5 Steps to Starting an Online Store

This is a documentational piece following “Creating A Dropshipping Company in a Month.” Check out the entire project here!

What in the world made brick-and-mortar retail obsolete in the roaring 2020’s? I’m sure a global pandemic played a part; however, the convenience of seamless and safe transactions that bring products straight to the consumer at the movement of their thumbs played a hefty role as well. Whatever the reason for the e-commerce boom, I decided to get in on the action through building an online store in the spring of 2021. Here’s my five-step process for doing so:

1.) Find a Product

Find a product that isn’t like every other product on the market. Throughout your preliminary research, the most common thing you will hear from companies promoting dropshipping is to find a trending product to sell in your store. While this can be effective in boosting sales temporarily, I believe that selling in a niche-market is not only more effective but also leaves room for versatility and reproach if the market does not react the way you had initially thought it would. Finding a product that addresses customers’ pain points is beneficial. For example, I chose a product that supports ocean cleanup with each sale.

2.) Build Your Brand

Building a brand consists of creating a logo, building your website, and incorporating the themes necessary to market your product effectively with website copy that will attract a customer’s attention. Look up color codes that correspond with your company’s brand identity and incorporate them on your site! For example, I used Poesidon, the protector of the sea, as the company name because a portion of each sale of my store products support ocean cleanup.

Once you have a name, a logo idea, or a marketing strategy, start building your store by testing out your colors and logo ideas. Hey newbies: Don’t get upset! You’re going to scrap your entire preliminary design once, if not twice, like I did. I had done research on what colors are most effective in boosting sales in an online store and long story short, I found that blue had a high positive effect on sales and implemented different shades of blue for my theme, for my logo, for my font color, CTA button color, my links, image overlays, forms and field lines and background. I wish I had a screenshot of my first draft; it looked like a landing page for Papa Smurf. I went back to the logo-making drawing board and then back to the theme customization page and started again.

I deleted my second draft, too, and then finally changed my logo color to a blend of tan and white with blue outline and finally started making some progress. I did this after researching nautical-themed businesses and online stores and found the most pleasant-looking ones incorporated tan. It makes sense being the color of sand since it blends well. Don’t be afraid to get your inspiration from others.

3.) Soft-Open, Dry-Fire

Once you have your brand identity and store layout established, do your own final review from top to bottom of each page. Click on all of the action buttons to make sure they lead where you want them to go and then launch your store. Pro-tip: Don’t worry about making your store perfect; I’ll explain later.

Remember to remove the password protecting your store’s visibility if the website builder has one. Once you’ve launched, the most important and effective step to ensuring customer success is to dry-fire.

Test the operations of your site by having someone close to you play customer by searching it by domain, clicking on it, finding a product, checking out, and checking their email for your store’s confirmation or order number. Play your actual role and treat this as a real order, seeing how an order comes in, how to address it by fulfilling it, sending the order to your supplier, and sending a follow-up to the confirmation email with a tracking number for your customer’s product and a thank-you note. In other words, test your store from domain search to a delivered shipment.

My mother was my first customer and gave feedback on her store experience:

• Easy to navigate (Pro/no change needed)
• Bought a product in three clicks (Pro/no change needed)
• Confirmation email had all my personal information on it. (Con/change info)
• When I changed the email, she sent a mock “Where’s my package?” email and got a “This email doesn’t exist response” (Con/Confirm email activity status)

My ma being the customer, these mistakes were easily corrected. I could change what needed to be changed without the fear of bad reviews or angry customers. Imagine if I hadn’t done a test run, though? Yikes!

4.) Run Some Ads

There are many ways to do this; however, I found social media ads to be very effective for analyzing audience reach. You will spend a good portion of your budget on ads. There are two ways to get ad content for dropshipping. One is to order product samples and have a video or photo shoot if you’re artsy and creative with editing and post them with catchy ad copy. Another way is to research your supplier’s copyrights.

You can do this by reaching out to them, or if they’re listing their products on popular dropshipping apps like Spocket, Oberlo, Alibaba, and AliExpress, then there is a good chance the company required them to obtain the photo copyrights to market products on their platform. You have to research this and make sure that is the case before using their content to market your products or you could get in trouble for copyright infringement. I know Spocket has this policy, and it means that any content my supplier has listed on the platform, such as pictures, video, or copy can be used by retailers to market their products. So, if this is the case, you can use product pictures to create a social media post with catchy copy. Then you can choose to promote them or not on your social media by creating professional accounts that allow you to create call to action buttons that you can link your store to!

Doing this can be expensive depending on what your budget looks like but does get your name out there and allows you to review analytics from your website traffic and ad interactions.

5.) Maintenance

Remember when I said “don’t worry about making your store perfect” in Step 3? Well, this is why:

My boosted ad reached 5,354 people in four days and triggered 28 link clicks but 0 checkouts. Now this is where you have to decide what to tweak first. Based off of the ad analytics, I got 0.52% of the people who viewed my post to click on the link. I’m not going to write this off as a failure of an ad because it is still running. I like to think the other 5,326 viewers just saw it as an ad and skipped over it like every ad they see.

This is helpful information when it comes to creating another promoted post. I can look back and switch up the copy and make it more inviting or less aggressive or more interactive to boost the link clicks. Because my ad is still running, what I would do for maintenance would be to change something on my site.

Check out that data analytics video here.

Reviewing the store and ad analytics daily can help you narrow down where the speedbumps are slowing your customers down, preventing them from checking out. Making changes to better streamline the process for your customers to click on a link and actually checkout is how you scale your online store!