2021 saw a tremendous growth in e-commerce sector which is likely to continue ahead. While its growing e-commerce has became highly competitive .

In this post we are through all the ins and outs of setting a successful e-commerce store in 2022 completely from scratch .

Roadmap for building your e-commerce business

1. Finding the products to sell .

There is no astonishment in the fact that you need a product that can be sold . If your are a tradition brick and mortal business who wants to add e-commerce as another sales channel you already have the products to sell . But if your starting out . You should spend a good amount of time at this stage , to figure out the product you are going to sell .

It surely doesn’t need to be a physical product . You can also start selling digital products like ebooks.

If you don’t have a product at hand and don’t want to spend time with supply chain and inventory management . You can start doing drop shipping .

Drop shipping is an order fulfillment method that does not require a business to keep products in stock. Instead, the store sells the product and passes on the sales order to a third-party supplier, who then ships the order to the customer.

Another valuable option is to setup and print on demand store . In which you can creative goods and merchandise like designer tees , phone cases , caps . The printing and supply process can be forwarded to a third party seller like printfull or printify .

Apart from just selecting the product don’t forget to do the necessary homework of evaluating the product market and other factors like demand , quality , fulfilment , etc..

TIP : While choosing your products niching down to specific category or genre will highly increase your success rates as it will reduce the competition .

2. Registering your business and brand name .

Its pretty obvious that you need a name for your business . For successfully connecting your users to your brand the name should be easy to remember and relevant to your niche . Choose the brand colors carefully as colors tend to have a strong psychological impact on users .

Registering your company will help with legal work flows in future and can help with reducing the taxes also .

Another important thing is creating a logo for your business . Important thing to remember is to not copy it in any regards from your competition .I have been myself guilty for wasting too much of time at this step .

3. Setting up your store .

You have the products in hand , you need a place to sell them online . Their are a number of ways to start selling products online like website , social media , third party reseller like amazon or etsy.

To start selling on any of these platforms we need to take in consideration a number of factors :

• What kind of Products you are selling
• How much control do you need on the selling process
• Control over payments and fulfillment process

Lets see which platform can be good fit for your case .

Selling through social media like Instagram and Facebook .

Instagram or Facebook are damn popular social media platforms . With billions of people connected on these platforms . Facebook also has introduced the marketplace section to their app and instagram also introduced instagram shop. Given all the supportive features selling on social media is not easy . I have to say it here it is really completive and hard .Still social media can be a good first choice for you IF :

• You have a decent following
• Knowledge of some social media growth and marketing
• A unique niche product

One of the main cons of selling only through social media comes into play when your store starts growing and lots of orders start coming . Dm’ing becomes a mess . Storing and checking orders is a total chaos . I have even seen people hire assistants to handle incoming customers which I think is a complete waste of money , time and labor . We will come to solving these problems below in the post .

Selling Through Third Party Retailers like Amazon .

Amazon is one of the biggest e-commerce giants . So selling on it may seem to be a goto but there is something to it . Lets see

Pros :

• More Sales
• Less need for marketing and ads
• Selling internationally is lot easier
• Easy Fulfillment process

Cons :

• Highly Competitive
• High Selling fees
• Order management is complex

Selling Through Your own website

If you want to have a granulated control over selling process , customers and business . Nothing beats the benefits of setting up your website to sell products .

Selling on your website gives you the following benefits :

1. Customers can browse your products 24*7 without need of any personal assistance .

2. Less direct customer interaction needed .

3. You keep 100% profit

4. Can suggest product to boost secondary sales .

5. Can create sales and distribute coupons .

6. Designing your website according to the product .

Marketing Your Business / Getting People to Visit Your Online Store

I don’t want to be the guy with the bad news but e-commerce is competitive ; Niching down will help a lot but there will still be some competition . Well my friends competition is not that much of evil as we think . Given the right marketing strategy and a good product you can leverage it to your benefit .

You can use different marketing strategies like :

• Paid Ads Campaigns
• Social Media Marketing
• Content based marketing
• Running Giveaways
• Having coupons and festive sales .

You need to start .

There is a lot and outs of running a successful but the most important thing is to start and keep your patience . I hope this article will help you with your e-commerce journey as an entrepreneur . If you need any help or have any queries related , I am available at me[at]aabidsofi[dot]com

Thanks .