A Step-By-Step Guide for Students on How to Open an Online Store

Are you a student thinking about starting your own business, or are you already selling on marketplaces but want to expand your business? Great! We will tell you step by step how to open an online store from scratch.

An online store is suitable for both students as a start-up business and for people with experience in retail business and those who already trade on marketplaces, bulletin boards, or social networks. For the latter, the entry threshold will be lower.

Despite the dominance of universal marketplaces, there is a demand in the market for an individual approach to clients, building personal communication with the consumer based on trust and personal needs. Keep these features in mind whatever products or services you are going to offer, starting from providing help from online essay writers for students and ending with selling PC parts.

Step 1: Choosing a niche — deciding what to sell in the online store

This is the most important stage. There are two nuances here: if you choose a popular direction, you will not be left without profit, but you will get crowds of teeth-chattering competitors who have long and firmly established themselves in the market. If you choose a little-known or new direction, there will be almost no competitors, but you will have to invest in advertising to popularize your product in the market.

However, there are several loopholes. If you choose the first method, take a narrow topic. For example, offer not women's clothing in general, but dresses specifically, and not simple ones, but, say, handmade ones. This way you will attract more customers. The second loophole - if your budget does not provide for advertising costs, use the social direction. Use word of mouth, give bonuses and discounts for good reviews - in short, make people talk about your website.

Step 2. Study the TA — the target audience and competitors

A portrait of the TA will be very useful to you: if you do not know who you are working for, there is a high chance of going down the drain. For example, selling household goods to reckless teenagers is a useless business. The older generation is unlikely to be interested in fancy gadgets, and city dwellers do not need gardening products.

Step 3. Find suppliers

Next, you need to find suppliers of the goods with whom you will cooperate in the future. Looking for them is not a problem: type “the name of the product” + suppliers in a search engine and study the offers. However, finding a good supplier is more difficult. The following criteria are important:

  • Location. If you are in Chicago, and your supplier is in Los Angeles, it is unlikely that you will be able to wait for the delivery of goods across the country.

  • Quality of goods. Many suppliers work in bad faith, purchasing defective batches. Yes, the price for them is lower, but there will also be more problems with customers. For a recently opened online store, even one negative review can do a disservice.

  • Working conditions. Many suppliers work only with wholesale: if you are just starting out, you may not fit into the budget for large batches.

  • Purchase price. Do not be fooled by too low prices: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Too expensive is also not good enough - remember that you still need to make your own markup to make a profit.

Look for a happy medium, read reviews about suppliers, and, if possible, try to meet in person before signing a contract.

Step 4: Choosing a name for your online store

You've decided what products you're going to sell on the website. Now, you need to choose a name for your store. Everyone remembers an online store by its web address (domain name). A domain is the address of your website on the Internet. For example, the domain name of our website is OpenCart.com. Your store will have its own unique name.

Step 5: Create an online store website

Here, you have two options: you can create your website yourself if you have the relevant knowledge and tools, or entrust it to a professional. Alternatively, you can use ZipWP, an AI-powered WordPress website builder that simplifies the process. It generates a fully functional site in under one minute, complete with ecommerce-ready features.

Step 6: Add products to the website

When adding products manually, you need to create a product card for each item in your store, upload an image, and provide a description, price, and additional information about the parameters and properties of the products.

Step 7: Set up payment for orders in the online store

After adding products, you can set up payment options. You should connect a payment aggregator. These services provide payment acceptance by several methods at once. To connect, you need to find out the terms of work. Choose the most suitable one for you, and create an account with the selected aggregator/payment system.

Step 8: Decide how to attract customers — set up advertising

We will briefly list the main methods of website promotion that you need to pay attention to first. 

  • Preparing the store for promotion

  • Search engine promotion

  • Contextual advertising

  • Trading platforms (for example, Google Merchant)

  • Email newsletters

  • Social networks

  • Word of mouth — recommendations and reviews on forums and social networks.

Step 9: Make your business profitable

Perhaps it is the most exciting point. Your website has started receiving enough orders to cover the costs of promotion and order processing. Congratulations! The most difficult stage of creating a website has already been completed. Development awaits you. Yes, you have reached it and can already say that your website is a working business. As in any other business, you must track and control its performance. Just use analytics.