How to set up an Online Essentials Store and Pick-up in India?

Are you thinking about starting your own online essential store and pick-up in India? We will walk you through the steps - how to open an online store from scratch with examples and additional materials. In this "post-pandemic" era, many companies and entrepreneurs are considering creating their own online store to launch their products.

Online stores are suitable for those trying themselves as an entrepreneur for the first time and those who already have business experience behind them. The creation of an online store for essentials can be divided into several steps:

1. Choosing a Niche - Deciding What to Sell in the Online Store

This is the most crucial stage. The success of the entire enterprise as a whole depends on what you trade. There are two nuances here:

• Choose a popular direction - You will not be left without profit, but you will get crowds of competitors clicking their teeth who have long and firmly established themselves in the market.
• Choose a little-known or new direction - There will be almost no competitors, but you will have to invest in advertising to popularise your product on the market.

2. The most popular niches in which online stores are usually opened are:

• Clothes
• Footwear
• Electronics
• Household appliances
• Goods for children
• Food products
• Auto parts
• Household goods
• Sporting goods
• Cosmetics and perfumery
• Office supplies
• Furniture
• Building materials
• Underwear
• Jewellery
• Books
• Medicines
• Gifts
• Intimate goods
• Accessories

3. Studying the Target Audience

This is a very important process. You have to validate your idea by asking people if they would buy your product before creating your online store for essentials. The pre-sale campaign is a powerful strategy that will help you legitimise a real demand for your product and minimise financial risk. It is also good to have confidence in your product and pass it on to others. The target audience’s portrait will be very useful to you: if you do not know for whom you are working, there is a great chance of your product flying down the pipe.

4. Research your competition

If you have already managed to find your ideal product, evaluated its potential and obtained your suppliers, then the time has come to thoroughly investigate your competition, to know exactly what you are up against. When you know everything about your competition, you will have the necessary elements to explain to your potential customers why they should buy from you.

5. Do Good Financial Planning

This part is often overlooked in many projects because it is difficult to collect all the data, it involves thinking and planning ahead, and it tends to be "lazy". But it is one of the keys to your business’s success, so give it all the attention and time necessary. You have to know the cost structure of your product, and for this, you must consider at least these points:

• Cost of raw materials.
• Packaging cost.
• Transport cost.
• Various expenses for electricity, rent, water, gas, insurance.
• Personnel expenses and your salary, of course.

6. Choosing a Name for Your Online Store

So, you have decided what products you are going to sell in the online store. Now you need to choose a name for your online store. Everyone remembers an online store by its web address (domain name). When choosing a domain, consider the following guidelines:

• The domain should be easy to understand by ear.
• The domain should not be very long.
• The domain should be easy for people who don't know English.
• Do not use complex transliteration in the domain.
• Use words that are close to your industry.

Spend a session thinking about the name, checking which domains are unregistered. You can check this in any name registrar. Mostly, only one person thinks about the ideas for a day or two and then shares them with the rest.

7. Choose a Good Hosting

Take a look at the prices, what they offer you and if in doubt, contact who you trust the most. To set up a WordPress, almost any hosting is enough, but if you already go to a website made from scratch for you, things change.

8. Create an Online Store Website

After choosing a name and assortment, you can proceed directly to open an online store for online shopping. Once you've finalised your business plan, the next step will be to consider your brand name options and register your online store. Before registering, you must create a logo that serves as a brand identity.

9. Customise the design of the online store

Initially, when creating an online store, a standard template is installed, which you can change at any time or, if necessary and have skills, make your own. To change the template, go to the design section in the back office, then select another template in the theme gallery or order a turnkey design development.

10. Add Products to the Online Store Website

After setting up the design, proceed to adding products. This can be done both in manual and automatic mode. By adding products manually, you create a product card for each item in your store, upload an image, provide a description, price, and additional information about the products’ parameters and properties.

11. Set up Payment for Orders in the Online Store

After adding products, you can proceed to setting up payment options. As you know, most buyers are used to paying for orders in cash upon receipt. Nevertheless, if you plan to deliver orders to the regions on a prepayment basis or simply stimulate its implementation, then it makes sense to connect the acceptance of plastic cards and electronic payments.

If you want to accept money by bank transfer, you can enable the ability to automatically generate payment orders, thereby automating invoicing for orders from legal entities.

Having an efficient shipping and fulfilment system is very important to an online store’s success or failure. For example, many buyers abandon orders due to shipping time that was too long or not provided at all, or sometimes buyers don't like additional shipping costs to come to the end of the checkout process.

Starting an Online Store: The Legal Aspects

There is a lot to talk about, but basically, you should look at what legal pages you should take into account when creating your website.

The essentials:

• Legal warning.
• Privacy policy.
• Contracting or purchasing policy.
• Cookies policy.

If your site uses cookies, you will also need to seek consent from your visitors. The identity of your company (name, company name, legal form, share capital) and the address of your registered office.

You must be clear about what you are going to measure and what tools you will use.

The tools that you should include at the beginning are:

• Google Analytics
• Search console
• Google Tag Manager
• The business metrics offered by platforms such as Shopify or Woocommerce
• Social media metrics
• Ad platform metrics (Facebook or Google Ads)

With this, you can create your metrics panel and follow them as actively as possible to see how your business, traffic, and community are evolving, and thus, make decisions to improve every day.

Conclusion

If you are going to create a platform for online shopping for essentials, you see that there are many variables to consider, many points to pay attention to and to be successful you must take them into account from the beginning. If you create the store but do not know how to launch it or make it known, you will not be successful. If you create a store in a very competitive sector or that you know nothing about, it will cost you a lot to start; you will make many mistakes and spend a lot of money in the wrong direction.

Also Read:

1) How To Start A Business From Scratch?
2) How To Start Your Own Franchise?
3) How To Start A Stationery Business?
4) How to Start Export Business in India?
5) How to Start a YouTube Channel for Your Business?