Guide Line to Start Ecommerce Business

If you want to be an entrepreneur on e-commerce section you must think about what is e-commerce, why you are going to start e-commerce, how to face and overcome barriers to be successful. There is a term which has its hand in every business. R&D. It means Research and Development. You may create a success story with your entrepreneurship but it’s also possible to stay unsuccessful if you can’t do everything with a strategy. If you don’t apply this R&D before starting or after starting your business, you need to understand that you not doing enough hard work.

What is E-Commerce Business???

In a simple word, the business you are doing with the help of internet is called e-commerce. E-commerce is the short form of Electronic Commerce. It’s an example of buying and selling products through online. In fact, managing any business through electronics is e-commerce.

Example:

Online Shopping: online shopping is one of the best examples of e-commerce. Their seller uploads their products to a website and customer check product details, compare and order their selected product.

Electronic payment: when you are buying a product from online you also need the necessary mechanism to pay for the product. And this connects a seller and a customer.

Online auction: First thing that comes to our mind when we hear the word online auction is eBay. When you call an auction in real life you need to fix a date and send notice to everyone. But by this online auction, you can get in touch with lots of people in a small time.

Internet Banking: Nowadays you can do your all banking activities from home using internet banking. Also, you can order a credit card from home. It is one of the big achievement of the e-commerce.

Online ticketing: you can book airplane, train, bus, and sports match ticket easily from online. It’s also a part of e-commerce service.

Types of e-commerce

Business to Business (B2B)

When a seller and buyer trade for their own business is known as B2B.

Business to Consumer (B2C)

When a seller sells his products to customers is known as B2C.

Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

When a consumer start selling the products to another consumer is called C2C.

The benefits of e-commerce business:

• World Wide Business: you can spread your business to all over the world using an e-commerce site. The reason that e-commerce business is increasing day by day is for its Availability. And the Fourteen businessmen are using this opportunity. For the communication feature of the internet, you are able to connect and deliver your product to any place in the world.
• Profit with low investments: to start a business you need courage beside the huge investment. And you can’t imagine how many entrepreneurs lost their path because of the lack of investment. But, you need to give thanks to the fast internet service of today. The e-commerce service improving with the improvement of internet service day by day.
• Without Vat: In Bangladesh, Govt. made e-commerce service vat and tax-free. It means you will get your revenue without any trouble.
• No indirect costs: when you start an offline shop/store there are would need to pay for office space, store room, employees, electric bill etc. but you can earn from an e-commerce site from home at starting with just a computer device and an internet connection. Anyway, you can be exempted from this additional cost when you are running an e-commerce site.
• Working marketing with low cost: another big assistant for the internet commerce is digital marketing. Digital marketing is completely opposite of traditional marketing. It means, in digital marketing you all work and target is to the internet user. When you need to pay a huge amount for marketing in the traditional way, you can do it with a small amount of digital marketing and its effects.

Why you will start an e-commerce business.

Are you enough responsible person? Know how to give quality service to the customer? Are you complete your thoughts on the product with a lot of goodness? Only then can you get down in this business. But there is but!!!!

You need some years of experience in this section. It will reduce your success possibility if you have less applied knowledge or money.

Think…Think….. Think….!!

Take your time to figure out where you are weak. You need face hard truth to be successful. You need to know about technical, product sourcing, product delivery, payment, communication, research, development, customer service, marketing, a policy with time and legal terms.

Now you may think I will hire skilled employees for this sections. But, you need the skill to select those skilled employees.

How to start e-commerce business?

Before starting your business you need to analyze some matter with importance. These are:

Are you ready to start e-commerce?

Set are you mentally and financially fit to start e-commerce business? Do you have sufficient money to start? Can you face the challenges of e-commerce business? Ask this questions to yourself and think. Try to know about your power. Create a graph really what things you can do when you will start an e-commerce business.

Which products you want to sell?

Set goals which category products you are going to sell? How many products you can sell together. Can collect those products which really people want to buy? If yes, from where you can collect those products to sell. It will be hard or not collect products?

Product cost and Transportation cost

You need to look at how to bring products with low cost and small time. You need to keep in mind that it will reduce your cost and you can sell at low rates then your competitors if you bring your products with low price and transportation fees. Set your goals to sell quality products at a low cost and selling them rather than selling a low-quality product.

Keeping the Quality of the Products

It is important to deliver products well and securely to the customers. You need to decide for yourself how long your products going to stay fresh and good. You also need to think about proper product storage.

Selecting a Brand Name and Legal works.

You need to give your store a name which will be your brand. If you are targeting any selected product categories it will better to select the brand name with the product name. for example, you want to sell tech staffs, you can name your Brand as Tech ’name’ or Gadget ’name’. After selecting a brand name you need trademark and logo designed for your company. You need to look that you Brand name should not be similar to other brands. Selecting a name is important. A great Brand name also helps you get more customer attention.

The main problem that every new entrepreneur face problem that they can set their plan to build an e-commerce site. There you will find step by step steps to build an e-commerce site.
1. Selecting a Domain name.
2. Selecting the Domain Provider.
3. Which Hosting is best for an e-commerce site?
4. Platform to build an e-commerce site.
5. Works on a Website.
6. Website Security.

SELECTING DOMAIN NAME FOR E-COMMERCE WEBSITE

Selecting a beautiful domain name is an important part for your organization or business. Because a domain name gives idea about your business to your customers.

Suppose your brand name is Samsung. Now if you don’t buy the domain name with the word “Samsung” it will prevent you from huge sales and marketing.

Also, people search their targeted products with products categories. When they visit a link the domain name gives the idea what they are going to have on that site.

Some tips to select Domain name:

• Select your domain with your Brand name.
• A big domain creates a bad impression. Who is here to remember a long name to visit your site? Select a short and simple name for your website. Try to keep the words within 4-10.
• Avoid confusing domain name. Don’t choose a domain name which is similar to another brand.
• Try to choose .COM extension for your domain.
• Check Who.is tool to see is your selected domain name available to purchase.

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE BUYING A DOMAIN NAME?

• Is your domain provider giving you full control of the domain?
• Are you getting EPP code and other secret code?
• Is there any hidden charge when you are going to renew the domain?
• What are you getting in addition to the domain name?

WHICH HOSTING IS BETTER FOR E-COMMERCE SITE?

Web Hosting stores your websites data, image video in a virtual storage system. When you are buying hosting for an e-commerce site it is important that the provider supports you with phone and email 24/7.
You will find different types of web hosting, they are:
1. Shared Hosting
2. Cloud Hosting
3. VPS Hosting
4. Dedicated Hosting

Shared Hosting: you can start your e-commerce site with Shared Hosting at first. Because you are not going to have huge traffic first. But once you start getting the traffic it will be better to upgrade your hosting plan from shared hosting.

Cloud Hosting: The best hosting solution for e-commerce business. Because, when you are running your site on a cloud hosting it is storing your data on different servers and showing your visitor from the nearest one. So, when one server goes down another one is working on your site to stay online.

VPS: VPS is the short form of Virtual Private Server. When you divide a server pc to small servers with a software it is known as a virtual private server. It’s little hard to manage a VPS server. But you can use it for an e-commerce site.

Dedicated Hosting: when you are using a whole computer as your server is known as a dedicated server. One thing is common between a dedicated server and VPS is you can’t control the downtime to bother servers. Also, you need to pay huge money to run your site on a dedicated server.

SO WHAT SHOUD I CHOOSE?

When you are starting an e-commerce site, shared hosting will be good. But once you start getting good number of traffic you should upgrade your hosting to cloud hosting.
Reasons:
1. Low Cost
2. Scalability
3. Uptime
4. High speed

Platform

You need to choose Content Management System (CMS) for your e-commerce site with study and analysis. You should choose CMS which will be easy to use and maintain for you.

Some Famous e-commerce CMS:

• Opencart – Opencard is famous Content Management System for its attractive design and easy to use features.
• Magento – Magento is a famous e-commerce CMS built with Zend Framework. It has many features and it’s completely open source.
• Presta shop – A great free open source content management system for an e-commerce site. It is famous for its good looking and attracting features.
• Zencart – another famous open source CMS for e-commerce.
• Woocommerce – The most popular WordPress plugin to build an e-commerce site with WordPress. It’s popular for its simple user interface, payment gateways, and many more features.

WEBSITE SECURITY.

People show less importance to this point. Try to give the highest security to your site. Nowadays, school goings kids can make a DDoS attack. So it is important to think about your site security.

• Try to use CDN with your hosting. MaxCDN and Cloudflare are giving best CDN services.
• Use a strong password.
• You can use Site Lock service.
• If you are using WordPress you can try WP Security Plugin.

Keyword Research.

Keyword research can take your startups to another level. If you can write review blogs for your products with correct keyword research you will get more sales from it. You need to research with those keywords which people search more on the search engines and with low competitions.

You can use Long Tail Pro to research keywords. It’s premium. Also, you can use free MOZ or Google Ad Words keyword research tools to research keywords.

Marketing

You can deliver your products to the customers if you can’t does proper marketing with them. And you not going to make revenue if the customer doesn’t know about your products. You need to learn how to use social media well to present your products. You can do paid advertising on social media like Facebook, twitter, and Instagram. Also, you need to think about SEO, email marketing, SMS marketing, Postering, Leaflet, and Digital advertising everything. Your marketing strategy should walk with your budget. It is better to keep 30-40% of your total capital for marketing. Marketing will give you more sales and you will get more revenue.

Payment System

A new entrepreneur must have complete knowledge about his payment options. You can offer cash on delivery and online payment options. It will be better if you have almost all the online payment options on your site. An automated payment system creates more professionalism them the manual payment systems. As mentioned, you must have SSL certificate to process a secure online transaction.

Product Delivery

If you can start the feature of tracking products while delivery it will give you plus point to attract more customers. They can track their products in the order it will make them more interested to buy products from you.

Customer Support

Customer Support is the most important part of any kind of online startup. Your duty is not over only after selling the product. You need to provide before and after sales service to your customers too. And that’s why you may need a separate team for the customer support or you can do it by yourself at the beginning of your business. Remember that, when you can give complete satisfaction to a customer, he will definitely come back to buy other things from your site and will refer others to buy from your site.

So you need a great customer service for your customers.

Team Management.

If an entrepreneur unable to understand the quality of a skilled employee it will damage your full processing chain. Your all departments like payment, product sourcing, marketing all are related with each another. That why you need perfect team management to manage all of the departments.

Budgeting

Every startup and work need a budget. You need to analyze when, where, why and how to spend your capital wisely. You will do these research before starting your online business. You need to keep a supporting budget besides your main budget. You can divide your possible spending’s. Divide capitals into three part. 30-40% for marketing, 35-40% for product processing and 20-25% for official expenses. Your budget also depends on which types of e-commerce site you are going to start.