Starting an online shop can be challenging exercise, especially when a new entrepreneur wants to beat established companies. Before you start thinking of owning online shop like Jumia, Kilimall, Amazon, Alibaba and many other established shops, you have to be aware of this:
Capital
Capital is the most important thing when it comes to this business. The more you have the better.
Online shop is not the same as establishing a shop in a physical location, you simply set up your shop in an online platform.
The basic requirements include a professional website and source of your products. A professional website, which can serve thousands of visitors, even millions per day can be purchased from WordPress.
As you know, Content Management System matters a lot.In this case I advise you to purchase WordPress themes for ecommerce. These themes cost as little as $40 to as high as $100
Another important factor is to register a domain. You can register your .com domain at Bluehost, Namecheap, WpEngine or other top Webhosting companies. Domain name costs less than $12.
After you have purchased your domain, you have to look for an established and reliable company to host it.The best web hosting companies in the world include Kinsta,Godaddy,Namecheap,Hostgator,Bluehost,WPengine,Amazon and Google. Hosting will cost you from as little as $3 per month to as high as $1,000 per month, depending on server resources consumed.
In simple terms, to set up an online shop, without marketing costs, you need $100 only.
Marketing
Now this is where the real issues are: as you know, business is all about marketing—the more customers you have the better. You should figure out how to get customers. In this case I advise you to set up Facebook and Twitter accounts so as to drive traffic to your website. You can also market your products through Google and established websites. But you should be aware that the best marketing techniques involve referrals, quality of goods and services.
Company registration
Another important thing to note is that, as per the law, you must register your company so as to meet tax obligations.
Source of products
If you want to make reasonable profits, you must source products direct from production industries, never use middlemen and brokers.
After you have done what we have described above, you can launch your company, it is not easy though.
