Launching an e-commerce business in 2024 can be your gateway to tapping into a global market worth $6.9 trillion, but success requires more than just a great product and a website.
Key Takeaways
- Expect a challenging start: 90% of new online businesses fail within the first three months, so be prepared for a marathon, not a sprint.
- Focus on product quality: Sell in-demand products with proven market appeal to make marketing easier.
- Invest in effective marketing: Build a strong online presence through social media and content marketing from the start.
- Plan for competitive shipping: Customers expect fast delivery options, often next-day, so factor this into your strategy.
- Develop a solid business plan: Understand your costs, potential profits, and have a clear product/service offering.
- Create a user-friendly website: Invest in an attractive and functional ecommerce platform.
- Be patient with profitability: Give your business 18 to 24 months to establish itself before expecting significant returns.
If you are considering starting up your own ecommerce business, you are probably going to be keen to ensure that you are doing it right. As it happens, there are quite a lot of things you might need to bear in mind here, and it’s likely that you will need to think about them as best as you can. In this post, we’ll look into some of the main ways to ensure you are getting your ecommerce business started right so that you can effectively make the most of it and expect a much brighter future for it.
Naming It
The name of your business is hugely important, and it’s something that you’ll really need to make sure you are thinking about and that you are happy with before you do anything else. This is especially true of the trading name, as this is what the public is going to see and it’s a really vital part of the whole marketing process. So make sure that you choose a name which you think is going to work well, and bear in mind it might be worth taking your time to ensure you get this right.
Registration
All businesses need to be registered, so you’ll need to ensure that you are doing this before you can start trading with your ecommerce business. For this you’ll need the name decided upon, as we have seen, but you’ll also need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to have a basic legal structure and to know where you are going with it. The actual registration process is quite simple, although some people do find that they want to make use of a legal representative to help with it.
Funding
A good ecommerce business is going to need sufficient funding in order to get off the ground, so you should make sure that you are thinking about this as well. If you are able to fund your business appropriately, it’s going to mean that you can effectively expect it to work pretty well from here on out. Check out some of the best small business loans that you can find out there, and consider applying for a few grants too. You might find that you can really get things moving this way quite well, so it’s going to help a lot.
Website Building
Clearly, an ecommerce business can’t exist without the website, so you should make sure that you are thinking about this as well if you want to get it started right. The site needs to be professional and to look the part, but you can always build a simple one for now and then build on it over time as required. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to approach this too. All in all, the right website is going to be something that you are really keen on so it’s definitely worth thinking about.
