How do one start an online store? What is required?

In these days, every person with the Internet access can purchase any product they want. Surely, some of you have wondered someday at creating an online shop from nothing. In fact, everyone can build an online store from scratch and start making money at any time. You don’t have to rent expensive office spaces, warehouses and hire numerous stuff anymore. Nowadays, a lot of shops have their representative websites on the Internet, but loads of merchandisers work solely online. It’s not surprisingly, that starting an online store is a quite widespread and profitable business, as it is well known that it is the easiest way to increase sales volume. This way your target audience is much more wide in comparison with offline commerce, because a user from any town can easily visit your website and purchase an item.

While considering the prospects in this field and limitless online store promotion opportunities, it becomes obvious that the amount of those who want to start an online store is very big. Consequently, emerges the reasonable question: how to build an online store from scratch without external assistance?

The minimum requirements to do to open an online store are laid down:

• to create a platform and fill an online store with products;
• to obtain a minimal customer base, which have to be constantly extended.

Filling an online store with products

Design, advertising, proper marketing and search engine optimization play an important role in successful launching of your new-made online store. But even if you carried these tasks out, your store won’t prosper without a proper product database. At the initial stage of the online store promotion it is especially important to seem for search systems as attractive as possible. What is to be done for this? The fullest product description. If your shop specializes on clothes, you should specify color, size, length, manufacturer, seasonality. If it is electonics – describe technical specifications of products.

Description can be added both manually or automatically. When adding every single item manually, you have to download picture, publish description, price and additional information about facilities and characteristics of products. If your store consist of about 100 items, you can fill it up in a day or two. But you may need to create an online store which numbers thousands of products. In this case you cannot do without automation of the process. Online store scraping can help you to collect information about items from vendor websites and fill your online store with any quantity of products within the shortest possible time. The obtained product data can be uploaded directly on your online store, or to a CSV or Excel file.

Searching for clients

Starting an online store and building it up are quite challenging tasks. Your future income will depend on the proper management of the store launching process. Besides, new customers will always be needed for your ecommerce business. But how to find them? You can make use of paid services provided by professionals in this field or try to look for new clients yourself. In order to automate the process of searching for contact data on prospective customers an email scraper can be used as well. Using such scraper you are able to get contact data in a useful format and distribute promotional content to them via email.

You can test the online store scraper and the email scraper, realized on the Datacol basis, at this link.