The e-commerce business is witnessing a widespread growth in India, backed by the penetration of the Internet and the booming smartphone market. The availability of affordable internet connections is working as a boon for the e-commerce industry, thus inspiring even small retailers/business owners to step into the e-commerce world. People are widely using online shopping. Therefore, starting an e-commerce business is in India is easier than setting up physical distribution, plus it is highly scalable.
Are you thinking of starting your e-commerce business in India?
If yes, you would definitely need to have answers for some of the most important questions concerning e-commerce business:
- What product niche do you want to list in the e-commerce store?
- How many products do you want to offer?
- Which market segment you want to target?
- When it comes to e-commerce store design and development, what platform do you want to opt for- a custom platform or a pre-built platform?
- What is your total budget? How much percentage are you willing to invest for the platform?
And more..
Here’s your quick guide on how to start E-commerce Business in India-
1. Finding a product to sell and determining your business model
The first step to building an e-commerce business is to know what products you want to sell. This is often the most challenging part of starting a new online business. There are hundreds of products and dozens of categories. Choosing your niche is the most important step in opening your online business. Start this process by identifying successful companies already working in this space.
Make sure that the area is competitive – an absence of competition usually indicates that there’s no market, either.
At the same time, don’t pick an overly crowded niche, however, and skip anything dominated by major brands. If you’re having trouble with this, drill down further on what you want to do – the more specific you are, the less competition you are likely to face.
There are two types of Business Model for you to choose from: a single vendor or multi-vendor e-commerce store.
Single vendor involves only 2 entities viz a seller and the customers and multi-vendor involves 3 entities viz admin, seller and the customer.
2. Establishing Your Brand & Business
For a successful business, you need a brand that connects with your persona. Once you have decided what products you will be offering, your niche and the business model, the next important step is to establish a brand that connects with your persona.
Identifying your persona makes building an e-commerce brand easier. This includes:
- the brand name
- colors of your brand
- your company logo
- the typeface/fonts to be used
- your total budget, etc.
This leads the path to another important step in the process of e-commerce business establishment and that is legal registration of your business.
3. Select The Best Business Structure and Register Your Business
You’ve got several options when it comes to your business structure:
- Sole Proprietor
- Partnership (if you have a business partner)
- LLP
- Corporation
Registration of E-commerce Business in India depends on the type of your business model. Before you get started, you must get your company or LLP registered so that you can get a bank account opened in the company name and obtaining GST registration documents easily. You’ll need an Employer Identification Number (EIN) to open a business bank account and file your business taxes and you need to have certain business licenses and permits. Check with your city and state to see what sorts of sales tax licenses or home business licenses you need, and get those approved before you start operating.
To know more about business registration, you can refer sorted pixel.
4. Create Your Online Store
Once you’ve legally registered your business and started thinking about design, you need to register your domain name and any redirect URLs that might be relevant.
The design you chose for the online store needs to be compatible with your e-commerce software, too.
There are literally hundreds of e-commerce shopping cart platforms. Choosing the right e-commerce software is not easy. You need to carefully evaluate things like loading speed, features, compatibility with different payment gateways, compatibility with your business structure, your web developer skills, SEO-friendly features, and more.
One of our favourites is WooCommerce. As an e-commerce service provider and wholly a Website Design and Development Companies, we offer you much needed support in all the stages of your online business development, allowing you to upload product images and manage the content of your E-commerce Website more effectively.
As you move on to the design and development of your e-commerce business website, you can either opt for a custom build platform or a pre-built platform. A pre-built e-commerce solution refers to a set of themes/templates are created by business entities to meet the needs of a specific market. They are designed with a customer-centric approach that allows anyone to set up an online store with ease. However, a custom build platform is always a better option as it lets you customize the entire design of your e-commerce store as per your business requirements.
5. Payment gateway
Setting up your online store is much more than adding your products and content. You need lot more.The next important step would be to have a payment gateway integrated with your e-commerce website to allow customers make their payments through credit card, debit card, internet banking, etc. With digital payment gateway set up in its place, the customers can make the payment online which automatically gets transferred to your business’s bank account.
Other than that you need to get your email marketing and automation set up as well.
6. E-commerce Business Shipping Solution
Your online shopping portal is incomplete without a shipping solution. Once you receive an order you are also required to ship it to your customers. And, without a reliable shipping partner, shipping products to your customers might be a hard task. The growth in the e-commerce business has definitely benefited the shipping and logistics activity. So, get in touch with your shipping partners and decide the rates that would be charged and paid by you for shipping different quantities of products. This allows you to enhance the overall customer experience.
7. Attracting customers
Once you are all set, you need to attract customers to your e-commerce store. You need your target audience to know about your store. SEO is still popular and a “must be done” way to do so.
The top e-commerce sites invest heavily in digital marketing. You can also opt for such digital marketing for your e-commerce store as well. Also, stay updated with the digital marketing industry and marketing tips like sponsored content, social media, pay-per-click ads i.e. Google PPC Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram, or a combination of strategies to attract your target audience.
Starting an e-commerce business is a great idea especially now that e-commerce industry is booming. You need to make sure to frame and implement your e-commerce marketing strategies carefully.
Ready To Start Your own E-commerce Business in India?
We at Regur can help you through the entire process of your e-commerce store design and development including creating amazing customer experience, managing the content, integrations etc, followed by proper support and maintenance .
