Your online shop

7 Important Things To Know Before Starting Your Online Shop

You probably heard the words many times:
Hey, I have opened an online shop!
But you might have rarely heard the words:
My online shop just reached a milestone of 10k sales!

Why does it happen?

The answer is simple. Many people launched their online shop before taking adequate preparation and gathering important knowledge. The rest of the article is for you if you don’t want to be one of those many people!

1. Uniqueness

When You start thinking to launch an online shop the first question will be raised about the products. The product should be unique enough in terms of availability and demand. If the product is such common that people can get it within his walking distance then it might not be a good selection.

The product should not be so common in the existing online shops. So before selecting any products, you should consider the mentioned uniqueness criteria.

2. Know about competitors

Having information about the competitors is important for all business. In case of online business, it is easier to know about the competitors because the business strategy is almost open and you can get enough data visiting competitor’s shop.

3. Budget and Strategy Plan

It is important to make a budget plan based on your raised fund. If the budget is not set for each sector properly then it is obvious that almost 50% or more of your total investment will be wasted.

It will not be a good idea at all to define strategies based on generic customers. A good research need to be done to know the target customers of your products. To be exact, strategies should be be specified based on the customer age groups and gender.

4. Selection of best platform

The platform selection should be taken care of properly because it will be important factor for impacting in the conversion rate (the rate of converting visitors into your customers).  It can be decided by studying yourself or by consulting with the relevant experts.

5. User friendly shipping and payment system

The most convenient way of shipping should be chosen for products delivery to your customers. At the beginning of the business, third party shipping can be used to keep the delivery cost low.

Besides all common international payment gateways (like Paypal, Credit card), the popular local payment systems should be available as well to make the payment system easy for all types of customers.

6. Marketing Policy

If the perfect marketing policy is not made the other preparations will go in vain. Digital Marketing is the most important part of your marketing policy because the target customers are the internet users. So it is important to allocate enough budget for digital marketing.

7. Quality of Product and Customer Support

The golden rule of long run business whether it is online or offline is gaining trust of the customers. Although following a good marketing strategy a huge amount of customers can be gained initially but it will not take long time to lose customers quickly if proper customer support and quality of the products are not ensured. No one should ignore the power of word of mouth marketing if he or she really wants to develop a sustainable business.

The online shop revolution is going on for last few years all over the world. It is becoming more competitive day by day though still there is a huge chance to establish online shop if all the above mentioned factors are considered properly.

I will be happy to hear from you about any queries, suggestions or even if you have some experiences about your online shop already.  Best wishes!

Tareq Mahmud Chowdhury
I have been working with PHP, MySql and wordpress for more than 4 years. I also enjoy working with UI.

I completed graduation in Computer Science and Engineering and was active participant in University programming contest. Also, I love to write technical blog and share programming knowledge in the local community.