Why would you need to build your own eCommerce website
Imagine that you are operating your boutique store and selling custom-made t-shirts. You’ve been selling your goods on ebay and esty for a while. For the last couple of months, your sales started to increase steadily. Your Instagram account’s followers are increasing day by day and your followers are demanding your t-shirts. You’ve started to feel that it’s the right time to build your own eCommerce website. Afterall, you have a physical retail presence and a small area to store your t-shirts, a few suppliers you’re working with, an accountant and a bank branch you work with. Why not have your own online store?
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Having an eBay or an etsy store helps but is it enough
Showcasing products online could seems easy for the outsiders but even product definition could make an important effect on a visitor’s shopping decision. So in that sense, selling products on ebay or similar kind of environments could help a seller gain a whole lot of experience regarding pricing, competition, product listing pages and delivery. But is that experience enough to carry you through the complex process of building your own online store?
The perils of being an eCommerce owner
An eCommerce website is like a living organism. It has its own skeleton (the eCommerce platform or the CMS), its heart (the CDN), its legs (the pages) and its own circulation system (user interface). When you’re operating your own eCommerce website, you need to be able to act like a good physician and diagnose the cause of the problem by looking at several systems. So in other words, you need to be able to get an hold of the big picture so that you can keep an ecommerce operation up and running.
Where to start if you decide to build your own eCommerce website
Deciding on the software and web hosting is the single most important decision and it really depends on what kind of an organization structure you have. If you’re just one person who will handle every single task, then choosing an easy to build hosted ecommerce solution like Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Volusion or 3dcart might help you get a jump start. If you are a small but interdisciplinary team and one of you is able to manage a software development projects, you may as well select an ecommerce development house and this agency could decide on the eCommerce house.
What are the steps after choosing your eCommerce solution
If you decide to go with a hosted solution, your store will be up and running in a couple of days if you already have the product images on-hand. If you choose to work with a development house – depending on the volume – it may take a few weeks to a few months to go live. The development house will most probably choose a CMS software and tailor-make some modules to fit your specific needs and it will take some time but you’ll have a ‘so called’ control over your eCommerce website. In either case, you will need to decide on the design, the payment module, how the product images will be created, the logistics company and the marketing strategy.
How to gain success after building an eCommerce business
That’s a tricky question and every successful online store may answer this question, differently. For inspiration, we have compiled some nice articles for you to check-out:
- The Ultimate Guide To Starting And Scaling An Ecommerce Business
- 10 lessons you can learn from 10 eCommerce stories
- 7 ridiculously good eCommerce case studies
- How We Built an Ecommerce Business from Scratch and Generated $922.16 in Revenue in 3 Days
