How to Start an Online Business by Creating Your Own Store

[Jasmine]

Even though selling from third-party marketplace is easier, you are always at the mercy of the marketplace for selling your products and receiving payment. That’s why creating your own store is far better than selling from third-party marketplaces.

You need a domain and hosting to create your online store. You have two options to create your own store, one, use an open source content management system like wordpress, Magento, OpenCart etc. or premium ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Wix, etc. Setting up your store on premium ecommerce platforms is easy, whereas on opne source, you will have to do everything manually. Once you install content management system or ecommerce platform, you can start creating your product list.

In order to sell form your own store, you need to do SEO and rank your website on search engines. When you are selling from third-party marketplace, you need to rank internally. Internal ranking is easier than ranking on search engines.

If you can get 5-start reviews on your few products, selling can be very easy. Focus on getting 5-star reviews.

 

[Spkin]

When building a website for my store, I chose Shopify, although I've heard that Woocommerce will be the best one here

 

[Mika]

If you are new and if you do not have experience, using a premium ecommerce platform like Shopify will result in a huge loss. You will end up spending just about $350 just for shopify subscription. You will also have to use premium add ons and your cost for developing shopify stores will increase. Then, you will also have to spend money on products. Even if you are trying dropship, you still need to spend money on marketing because without marketing, you cannot generate any sales. Be prepared to spend at least $1000 in marketing and SEO before you can generate sales. There is also no guarantee that you will sell even when you spend money on marketing and SEO. You can use a free platform like wordpress, however, you will have to spend a lot of money on hosting. You need at least $10 per month to host your ecommerce store (VPS hosting)