What not to forget when setting up an e-shop

Are you thinking about setting up your first e-shop and unsure what awaits you before you start selling online? Let us look at the basic steps for anyone starting an e-shop, from choosing a business area and a dispatch solution to marketing activities.

Choosing a business area and researching the market

One of the first steps is deciding which products you will sell in your online store. You can choose ones the competition offers too, if you know of an interesting new way to sell them. The second option is creating your own product that only you will offer customers. Whatever you decide, start with a business area you understand. You can always expand the range in your e-shop later. Preparing to start selling also requires market research. You can do it yourself or put it in the hands of professionals. Find out how many potential customers there are on the market and how big the interest in your products is. Analysing the competition and assessing the competitive advantages you have is important too. Another way to choose products to sell through an e-shop is following trends. A craze for a new type of product can start online at any time and you can use it to your advantage.

Which technical solution should you choose for your e-shop?

The choice of an e-shop solution depends on several factors. The first are the features you need in your e-shop. If you have specific requirements, for example for various product configurations, they will probably need to be programmed into a custom e-shop. Most people starting an e-shop will be fine with the basic features you will find in any e-shop for rent. Time also plays a role in what solution suits you. An e-shop programmed exactly to your requirements can take weeks or months, while with an off-the-shelf solution you can start selling almost immediately. Last but not least, your budget matters too. The more features and specific requirements you plan, the higher the cost of delivering them. E-shops for rent are usually charged monthly, with prices roughly between 4 and 20 euros a month.

An e-shop solution for rent

Renting an e-shop is suitable if you are just starting to sell online. It is a ready-made e-shop system that you can use without any programming skills. If you have no specific requirements, an e-shop for rent can save you time and money. Quality platforms are easy to operate and offer plenty of features – the option to connect a payment gateway, an invoicing system, SEO tools and more. An e-shop for rent is a good solution for people who want to try e-commerce for the first time, with a smaller number of products and no special requirements for the look and features of the e-shop.

A custom e-shop solution

If you have high demands on customising your e-shop, thousands of products or a complex structure, you can go for a custom-built e-shop. You can implement almost any requirement in it, improve it gradually and add new features. Every part of the e-shop can be optimised to increase conversions. Thanks to that, a custom e-shop has the potential for higher sales and a higher conversion rate than one for rent, since you can adapt the buying process and the user experience to your customers' needs. This solution suits above all people who are ready to invest in an above-average e-shop, need premium features or have a clear idea of what the e-shop should look like. It is best delivered on the basis of a prepared technical and functional specification, ideally with a custom design.

Search engine optimisation

If your website is not optimised for search engines, you will lose a lot of organic (unpaid) traffic from Google or other search engines. SEO is not a one-off activity and has to be worked on long-term and regularly. It starts with an audit of the current state and then implementing improvements on the site. At the beginning you need to assess the current state of the e-shop and its content, any technical shortcomings (page loading speed, for instance) and carry out a keyword analysis. If your budget is bigger, you should make SEO a regular activity on a monthly or weekly basis. Talk to your SEO consultant or agency about defining the right SEO strategy. A digital marketing agency is better suited to covering this service comprehensively.

Sorting out dispatch and parcel delivery

At the start of your business you should also be clear about how you will send goods to customers. They have different preferences when it comes to payment and shipping, so it is worth considering right at the beginning what options you will offer them. These days it is standard not only to send goods by post, but also with various courier companies, or to have them delivered to a pickup point.

You should also think right at the start about your position in the relationship between orders and parcels. Will you process orders manually and copy the data needed for shipping labels? Or will you prefer automated solutions? You can also opt for our Neoship, which makes dispatch easy from the very beginning, whether you have 5, 50 or 100 parcels a day, and on top of that we will also handle delivering the parcels to your customers.

Doing business through an e-shop is becoming more accessible and easier. Even so, thorough preparation should not be underestimated – it is where you define what you will need, which services you will entrust to experts and what stays in your own hands. We wish you every success in building your first e-shop and doing business online :)