Ecommerce sales reached record levels in 2020. In 2021, sales will grow by 9.3%. It may seem like a modest increase, but it’s a sign that the ecommerce market isn’t saturated yet.

Now is a great time to start an ecommerce site. The fastest way to get online is to start a Shopify store. It handles website hosting and payments in a simple solution.

Read on to learn how to start a Shopify store.

1. Develop Your Idea

What is your big idea for your Shopify store? Before you sign up for your Shopify account and invest time and energy into building your store, you need to validate your idea.

There are key questions that you must answer before going any further:

• What would I like to sell?

• Who am I selling to?

• How will I make money?

Answer these questions, and you have the foundation of your business. You then need to figure out why someone would shop at your store as opposed to any other ecommerce store.

Remember, you’re not just competing with other retailers in your area. You’re competing against every single ecommerce store that sells similar products.

This is where your brand, mission, vision, and values take shape. These items form the core of your Shopify store, which is important to define clearly if you're going to employ Due North Shopify development services or those from a similar company. These foundational elements set your business apart and they inform the rest of your decisions going forward.

2. Formalize the Business

How do you make your business official? It starts by registering the business with your secretary of state’s office. You need to pick a name for the business.

Do a search to make sure that the name isn’t taken and doesn’t violate someone else’s trademark or copyright. If it’s in the clear, then purchase the domain name.

You want to have a business name and domain name that is simple and tells people what you sell. For example, if your niche is low-priced athletic wear for women, a name like Athletic Discounts is a simple one.

Don’t go with the first name that comes to mind. Write down 20-30 names. Test them and see which ones work the best.

Decide on your legal structure before you register the business. Your main options are to register as a sole proprietor or LLC. There are legal and tax implications you should be aware of.

As an LLC, you have more liability protection. That protects your personal property if someone decides to sue you for a faulty product. You don’t have those protections as a sole-proprietor.

A single-member LLC and sole-proprietor are usually taxed the same. Check with a business attorney and CPA to carefully look at your options and pick what’s best for your situation.

3. Have a Tax Plan

Ecommerce stores have to think about tax issues early on in the business because they impact pricing and profitability.

State sales taxes make things very complicated for ecommerce businesses. Each state is trying to catch up with the growth of ecommerce by enacting sales tax laws.

You may have to collect sales taxes depending on where your business is located, which is called your economic nexus. It also depends on where your customers are located.

Your best bet is to hire a CPA who specializes in ecommerce. They’ll understand what your obligations are and help you with compliance.

4. Decide Which Products to Sell

There is a lot that goes into this step. You have to research your target market and what they need. Look at Google Trends for product ideas.

Alongside this decision, you need to pick suppliers to work with. Most people starting out in ecommerce choose to dropship their products. This means that you choose a product to sell from a drop shipping company, the order goes directly to the drop shipper, and they handle the order fulfillment.

The alternative is the more traditional route. You’ll work with wholesale distributors and figure out inventory storage and order fulfillment on your own.

Be aware of order minimums and set up fees with either model.

5. Plan the Customer Journey

Most novice e-commerce business owners start with a misconception about their shoppers. They believe that someone just has to visit the website once before they buy.

That is a unicorn scenario.

Customers are savvy, and they put a lot of effort into their purchases. How much effort they put in depends on the product and price point.

They’ll have less resistance to buying a $7 product than they would with a $700 product. The more they spend, the more research goes into the purchase.

That means you’ll have to make a plan for the customer journey. Map out every touchpoint a customer has with your business leading up to, during, and after the purchase. Ensuring the journey is effortless will tremendously grow sales, and using a shopify search app to improve the customer experience on your store is a must.

6. Build the Shopify Website

Are you finally ready to build the Shopify store? Go ahead and get your Shopify account.

Shopify doesn’t have design services. You can get templates from Shopify and build the site yourself. The risk in doing that is your site will look like the thousands of other stores that use the same template.

You can hire a Shopify developer to build a customized site that fits your brand.

The areas where you should focus during the development phase are SEO, product integrations, and automation. Make sure that the technical side of the business operates smoothly, which saves time and allows you to handle more transactions.

7. Market Your Store

Marketing needs to accomplish three goals for your business: create brand awareness, drive traffic to your store, and convert traffic to sales.

Every activity you do has to align with one of these goals. Don’t think that you’ll just have a great Instagram following that that’ll be enough to build a business.

Social media is great for building brand awareness. SEO and PPC ads drive traffic to your site. Your site needs to be ready to convert.

Ready to Start a Shopify Store

Starting a Shopify store takes so much more effort than signing up and picking a template. There’s a lot of planning that goes into an ecommerce site.

You need to have the right product, pricing, and promotion strategies in place. You also need to understand the legal side of ecommerce.

If you enjoyed learning about building an online store, you’ll enjoy the other articles on this site. Check them out today!