Ecommerce Business For Beginners

Ecommerce Business For Beginners – Content is free. If you make a purchase through referral links on our site, we receive a commission. read more

Home / Blog / Best e-commerce platforms / How to start an e-commerce business How to start an e-commerce business. The Complete Guide to 2023

Ecommerce Business For Beginners

We walk you step-by-step through the entire process of starting an e-commerce business and make everything as simple as possible.

What Is Ecommerce?

This guide you are reading will teach you everything you need to know about starting an e-commerce business, but in case you need some additional resources:

People sell all sorts of different things online and do so in all sorts of different marketplaces and marketplaces.

And the best thing is that the prices are only increasing. It is estimated that there are 2.05 billion digital consumers in 2020 (!). Of course, everyone and their dogs are shopping online these days. [1]

But! This does not mean that you can give it a wing and not think carefully about what you want to sell and to whom you want to sell it.

Types Of Ecommerce

And “almost” is the key word here. We’ll do more research on your potential sales later, but for now, let’s just talk in broad terms.

The great thing about today’s e-commerce technology is that you can successfully sell one or all of them at the same time.

But this is not all. In addition to what is offered, you also need to decide on your performance

This is where the products you sell fit comfortably in the warehouse you manage. You are also responsible for shipping products to customers.

Ecommerce Defined: Types, History, And Examples

This is where the manufacturer manages the fulfillment process from start to finish (all you tell them is the customer’s information and the product to be shipped). This is a great model for printing needs like t-shirts.

In some cases, running a dropshipping store can be impossible, especially if you are going to sell products you make or if there are no local suppliers.

The difference between this and drop shipping is that in this model you still have to find or make the products, but then send them to the fulfillment house and they will handle the final shipping.

This way, while you are still responsible for the production of the products you sell, you don’t have to worry about the hassle of shipping them.

Best Ecommerce Business Ideas Anyone Can Start Today

The above may seem like a lot to think about if you’re just starting an eCommerce business and struggling with your initial ideas. But there’s not much to do at this point. Just write down your preferences and use these notes as a reference when making future decisions.

The next step is to find people who will buy from you, so let’s find a place.

Or, to put it another way, a niche is a specific group of target customers who are willing to buy what you’re selling.

This brings us to a common mistake people make when starting an eCommerce business, thinking they’ve found an untapped niche.

Ecommerce Business Ideas To Generate Profit Now (2023)

If you can’t confirm your potential niche through research, you shouldn’t risk entering it and expect good returns.

You probably have a general idea of ​​what kind of market you want to target and what you want to sell. very few start from scratch when starting an e-commerce business.

Fortunately, we live in the year 2023, and we have many modern e-commerce tools at our disposal to make research easier.

The first tool I recommend is called KWFinder. It’s a keyword research tool, which means if you give it a keyword or keyword, it will suggest related keywords and show you how many times each of these related keywords is searched for.

Things You Need To Run A Successful Ecommerce Business

KWFinder is a paid tool, but it offers a 10-day free trial, which should be more than enough to complete your research.

What you can see on the left is your seed keyword and a list of related keywords. Each keyword also has a popularity indicator next to it. On the right, KWFinder shows what Google’s top 10 looks like for the currently selected keyword.

What you can do now is browse through the list of suggested keywords and dig deeper and deeper into your research. For example, my list of keywords related to “bed linen” includes the keyword “designer bedding.” It has 4900 monthly searches which is a good start. I can click on that to make it my main keyword and run the search again.

If I want, I can repeat this process several times until I come up with a name that looks appealing and sounds like something I can turn into an e-commerce business. But for the purposes of this guide, I’ll stick with “designer pajamas.”

The History Of The Ecommerce Business And Its Future

KWFinder shows me the ranking of the top 10 sites for this keyword. I can click on any of them to see what those sites look like. Luckily for me, the top 5 are all e-commerce sites that sell designer bedding.

The natural reflex would be to despair, there are plenty of stores that already offer designer bedding, so don’t buy into a niche. That would be a bad call though. Just having competition is a good sign and it reassures me that there really are people interested in buying designer sleepwear.

If I were the type of person interested in entering the bedding market, I would make designer bedding my main focus.

You can follow the same process and find your niche by narrowing down a keyword and going deeper and deeper into related niches.

How To Start Your Own Ecommerce Business In India

Once you find an area that offers other businesses and it looks like something that might work for you, move on to the next step of research.

So far we’ve covered how to find your niche and make general assumptions about what to sell. Now let’s narrow down the specific products you can offer based on their marketability.

The key to all of this is understanding your customers, their needs and wants. In other words, you want to find out what makes your customers buy and what kind of products they are likely to buy.

As I mentioned earlier, the mere presence of competition is a very good sign for new e-commerce businesses, contrary to what many would believe.

Checklist You Should Know To Start An Ecommerce Business

All you have to do is know who your competitors are and what you can learn from them.

All this may seem strange at first, so I need to clarify something. The goal here is not to outdo your competition and do what they’re doing. Instead, you’ll take advantage of the work they’ve done to build their business and try to incorporate their good deeds into your business.

The best way to identify your competition, if you don’t already know them, is to go back to keyword research (using KWFinder).

As you search for keywords in your niche, you may stumble across some of the top product placement spots. Go to those sites and see what they are doing.

How To Start An Ecommerce Business

The example I used, designer bedding, has these well-placed locations: Bloomingdale’s, Horchow, Macy’s, Ethan Allen, Crane and Canopy, Frontgate. Granted, some of them are quite large, but it’s really not bad at the research stage.

You can find a similar list of competitors in your niche. Now all you have to do is go to each of your competitors and write down the things I listed above.

Here are some additional tools you can use that will give you great insight into your competitors’ websites:

Each of these tools will report on your competitor’s website with things like top keywords, top content, social media metrics, top pages, audience demographics, top selling products, and more.

A Better Selling Ecommerce Business Plan (template, Guide, & Examples)

SiteProfiler even gives you a list of the top competitors for the site you’re looking at. This is another way you can discover more websites and businesses in your niche.

The next stage of your research will be to find out what is selling best in the niche and consider offering similar products (or services).

Again, please don’t misunderstand. This isn’t about trying to copy your competition and match their game. It’s about understanding what’s happening in the area and what products your customers are enjoying. This is how you get product ideas that are likely to already resonate well with your customer base.

To get started, revisit your competitors’ websites and look at their best-selling product lists (most e-commerce stores have them).

How To Start Your First Ecommerce Business

Alternatively, you can use Ubersuggest and SiteProfiler to find your competitors’ most popular pages, which often translate into top-selling products.

Another tool you can use is KWFinder, the same one we used for keyword research, but this time enter the competitor’s domain name to start the search.

You will see a list of the top keywords they are ranking for. Often those keywords will lead you to their best selling products.

One more thing

Sales Tax Software: Enhance The Power Of Your Ecommerce App