Start Your Online Shop FREE — The Complete Quick Startup Guide

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Interested in creating an online shop, but don’t know where to start? Follow these steps to learn how to create your online shop quickly, easily — and most importantly — cost effectively.

The very first step you’re going to do is register your business legally. You can watch the video here that will walk you through all the steps on how to do so.

Next, you will need to choose a platform to host your online shop — Big Cartel allows you to create a free online shop! They do not take a cut or commission out of your sales, and they do not charge you a fee for hosting your shop — the starter version of Big Cartel is completely free as long as you are selling less than five products. As your business expands however, you may want to consider adding more products and features in order to promote and maintain your shop — it may even be beneficial for you to switch over to a different seller’s platform such as Shopify or Wix.

If you need to create materials to enhance your shop — such as a shop banner, a logo, or if you want to create mockups of your product using stock photos — then you can go over to Canva. Canva is a free software that allows you to create logos, shop banners, and much more. You can upgrade to a paid account which has several higher level features, but I would suggest starting with the free version.

Once you have built your ecommerce site, you will then need to develop a plan for shipping your packages. First, you will need to buy a postage scale in order to make sure that you’re shipping things properly. Once you obtained a postage scale, you can go to Usps.com to print shipping labels online — you can even schedule free package pickups directly from your home address.

Once you’ve taken care of the legal registration of your business and built your shop online, you’re going to need to figure a way to get customers to find it — do not simply build a shop online and expect customers to find you. In most cases, you will not get customers simply by creating an ecommerce site, you need to have a way for those customers to locate you online and then be directed to your website. If you want to start up a low cost marketing plan, I recommend that you first start by creating a blog.

You can create a blog using one of these free sites — Wix.com or Blogger.com. Next, you will need to take pictures of your items, create blog posts talking about those items, and link them to the sales page. Make sure that the title of your blog post, the descriptive text in your blog post, the keywords and titles of the photos — as well as the keywords and tags of the blog page itself — are all including target client keywords that you know that your customers will be searching for when they look for this type of a product. Online blog posts will help customers find your business because when they type in those search terms in Google, they are more likely to be led to your site and your blog — your keywords will be tagged in the images on your blog, embedded in the blog itself, attached to the title of your blog, and will be included in the tags as well. Therefore, it will drive more customers to locate your blog and then they will be prompted over to find your ecommerce site.

Next, you will need to create a Pinterest account and create pins for your blog posts and your shop every week. Create boards that are based on what your target client is going to be searching for, and post to those boards every single week — do not simply create one Pin to your product and then leave it alone. You must pin many different images from your ecommerce site and your blog every single week in order to gain more traction and customers. You can use Canva to create different visuals to upload to Pinterest, which will link to the same content on your blog or shop website.

Next, you need to choose one to two social media sites to commit to — doing all of them is going to stretch yourself too thin and you won’t be able to do any one of them particularly well. Once you have chosen your social media sites, you will then repurpose the content that you created for your blog and reformat it to share on social media — this will advertise your products to more prospective customers and link back to your shop page.

Lastly, you need to create a mailing list. The best way to build an online mailing list is by creating an incentivized opt-in — that means that you are giving away a piece of free content for your customers that they might be interested in. When they click the link to access this content, they must submit their email address and join your mailing list before they can receive the digital product. While you might not be selling digital products in your online shop, you can create a digital product for your opt-in that is still appealing as a free download to your potential customers. This can include things like a guide, suggestions on how to use your products, an ebook, a video tutorial, or anything you think your customers may be interested in — you can use Canva to create this quickly and easily.

Next, you’re going to join MailChimp — MailChimp is a free online mailing list platform. You can upgrade your MailChimp account to a paid account, but the free account has many great features. You’ll be able to start building your email list by having folks opt-in to that free digital download or by taking your customers email address and adding it in. Once you have a mailing list, you can start to send them updates and helpful information, in addition to trying to sell to them.

Want to learn more information about starting your online shop? Watch the video here!