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Starting An Ecommerce Business In 2024

Oli Kashti - Writer and Fact-Checker for Fast Simon
By Oli Kashti
Joel Taylor - Editor for Fast Simon
Edited by Joel Taylor

Updated October 18, 2024.

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The eCommerce industry is huge, and growing at a rapid pace constantly. Starting your own eCommerce business in 2024 requires some planning and consideration, which is what we will give you in this post today. There are huge benefits to starting your own eCommerce store, but you should be aware of what this entails.

In order to make sure you get off to a good start with your eCommerce store, follow these steps:

Research

There are four types of eCommerce business:

  1. B2C: Business to customer (Amazon, Walmart, Adidas)
  2. B2B: Business to business (Amazon business, Alibaba)
  3. C2C: Customer to customer (Ebay, Etsy)
  4. C2B: Customer to business (Upwork, Fiverr)

These all have different business elements, and they will all alter the way that your business runs. Make sure you set up your business in an optimized way to meet the needs of the clients you want to appeal to.

Create A Business Plan

This also comes into the research category. You cannot simply start an eCommerce business without thinking ahead, and knowing what you are aiming for. Once you have the foundation of the business; create your plan.

Things that should be included in this plan are your roadmaps and objectives for:

You should have your goals set out clearly, and the steps that you need to take them. You should also be aware of the current state of the industry and market which you are planning on entering. Who is your target audience? How are you going to appeal to them? Creating a prototype customer is a great way of achieving this. What’s your USP? Knowing who you are selling to is important in order to structure your plan correctly. What are the logistics of this project coming to life over the coming months?

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Build Your Brand

The importance of a strong eCommerce brand cannot be overstated. The brand will create associations and lasting memories with your customers. It should reflect the tone of your business, the shoppers you want to attract and the impression you want to leave.

Creating a strong business name that is available, along with web domain, social media handles and legal names are all important. If your eCommerce brand will span across cultures you should also consider different cultural implications.

Depending on the age range of your customers, you should make sure that your brand applies to them. Packaging, website colors, design and marketing are all important to consider here. You could consider working with a designer in order to make this work in the best way possible for you.

Create Your Website

Obviously, a crucial element of your eCommerce business is your website. It’s the storefront that represents your business and needs to be accessible and attractive to users to make their purchases from. You can use a platform such as Shopify in order to get this started, and then from there, there are various ways you can optimize your site for the ideal user experience. 

Highly important elements to include within your website are:

  • Personalization: customers expect to be offered a tailored experience that helps their buying journey, and will also increase conversions
  • Merchandising: choose how your shoppers view your products by offering advanced merchandising capacity
  • Site Search: natural language processing and contextual understanding will take your site search, a crucial part of your eCommerce store, to the next level

Optimize For Mobile

These days, a huge part of the eCommerce industry takes place on mobile phones. Having a site that is optimized on browsers but not on mobile will lose you sales. Particularly for the younger generations, who even make high ticket purchases on their mobile devices.

Apps such as Tapcart create mobile apps for your eCommerce store that see great results. A mobile app is a great way for optimizing for mobile, but even without an app you should still make sure the buying funnel is seamless and optimized on any size device.

Final Tips

Now you have a broad understanding of what it takes in order to set up a successful eCommerce store. Some final tips to leave you on are:

  • Start small: don’t bite off more than you can chew, you can always grow bigger
  • Stay on top of trends: follow social media, and have a strong social media strategy
  • Creatively market: experiment with the best marketing way to reach your target market
  • Test: A/B testing is crucial in order to make sure you are making the right decisions

Starting an eCommerce business in 2024 is a great idea. It can reach a large audience and gives you the freedom to sell and market as you please. If you keep in mind the tips we’ve laid out in the post, you will be off to a great start.