You’re starting an e-commerce business and you’re thinking “How do I start my own e-commerce business?“. Yeah, you decided you have enough courage to start. But you’re not technical enough. Congratulations!
This article is mostly intended for companies that want to test the market for their ideas. Company that wants to sell things on-line.
Now some of the important things to consider are:
- are you selling products vs. subscriptions based
- how much budget do you have for an e-commerce platform
- do you have knowledge for setting up an e-commerce platform
- are there some payment types you prefer (credit cards, debit cards, local payment methods, bitcoin …)
- are you offering physical or “virtual” products
Products vs. Subscription based
Physical products are part of your stock mostly, so once you sell them you need to replenish them. It could be necessary to have stock, meaning you need money to buy it, or you can go down the lane of dropshipping.
What is dropshipping? You don’t need to pay for stock up front – other companies have the stock. After you sell it on your website, you buy. This is a good idea for starting a business.
Budget
Ideally you have some money to use to try your business model. Some of the possible costs you might think about when budgeting, are:
- marketing costs
- technology costs
- shipping fees
- office/warehouse costs
- stock (if you’re selling physical products and need stock)
Of course this is a very simple and short list, but this is really mostly what you need if you want to test the market for your idea. After you have decided you want to continue, you will probably need to budget more costs.
Technical knowledge about e-commerce platforms
Are you a technical person with programming knowledge? Setting up an e-commerce platform should be easy for you 🙂
If you’re not – you might consider finding a person to help you out with that part (or of course – you can contact us to help you).
Payment methods
There are a lot of different payment methods, but mostly you can group them into the following:
- credit cards
- debit cards
- cash payments (yes, that is still possible)
- Crypto
- …
If you’re offering your products/services globally, it’s easiest to use credit cards option.
But if you’re working on a local market, then you might consider going to more localized methods. That mostly means that people trust those payment methods more than credit cards, or at least they know how to use them. It usually also means that the transaction costs associated with the payment are lower (mostly).
Use case: Resportly
When we started Resportly, we knew we want to:
- offer subscription-based lease of sports gear
- we have a limited budget, but not 0
- we have internal technical knowledge, but less knowledge about sports gear – so testing business was possible through technology
- we prefer local payment methods (iDeal) to credit cards
- we will be using a combination of dropshipping and buy-as-we-need (when an order comes in, we will buy the sports gear)
E-commerce platforms
There are different e-commerce platforms. Some of them that we tested are:
- Shopify: general shop, best for selling physical products, easy to use, monthly subscription + payment fees. For selling subscriptions there are possible modules for an additional fee.
- Subbly: specialized in subscription-based shops, easy to use, monthly subscription + payment fees
- WooCommerce: most complicated for a beginner, but it offers a lot of customization – you can install additional plugins (functionality). Free software but you will need a web hosting provider, which charges a monthly fee.
Now – How do I start my own e-commerce business and which platform to choose?
You try them
We started with Shopify to see their functionality. We liked how fast we were able to launch and easy it is to use. And simplistic design.
But there was no out of the box functionality for subscriptions. And that would require additional monthly costs.
We tried this in combination with local payment methods and it didn’t work – which would mean higher costs for us and our users.
We tried Subbly, which is simple to use and it’s meant for subscription-based businesses – all good. But no support for local payment methods, which would bring the costs up.
We ended up with WooCommerce, which took more time to implement, but luckily we had technical knowledge. It offered local payment methods, which we needed. And it was more customizable than other SaaS solutions. And it offers an easy blogging platform, too. Read more here.
Some advice
Consider what’s important for you and your consumers
Try not to over-think your business model, rather get right to it – rapid prototyping
Connect with technical people (if needed)