How to Start an Online Store in 2024: A Beginner’s Guide

Most ecommerce website builders offer mobile-first website templates, varying levels of inventory management tools, reporting, and options for connected payment processing.

We recommend looking for these key features when deciding on an ecommerce platform:

• Mobile-first website templates and drag-and-drop builders: Mobile commerce is expected to account for about 40% of US ecommerce sales by 2024, so it is imperative that your online store be mobile-first. Also, look for an ecommerce builder that features a drag-and-drop online store editor to help you easily create your online store.
• Ease of use: Go with ecommerce software that is easy to use and navigate, especially for tech newbies. Ecommerce website builders should be intuitive and quick to set up. Sign up for a free trial to help you decide which platform is a better fit for your business needs.
• Customer support: Most ecommerce platforms provide support, but it is helpful to go with a platform that offers support all, or most, of the time. For example, Shopify provides 24/7 support through live chat, email, and phone in 19 languages.

When setting up an online store, look for ecommerce platforms that offer native or plug-in solutions for selling and advertising on social media, selling in person, selling on third-party marketplaces like Amazon, and connecting a blog. These features help you easily scale and market your online store.

Also, consider your current and future needs. While some may be the best solution for today, it might be a wiser investment to go with a more powerful platform if you wish to have one that can support your future growth.

Don’t leave this out—you need to have a rough estimate of your startup costs. While building an online store generally costs around $300, starting a business and securing products will be another matter. For ecommerce businesses, startup costs during the first year of operations vary significantly depending on your inventory, staff, facilities, marketing, and fulfillment strategy.

Related: Ecommerce Website Cost: Complete Pricing Guide

Shopify research shows that new online store business owners can expect expenses to reach up to $40,000 in the first year, recoverable through profit margins (with a timeframe set up to 18 to 24 months).

Shopify found that general expense categories during the first year would look something like:

• Product sourcing and procurement (31.6%): Raw materials, manufacturing, patents, etc.
• Operating costs (11%): Legal and accounting fees, business insurance
• Online store costs (9%): Ecommerce platform subscription, web developer, etc.
• Shipping costs (8.7%): Packaging and labels
• Offline/Overhead costs (10.5%): Rent, equipment, etc.
• Employees/hiring costs (18.8%): Salaries, benefits, compensation
• Marketing costs (10.3%): Logo, branding, printed materials, business cards, etc.

If you need help with business funding, consider applying for startup business loans.

How to Estimate Startup Costs

Based on the estimated expenses above, categorize your spending allocations by the following:

• Essential vs Optional Expenses: When budgeting, classify expenses that are absolutely necessary (and even critical) to your business. This will boil down to priorities, but we recommend having a rigid standard when you are just starting out. For example, paid ads will likely help your business garner attention quickly, but you can get the same result in the same amount of time with a carefully planned marketing strategy.
• One-time vs Recurring Expenses: One-time expenses include patent filings and business formation documents. Recurring expenses are your operational or overhead expenses, like subscriptions and employee salaries. Keep an eye out for recurring expenses so that you can estimate how much you will be spending on them over your first year.
• Fixed vs Variable Cost: These are usually part of your recurring expenses. Your subscription fees are likely to stay fixed during the year, but utility bills can vary monthly.

It’s crucial to spend the first year of your online store’s operations tracking expenses, testing cash flow, sticking to set budgets, and reinvesting sales back into the business.

You can also download our ebook on how to start a business for detailed insights on budgeting and planning a new business.

Should you build a custom store?

Larger businesses with developers may benefit from a custom store. However, most small businesses that don’t have a developer and want to manage the website themselves would have the flexibility to do so with a templated design from one of our recommended ecommerce platforms. Remember, even if you start with a template or theme, you can still customize your online store to suit your needs and your brand.

Branding will play a big role in designing your ecommerce website. By this time, you should already have your brand identity—your branding kit and collaterals—completed. In a nutshell, your business should have:

1. A logo
2. Brand colors (color scheme)
3. Font types (typography)
4. Packaging designs
5. Imagery (stock and lifestyle photos)
6. A brand story, which helps define voice and tone for written copy

Use your brand colors and fonts on your website as much as possible—but do not go overboard. While it is nice to have prominent brand colors displayed on your homepage, it would not be as visually pleasing if all your anchor links showed up in your brand colors, too. Additionally, product pages should be clean, with your product photos taking the spotlight. Display your mission and vision statements, core values, and brand positioning statement on key website pages.

No matter what ecommerce platform you choose, all of them have many options for free and paid templates or themes,
usually with multiple variations available. There are also many free and paid WordPress ecommerce themes available for
different shopping cart plugins.

When choosing a theme for your online store, remember to

• Invest in quality: Don’t shy away from paid themes; spring for the one you think is best. It’s
  not impossible to change themes later, but it is easier to pick the right one from the start.
• Opt for a mobile-responsive or mobile-first theme: Mobile browsing makes up a large portion of
  online shopping, so ensure your theme is optimized for mobile.
• Evaluate product pages: Quality product pages help increase conversions. Choose themes with
  options for lots of high-quality photos and/or images, multiple types of product descriptions, and other dynamic
  content.
• Filter themes based on your business needs, size, product catalog, etc.: Some themes are better
  suited for apparel because of their catalog presentation, while others are designed for restaurants and
  service-based businesses because they provide booking forms and provisions for displaying menus and service
  pricing.
• Look for specific website features that are a priority for you: These include a search bar that
  auto-completes queries and a section that displays user-generated content.

Store customization will greatly depend on your chosen platform, but most ecommerce platforms have drag-and-drop builders that allow you to easily customize your online store.

Follow ecommerce website design best practices, including:

• Prioritizing navigation features: Easy navigation is critical for a positive user experience, so ensure your site has great header, search, and related product navigation features. Don’t forget to add a sitemap to make your website easy for search engines to navigate.
• Displaying customer reviews: Have a way of collecting and displaying reviews and other user-generated content on your website from the get-go. This type of content helps build confidence and trust among potential customers.
• Making it easy for customers to contact you: Include a chat option, like Facebook Messenger, and a phone number with clear support hours. Add an FAQ section with store policies and common questions.

And don’t forget about the UX experience! Equally important is the experience of the website visitor in their shopping journey in your store. You can learn about improving your store’s UX experience through our ecommerce UX best practices.

When we reviewed some ecommerce platforms, we replicated the same store across each site builder for an apples-to-apples comparison. This is our demo store built on Ecwid’s Instant Site Builder.

Product descriptions should be uniform across the site, following the same template and tone throughout. In general, there should be three elements to a product description: a short intro, bullet points outlining high-level features, and a longer description at the bottom for shoppers who want greater detail.

To write well-crafted product descriptions:

• Keep your target market in mind. Write in their language.
• Keep text easily scannable. Break copy up into short sentences and paragraphs, and make use of bullet points.
• Anticipate common questions. Also, ensure you can address them in the description.
• Make it easy for customers to see themselves using the product. Since they cannot physically touch or try the product, include materials used, size charts, and anything that can help them imagine how it looks when tried on.

We have an in-depth article on how to write product descriptions that convert if you need guidance.

Download our free guide as an easy-to-follow worksheet with a product description template and helpful examples.

Product photos are one of the most important elements of an online store. High-quality images can showcase the details and quality of an item, while low-quality or grainy photos leave shoppers with more questions than answers.

Some wholesale suppliers will provide high-quality photos of their products, which will save you a lot of time and money. Ask your suppliers if this is something they provide. If not, you can either take the photos yourself or hire a professional.

When taking the photos yourself, use a plain white background in a well-lit area. You can do product photography on a budget with a smartphone camera and natural light. Though, if you are not a professional or experienced photographer, for the best (and fastest) results, there are services that specialize in ecommerce photography.

Download our e-book on product photography to learn how to take professional-level photos at home. We show you how to build a DIY photo studio and take different types of product photography shots.

In addition to standalone product shots and 360-degree photos, consider photos of the product in use. This is especially important for apparel, accessories, and makeup. Shoppers will want an idea of what the product will look like when worn. For decor and house items, consider lifestyle photos of the products so that customers can picture the items in their homes.

Several factors affect your products’ prices, and these include raw materials, overhead expenses, and shipping costs. The perceived quality of your product and demand for it also greatly impact how you can price it.

Remember, you can adjust prices based on what happens after your product launch. Read our pricing strategies, which come with examples, to learn how to competitively price your products.

Ensure that when you set the price on your product page, it is clear and there are no hidden fees that might surprise the customer during checkout—this can lead to cart abandonment. Having set shipping options or even a range (which we discuss in detail in Step 5) contributes to transparency.

Your ecommerce platform comes with built-in features to organize your products. We recommend that you utilize these to organize your catalog, especially if you have an extensive product line.

You can organize your products by:

• Product type (shirt, pants, scarves, socks, etc.)
• Supplier vendor (your manufacturer, wholesaler, or third-party vendor for the product—this helps easily reorder inventory)
• Keywords or tags (this helps customers search by keyword, product type, or format—anything you’ve set that helps organize your products).
• Category or collection (Best sellers, on sale, limited edition, or by season—this can be a curation of your products for specific purposes and audiences)

Part of setting up your products for success is to optimize them for search engines. Setting details—such as a good product title, a short description, and a URL that contains your product name—go a long way in helping your products show up in search results.

In Shopify, you can easily set these inside a product page, as shown below:

Here is what a product page usually looks like in a search result in Google. As you can see, consumers see your store’s name, logo, and product URL, as well as the product’s name, description, and price (plus whether it’s available!).

Part of efficient order fulfillment is having an effective inventory system. Inventory management is the process of ordering, tracking, and storing your products to meet demand efficiently. It’s a crucial part of any retail or ecommerce business.

Tracking inventory stock effectively helps businesses prevent stockouts (minimize carrying costs and shrinkage), manage multiple locations, and ensure accurate recordkeeping. An inventory solution makes these processes easier than trying to do them all manually.

There are paid inventory solutions and specialized systems, such as POS inventory software for those managing a storefront or doing in-person sales. However, there are also free inventory management tools and inventory templates to help you get started.

If you need more help establishing a full process, read our guides to retail inventory management, stock-keeping unit (SKU) vs universal product codes (UPC) numbers, and SKU generation for products.

Processing, picking, and packing customer orders are part of the order fulfillment process. When starting, many small businesses handle this process themselves out of a garage or storage space. However, some companies handle order fulfillment for ecommerce sellers.

There are four different ways to do this: in-house fulfillment, outsourced third-party fulfillment, dropshipping, or a hybrid approach.

In-house Order Fulfillment

In-house order fulfillment is literally in-house—all your customer orders are processed, picked, packed, and shipped under your roof. Your business handles all phases of the order fulfillment process, including receiving and storing inventory. This type of order fulfillment works best for businesses with full-time store owners or those that process fewer than 10 orders daily (usually startups or young businesses).

If you are fulfilling customer orders yourself, you have full control over choosing retail packaging materials and packing them in custom boxes. We also have a guide that features some eye-catching business packaging ideas that can help.

Third-party Order Fulfillment

If you want to outsource order fulfillment, order fulfillment companies and third-party logistics (3PL) providers will store your products and then pack and send orders as they come in. With this fulfillment method, ecommerce businesses still purchase inventory upfront and send it to the order fulfillment company to store. This method is often ideal for ecommerce businesses that have outgrown their at-home fulfillment space and do not want to start their own warehouse and large-scale fulfillment operation.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping companies serve as the product suppliers and fulfill customer orders, so ecommerce businesses don’t have to purchase upfront inventory. When working with dropshipping companies, ecommerce sellers are limited in that they can only sell products the dropshipper has available. However, there are fewer upfront costs and a lot less work involved for ecommerce businesses.

Shopify, our top-recommended ecommerce platform, connects with hundreds of dropshippers (such as DSers) through its Shopify App Marketplace. Learn how to open a Shopify dropshipping store.

Hybrid Fulfillment Solution

A hybrid fulfillment approach combines some (or all) of the above order fulfillment methods. This is a popular solution for growing businesses because it offers a lot of flexibility. It is also ideal for brick-and-mortar stores expanding into online sales by allowing shoppers to buy online and pick up purchases in-store.

If you are packing and shipping customer orders in-house, choose a shipping software or service, look for cheap shipping supplies, and shop around for the most efficient shipping rates among FedEx vs UPS vs USPS—the most popular shipping platforms.

However, if you plan to ship internationally, there are different ways to do so, such as cross-border international shipping and localized fulfillment.

Choose a shipping strategy that will work with your business needs. Some of these strategies include:

1. Offer free shipping. You can use this as an incentive for customers. You can tie this offer with a minimum required spend, to certain product purchases, or specific regions.
2. Charge real-time carrier rates. Many ecommerce platforms have built-in integrations with USPS to generate real-time pricing on shipments.
3. Charge a flat rate on shopping. This strategy is ideal if your product line has similar weights and sizes. This makes actual shipping costs easier to predict.

Check out our guide to ecommerce shipping and handling (with free SOP checklists). If you have a brick-and-mortar, you can ship from store.

Explore all the ways to save on shipping costs—the cost of shipping is a top concern for 41% of retailers:

• Cheapest Way to Ship a Package: Tips & Shipping Options
• Zone Skipping: A Money-saving Shipping Strategy
• What Is ePacket: Delivery, Shipping & Tracking

Popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Square Online have built-in shipping tools. They have discounted shipping rates, automatically calculate shipping costs for customers at checkout, and make it easy for ecommerce businesses to print shipping labels directly from the order management system.

However, if you build your own site or use a shopping cart plugin that does not have these features, you’ll need to find a third-party solution. For small operations, Stamps.com is a popular option. It syncs with many online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy, plus shopping carts like Magento. Simply import customer orders and print out the shipping labels at home.

Think of a custom domain as your website address. When choosing a domain name for your online store, be sure to:

1. Choose an extension (e.g., .biz, .us, and .net) that best reflects your store; .com is the most common
2. Make it easy to spell
3. Keep it as short as possible

Having your own website address builds credibility for your online store. It will look professional and help instill trust in your customers. Ecommerce platforms make this process easy, you just need to register your domain first.

We recommend adding sales channels on top of your online store—but they need to be relevant and worth the addition. For example, is the sales channel a place where your target customers are? Is the sales channel a part of your overall business goals and marketing strategies?

Remember, you don’t need to be all over the place—just a few key places where it’s worth investing your effort in. Here are some that are worth highlighting:

Marketplaces

Many successful ecommerce businesses grow by selling their products in more than one place. Even with a standalone store, many online businesses also sell on Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy. These platforms likely won’t drive traffic to your main store, but they are a good way to bring in revenue and can help strengthen your brand credibility and recognition.

Social Media

For new online brands, advertising and selling on Instagram and Facebook are popular ways of gaining recognition. Both social platforms let businesses create advertisements that directly link to product pages or offer options to buy without even leaving the social site. TikTok is also the fastest-growing social platform today, reaching 1 billion users. It also opened its doors to online stores by providing built-in integrations with most ecommerce platforms.