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By Chiran Sharma
The E-commerce business has emerged as an integral part of modern age business and economy across the world including in Nepal. It has simplified the way of shopping. The traditional way of shopping, going shop-to-shop which used to cost us both time and money, is now slowly coming to an end.
Most online stores are attractive and user-friendly, so customers can have the best experience while shopping for products and taking services just by staying in their own space. Features like price comparisons, discounts, offers, delivery, and online and offline payments make online shopping more attractive.
Today, we can find every type of business on the internet. We can see a lot of online stores and other types of internet-based Businesses already in existence. Many new ideas& start-ups join the internet for their business with an aspiration to become no.1 in terms of service providers. But, it is not as easy as we think to become one of the best players in the internet-based business
If we look at the history and practice of online shopping, televisions were the first that started to provide products and services to their audience at a particular place. Televisions used to display products along their features through the programs and connect their audience directly to the call services so that a customer can make an easy order.
If you aspire to take your business widely with the internet, you are in the right place. Here we will discuss how to start an e-commerce business that can achieve grand success.
So, before we start an e-commerce business, we should find a beautiful product or an attractive service idea.
Now, after we have the exact product and service idea of our preference, we have to study the existing market of our product/idea for example; we have to understand price, affordability, customers, market demands, logistics, and existing players in the industry which means your upcoming competitors. This will certainly take your time, but you should accomplish it because it is the prior thing needed for you and your business to get started.
Now when you are ready with either a product or a service idea, then why wait for anything else? You may feel some risk while getting started. My friend, business is always a risk so gather some courage before getting started. Coming to the online showcase, you will need an attractive online store to display your products and services.
To start an online store, the very first thing you will need is a domain.
A domain. Technically, it is a specific address given to particulars through which specific things, stores, and programmed firms can be found on a search through a search engine via the internet. A domain helps to take you to the exact address of your store. www.kinniho.com is an example of the domain URL of an e-commerce store based in Kathmandu. Here www represents the World Wide Web after www. The name is your domain. For the case of Nepal, you can add .np to your domain which comes for free. Mercantile Nepal provides .np for Nepalese users free of cost.
So, where to get the domain? Find a beautiful name for your store, go to one of the best domain providers on the internet like www.godaddy.com and get your domain with attractive plans.
After you purchase a domain, you will need proper web hosting. It is also known as physical hosting. A physical hosting is a physical space or a server where all your web content is stored and redirected to the search engines during searches through your domain.
You need to purchase it from a web hosting service provider. You can search for the best web hosting providers on the internet. Remember one thing good physical hosting keeps your site healthy and helps your site to run smoothly.
If you are ready with domain and proper web hosting, it’s time to design a beautiful, responsive, mobile-friendly website with a simple user interface design. A website can be generated with WordPress, designing a website with WordPress can optimize your cost because it is easy and cheap to design a page with WordPress.
You can either hire a website designer or customize your site by yourself with word press. You can select themes and various attractive graphics perfect for your business without any hustle. You will find many free themes with a perfect match for your business. Keep in mind that more than 50% of existing sites on the internet are made on WordPress. If you want to choose beyond, you can also create a website with different programming languages and self customized graphics designs.
Programming languages are one kind of computer programming to implement algorithms. There are thousands of programming languages generated now. Python, dot net, and larval are a few examples of popular programming languages. If you know about programming languages and graphics, you can develop a website on your own, if you do not have any idea about building a website, you can easily hire a team of experts who will design a website for you on paid.
When you have made an E-commerce website, you now will need to put on content and advertise this content throughout the internet. Digital marketing will help you to do so. Content like photos, videos, tutorials, webinars, written text, blogs and phrases are contents that you can put on your site. For digital marketing, you should know about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, bulk email marketing, fest showcase and many other forms of marketing throughout the internet.
What did we learn from this article? Let’s have a look.
Things to do before building an online store are;
• What to know about a product and services before starting an online store.
1. Study the background of the products and services that you will select to sell to your customers.
2. Customers behaviour.
3. Need of the market.
4. The demand for the products and services.
5. Competitors.
6. Logistics plans.
In the second part, we learned the step-by-step algorithm to generate our online store. A few mentions are;
a. What is a domain? & How to get a domain?
b. What is web hosting? & Why do we need web hosting?
c. How to design a website?
d. Content and digital marketing tools
About the Author : Mr. Sharma is the CEO of kinniho.com
