success. Since most ecommerce solutions not only allow you to create and launch your online store, but also customize your design, add your domain name (or purchase one), manage inventory, take and ship orders, receive payment, and more — running your online business couldn’t be easier.

However, you need to carefully evaluate factors like:

the site loading speed,
interactive features,
customer experience,
compatibility with different payment gateways,
compatibility with your business structure,
your web developer skills,
search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly features,
web hosting price,
ease of checkout,
code or no-code,
ease of changing your inventory, etc.

If all this begins to sound daunting, you can always contact Ecwid to help you navigate through this process.

Step 7. Launch Your Online Store

Your online store has been set up and it’s up and running, so what’s next? Now is the time to market your products and services– drive targeted traffic to your site. After acquiring new customers and having few sales under your belt, consolidation should set in. Concentrating on your top-performing marketing strategies or expanding into new ones will help you drive traffic as well as convert that traffic to sales.

You can drive traffic to your store via paid ads and social media marketing strategies across multiple channels. In addition, you can also optimize your website site for higher conversions through SEO and take advantage of any online marketing tools that are included within your ecommerce platform.

Final Thoughts

As challenging as starting your own ecommerce business can be, it comes with its own measure of excitement and reward. With Ecwid, your online business experience is guaranteed to be seamless and profitable because we are the premium online store that offers you a free ecommerce account with all the tools you need to build, manage, and grow your business.

While we offer other services like shipping, tax, payment, and advertising options, we make it super easy for you to create a free website. Won’t you rather join the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who trust Ecwid ecommerce to sell online today?

Sell online

With Ecwid Ecommerce, you can easily sell anywhere, to anyone — across the internet and around the world.

Get started

Jul 27, 2024

About the author

Max has been working in the ecommerce industry for the last six years helping brands to establish and level-up content marketing and SEO. Despite that, he has experience with entrepreneurship. He is a fiction writer in his free time.