Self-hosted Selling Online – Steps to take – Pt. 1

Did you know creating your own e-commerce store and selling online is not as hard and expensive as you think?

Selling your products online is the ultimate commerce strategy. It exposes your products to a large number of people quickly. Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram have become some popular ways to sell online. Some popular marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy are also great options. Todays post will focus on selling through your own self-hosted, online store. This is what I do with my craft business.

An online store gives you a professional presence and helps show your customers you are invested in your business. It may also be the next step in the natural evolution of your business. As your business needs grow and you expand your offerings, you may require additional resources. Having an online store can give you that flexibility you need to grow easily.

These are 10 steps you can take to get your e-commerce store setup and for you to start selling online.

The Basics

The first couple steps may be about things you already know. But just in case you need some extra help with getting started, check them out.

1. Compile your products

Start compiling and organising the information and details on your product. You may be selling a digital or a physical product. In either case it is a great plan to start the process early of documenting your products. You can start building your online catalog faster, once you have this information compiled.

Examples of the details you can focus on include:

• having multiple photographs at various angles of the product
• the name of the product
• a detailed description of the item, where you can identify what it is, what it does, the colour, size, dimension, weight, etc.
• quantities available
• the download formats of digital products
• requirements to use your product

Remember, if you are selling online it’s always a great idea to give your customers as much information as possible. The inclusion of images of the product and lots of details allows your customers to appreciate what you are offering.

2. Categories

Once you have completed the description of what you are going to sell, you should begin to group your products into categories, if that is possible. To help your customers navigate your site easier, categorising your products is a must.

For example, if you were selling shoes, you might categorise them as, women, men, children or dress, sneakers, sandals. Categories can also have sub-categories, so sneakers can have sub-categories of men, women, children, as an example. Even your digital products can be categorised. Look at the navigation on other sites, and you will get the idea of categories you can consider.

Keep your main categories 7 and lower and within these main categories you can create sub-categories, if you have a large product catalogue. This is just a guide and based on the scale of your catalogue and the design you choose for your site, this number could be irrelevant. Check Amazon for example, whose category listing is extensive and also contains sub-categories.

The Tech Stuff for Selling Online

In the next steps, we are going to look at where your online store will live and the basics for building your store.

3. Domain Name

The domain name you want to choose would more than likely be the name of your business. You will need to search for your domain name to confirm if it is still available for purchase. By the way, if you don’t know what the domain name is, its the website address which will take people to your store. Think amazon.com, the .com address is what is called the domain name.

The domain name will have to be purchased from a provider, and there are many providers out there to choose from. You will need to pay a fee every year to keep the domain name. Providers also provide hosting for your website, which we will discuss in the next section, along with a free domain name for the first year. Personally, I like to keep my domain name separate from my hosting account, so I don’t go for these deals. I prefer the flexibility of having them separate, so if I want to change hosting providers, I can do so without the hassle and cost of transferring domains, etc. You can decide which option works for you.

The first time you purchase your domain name it is always at a cheaper than regular price. You can get a domain name for about $9.99 USD, depending on the provider you choose. You can purchase it for 1, 2 or 3 years at a time. After the initial purchase, the yearly price will go up, so anticipate that as your first ongoing cost of having an online store. Just as an example, my ongoing domain cost is currently $16.99 USD.

I use the following provider to purchase my domain names:

• Netfirms

4. Web Hosting

If the domain name is the address to your online store then web hosting is where your store lives. Good web hosting is a must to ensure your online store is available 24×7 on the internet. There are many web hosting companies out there and over the years I have used the services of a number of them. Important things to consider with the web hosting company you choose will be:

• uptime performance (how often will your site be up, servers do need to be maintained after all and usually uptimes are 99%+)
• bandwidth offering (higher bandwidth means you can have more people on your site at the same time, amongst other things, without pages taking forever to load)
• easy to use (hosting plans usually come with an easy to navigate and use back end to manage the hosting account, usually cpanel)
• hosting types (the two standards are shared or dedicated hosting, shared means your site is hosted on a server with other sites and it will be the cheaper option. It is also more than sufficient for most sites)
• other features (plans should also include databases, emails, file transfers, backups, domain manager, file manager, installatron)
• installatron (this will make it easy for you to configure and install the platform you decide on using for your online store)

Experience

Over the years I have used hosting from bluehost, justhost, ipage and godaddy. Why do I change hosting providers? Well, for the most part, developing websites was a hobby, so not paid. After your initial purchase of a hosting plan has expired the prices go up, way beyond my budget. So I had to move for my “hobby” to be cost effective.

The best out of the lot of hosting providers in my experience has been bluehost and the worst was ipage. iPage was the cheapest out of all, so I guess you get what you pay for. It was slow and the backend was not the best to use as compared to the other hosting providers I had used before. They were not using cpanel at the time I used them. I am currently using godaddy and I am actually not that impressed either. I, of course, did take the cheapest plan, and nothing in that plan is unlimited. So my websites sometimes load slowly and when I monitor in the backend, my usage levels are sometimes ridiculously high with me doing the most basic of tasks, like uploading an image.

I am still half way into my experience with godaddy, so I will see how it goes, but honestly I expected it to be a way better as they are so popular. Maybe I’m too cheap and just need to upgrade, lol. Nope.

Recommendation

At the end of the day, I would recommend bluehost or even justhost. I had a similarly good experience between the both of them. I plan to move back to bluehost when my time is up at godaddy. Bluehost offers unlimited things like bandwidth, which I don’t get with my plan at godaddy. Also, I personally need to host multiple domains so will be going with a plan to cover those needs. At this stage I’m no longer coasting with “hobby money”, but don’t want to break the bank, so it would be the best option and good value for my online store.

5. E-Commerce Software

Your e-commerce software is what you will use to run and manage your online store. Numerous options exists to choose from for your software solution and they come with a wide range for features, such as:

• catalogue management
• payment methods
• shopping carts
• options to sell digital and physical products
• ability to manage customers
• order management
• inventory management
• newsletters
• and lots of other features

The hosting plan you go with may use installatron, and this will make it very easy to install the e-commerce software you decide to work with. Below you will see an example of the wide variety of software that exists for selling online.

I have worked with osCommerce and PrestaShop and will be recommending and guiding you through this process using PrestaShop. PrestaShop offers a wide variety of themes you can use, if you are not able to customise one yourself, and it offers a ton of features to make managing your store effortless. It is what I currently use for my online store.

Next Steps

These first 5 steps will actually get you an installed e-commerce store. In part 2 of these 10 steps, we will look at the different themes you can choose from to create your store design, configuring and populating your store with the content you compiled in steps 1 and 2 and get you ready to sell online.

If you would like a quick guide to get you started selling online, download this free editable workbook. The workbook can help you lay out the plan to organize your store based on the steps discussed here.