How to Make an Online Store — The 5 Key Steps

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In this post, I’m going to show you how to make an online store.

But…creating an online store is fairly easy. Selling isn’t.

So, this post isn’t just about what ecommerce platform to use. It also spells out the 5 key steps you need to take to get a successful online store fully off the ground.

Let’s kick things off by discussing something very important: the products you’d like to sell.

1. Pick the right type of products to sell

This may sound obvious, but picking the ‘right’ type of products to sell is absolutely essential to the success of your store.

However, I’m not talking about ‘quality’ here – you should clearly avoid selling poor-quality goods.

Instead, I’m talking about the uniqueness of your products.

This is because when you set up an online store, you are competing with a large number of hugely popular sites selling a vast range of products — eBay, Amazon, Etsy etc.

And generally, you are going to have a hard time selling products if you are simply offering stuff that is already widely available on those kinds of sites.

So, to create a successful ecommerce store, you need to find a niche – i.e, identify a product range that is not being sold by every online retailer out there, but for which there is enough demand to sustain an ecommerce business.

For example, instead of selling a guitar that is widely available on Amazon, you might consider selling an instrument that is harder to find online — but for which you know there is strong demand.

Now, finding a niche typically involves performing keyword research.

Let’s take a look at how to do that.

Using keyword research to help you find your niche

One of the best ways to identify a niche is to use a keyword research tool (like Semrush or Ahrefs).

Keyword research tools allow you to find out how many searches per month are performed for particular phrases (or products) and how hard it will be to rank highly for them.

So in effect, they let you identify digital niche markets — and check out the competition that’s operating in them.

Let’s say you’re thinking of creating an online store to sell musical instruments, and you’re wondering what type of instrument to focus on.

By using a keyword research tool, you might learn that there are 8,500 searches per month for the search term ‘buy guitar’ and 1,300 for ‘buy banjo.’

This could make you think “hey, there’s a much bigger market for guitars, so I’m going to sell guitars,” but stop right there — think of the additional number of guitar sellers you will be competing with!

The data from the keyword tool indicates that banjos are definitely much more of a ‘niche’ product — but one with a decent number of people interested in buying them every month.

The question is whether there are already a lot of retailers dominating the search results for this product — competitors might have beaten you to this niche.

To find out, you need to look at ‘keyword difficulty.’ This is a score given — in one format or another — by keyword research tools.

The lower the keyword difficulty score, the easier it will be to appear in searches for that product name — and thus generate sales.

As the screengrab above shows, it should actually be pretty easy to rank for the ‘buy banjo’ phrase.

So, the trick is to find products for which there is:

Once you’ve found your niche, and decided upon the products you’re going to sell, it’s time to think about where to get your inventory from. So let’s move on to that.

2. Source your stock

There are two main options available when it comes to sourcing stock for your online store:

The advantage of the first option is that you can

(Of course, if you’re making your own products, you are the supplier!).

The disadvantage of this option is that you will need to invest cash in purchasing or manufacturing goods which — if your business is not a success — you may never end up selling.

You may also face costs associated with storing your products somewhere, and you will be responsible for all shipping costs.

The second option, dropshipping, is a fulfilment method where you don’t keep what you’re selling in stock.

You take the order, send it to a supplier, and they deliver the goods to your client — your store becomes, in effect, a ‘middle man.’

With dropshipping, you might never meet or have direct dealings with your supplier, and you might never see the majority of goods you’re selling online.

Now, the big advantage of this method of selling products is that no upfront investment is required.

But the downside is that dropshipping is a very competitive activity, and you may end up selling products that are already being marketed aggressively by many existing online retailers.

Additionally, there may be some ethical concerns to consider — not all dropshipping suppliers have the best track record when it comes to how and where their goods are produced.

In terms of how to get started with dropshipping, most of the major ecommerce platforms — which I cover in more depth below — offer add-ons or integrations that allow you to dropship goods produced from a wide range of suppliers. Popular apps include DSers, Spocket and Syncee.

It’s fair to say that Shopify offers the most options when it comes to dropshipping, however — its app store contains a very large number of dropshipping apps by comparison to its competitors (510 at time of writing).

The platform also offers a useful set of free dropshipping resources in its dropshipping starter kit.

Now, let’s take a look at the online store builders that you can use to create your ecommerce site.

3. Choose the right online store builder for your project

Once you’ve identified your niche product and market, and you know where you’re sourcing your stock from, it’s time to think about getting your online store off the ground.

You have two options here:

If you go down the agency route, make sure that your developers to give you access to a content management system (CMS) that lets you edit your site easily and manage your store’s inventory yourself.

Having access to a CMS means that you won’t have to pay a developer on an ongoing basis to update its content or add or remove products.

(You may still need to pay them to maintain your store in other ways, however — for example to update plugins and themes, field general support queries etc.).

The other option is to use an online store builder and just create your own store.

There are lots of these platforms to choose from – popular options include Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Webflow and Wix.

These store builders work by letting you select a theme for your store as a starting point, which you then customize so that it meets your branding requirements.

After that, it’s usually a simple case of adding some products, choosing a payment processor — Stripe, WorldPay, PayPal etc. — and launching your store.

Of the store builders that I have tested to date, I have found Shopify and BigCommerce to be the most obvious options for users without a lot of experience of building online stores or websites – they strike the best balance between features and user-friendliness, and they’re also good for selling in multiple currencies.

Wix isn’t quite as fully-featured as these two, but is a good all-rounder and does have the advantage of being one of the cheaper ecommerce solutions available.

In my view, Squarespace is probably the easiest to use out of the bunch, but lacks multi-currency and some other ‘power user’ selling features.

You can watch our video review of Shopify below for a more in-depth overview of the pros and cons of the platform, or grab a free trial of it here.

4. Optimize your online store for search engines

Search engine optimization (or ‘SEO’) is absolutely vital to the success of any ecommerce project.

So, once you’ve found your niche market and designed your online store to cater for it, you need to make it visible on search engines.

You can use keyword research tools again here to find out precisely what kind of searches are performed for your type of product, and ensure that your site contains all these keywords in all the right places, namely:

Additionally, try to ensure that your online store is fully accessible to those with a visual impairment. Not only will this help users with disabilities access your content more easily, it can bring SEO benefits too.

The online store builders mentioned above give you a lot of control over SEO (with BigCommerce and Shopify probably coming in tops in this regard). If you opt for one of those products, make use of this functionality!

5. Market your store

Once you’ve built your store and covered the SEO basics for it, it’s time to market it! Let’s take a look at some of the key ways you can do that.

Content marketing

A key way to attract traffic to an ecommerce website is to blog regularly about topics related to what you are selling.

This type of activity is basically known as ‘inbound marketing’ or ‘content marketing’ — and if you don’t engage in it, you are potentially missing out on a huge number of sales.

By posting high-quality, keyword-rich blog posts related to your area of business, you are doing two things:

Potential buyers of your products will have greater confidence in vendors who clearly have a passion for all things relating to their area of business.

Online advertising

In addition to employing SEO and content marketing tactics to promote your online store, you’ll usually need to create some paid ad campaigns for it too. The starting point for most people with this involves Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Google Ads

Using Google Ads involves identifying and paying for relevant search phrases that will display adverts for your store/products alongside ‘organic’ Google search results.

In my experience, Google Ads campaigns generally work well when you are selling relatively expensive products.

For example, you might be able to live with a Google Ads ‘cost per acquisition’ of $50 (i.e., where you spend $50 on ads to generate one sale) to sell a product if that product – let’s say a TV – retails at $1000; but if you end up spending $50 on ads to sell one CD that retails at $10…well, a different approach might be needed.

It’s a question of looking at your margins, trying out different keyword strategies and so on to ensure that the cost of advertising doesn’t eat into your profit too much.

But, used well, Adwords can help you sell a lot of products.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads work in a different way to Adwords: rather than paying to display your ads to people who are entering keywords into a search engine, you are paying to display your ads to people who have told Facebook what they are interested in.

For example, you could use Facebook to advertise Beatles T-shirts to people who like the Beatles; VW key rings to people who drive Volkswagens and so on. 

Facebook ads are very powerful and let you target audiences to the nth degree, but use them incorrectly and you could find ad account disabled (with serious implications for your online business).

Accordingly, it’s worth getting a full understanding of how Facebook ads work — and how to avoid contravening the company’s advertising policies — before you start spending money on them. Facebook’s own guide to advertising on their platform is a good starting point.

Email marketing

Email marketing is another great way to promote an online store — and one that can offer a particularly good ROI (return on investment).

To get going with email marketing, you’ll often need to buy a suitable marketing app (like GetResponse or Mailchimp); but that said, some online store builders (for example Shopify and Wix) include email marketing features as part of your plan.

Check out our guide to creating e-newsletters to find out how you can promote an online store in sophisticated ways using email.

Or…just buy an existing online store!

If all the above sounds a little like hard work, the other option is to buy an online store that’s already generating a profit.

This is actually easier to do than you might think, thanks to a proliferation of online marketplaces that allow you to browse vetted online businesses for sale.

Our guide to buying a Shopify store provides an overview of the processes typically involved with purchasing an online store.