How to Start in E-Commerce: A 10-Step

How do you start in e-commerce?

Starting an e-commerce business requires at least as much individual effort as opening a physical shop — in fact a little more. But do not let that sentence lower your motivation! Because the roadmap I am going to set out will clear away the unknowns in your mind and make you bolder. And as a source of motivation, in e-commerce it is possible to start with a lower budget than a physical shop and achieve many times the revenue.

Why is opening an e-commerce shop harder than opening a physical one?
Fundamentally, in a physical shop, if the quality of the product and service you sell satisfies the customer, the number of people walking past more or less determines how much business you can do on average. When you open your shop in e-commerce it is like opening a shop in the middle of the desert. Nobody knows you, nobody visits your website. You therefore have to bring your customers to your e-shop in the middle of the desert yourself. As in physical shops, your customers will not come to you on their own two feet. You bring customers to your shop entirely through digital marketing and SEO work.

The effort you put in and all the work you do will carry your shop step by step to the busiest streets of the e-commerce city.

The cost of opening an e-commerce shop is considerably lower at the start than opening a physical one. But it asks you to close that gap with effort and time.

To succeed in e-commerce you need to bring many steps and decisions together at the right point. Let us look at those steps in order.

What is in this article?

1. Finding a Product

Just as the product sits at the foundation of trade, finding the product to sell to the consumer sits at the foundation of e-commerce. It is generally the hardest part. In this section we will look at how you can find the product you will sell.

Start with your own products

If you already make or sell a product, trying to sell those products online will be the most sensible decision. Do not say the products I sell cannot be sold online. As long as they are not banned products such as tobacco and alcohol, even products such as cement and bricks can be sold over the internet.

Your business can be your product

Subjects you are already experienced in are a better starting point than products you know nothing about. We generally focus on different fields we have no knowledge of, but you should bear in mind that you can lose a lot of time and cash until you master that new field. Think about your business again and brainstorm how you could sell your products over the internet.

Your interests or hobbies

Your hobbies and interests may bring many opportunities with them. Just do a little mental gymnastics and focus on how you could sell them online. I want to give an example that will look at first like it would never sell, and how you could turn it into sales.

For example: you are very interested in military technology. You have consumed books, videos and a pile of content and gained years of experience. How can you turn that knowledge into a product? Although that is one method, I am not going to suggest you immediately make a book and sell it. Let us give that knowledge over to creating a product from a different angle. In the field of military technology, turn headings such as fifth-generation fighter jets, the fighter jets used in the Second World War, tanks, weapons, soldiers and domestically produced military technology into poster concepts. In a niche category you can turn that knowledge into a product.

If the idea did not quite satisfy you, I recommend examining this site

Examine e-commerce websites you can draw inspiration from

You can draw inspiration by examining existing e-commerce sites or websites with different concepts. Categories' bestsellers and user reviews will also carry you to a better point.

N11.com
Hepsiburada.com
Trendyol.com
Gittigidiyor.com

If you want to look at international e-commerce sites

Make use of product analysis tools.

There are dozens of tools built for Amazon.com. Among the marketplaces in Türkiye you can examine nesatilir.com, which has drawn attention recently.

Fundamentally these applications give a set of analyses about products and thereby offer ideas on deciding what to sell and finding profitable products.

Find trending products

Trending products are products that have started catching users' interest but whose market has not fully formed yet. By finding trending products you can seize potential opportunities quickly. But I recommend paying great attention to — in fact avoiding — passing fad products that burst like soap bubbles. These products suddenly trend and then disappear. If your infrastructure and experience are not at a sufficient level, these products can cause you a loss. Growing your business slowly and steadily is far better than earning a lot in the short term.

Do you remember this product?

Where can you check whether a product or a movement (natural eating, for example) is trending?

By entering products and search terms into Google Trends, the tool where Google shows search trends worldwide and by country, you can look at search volumes and at which searches have risen recently, and compare more than one search query against each other.

2. Evaluate Your Product Ideas and See the Potential

Because we are new to e-commerce, seeing the product's sales potential in advance will protect you from losses and wasted time. The digital world offers easy ways of researching whether a product will sell.

How can I do it?
You can test this even without having a website. You can prepare an image for the product on social media, run a small ad, direct those who click the ad to WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and test how much interest there is in the product.

What else can I do to test products?

You can run surveys about the product with social media or survey tools.
You can try selling the product on existing marketplaces (Letgo, Gittigidiyor, Sahibinden and so on).
You can create a single-page website (a landing page) explaining the product in detail, run a little advertising to that page and measure the demand coming from customers.
You can create video content and collect feedback on social media (YouTube, Instagram and so on).

Remember: if someone else is doing this e-commerce business, you can do it better. Just try to gain a little more experience.

3. Do Your Research

We have found the product and tested it with the methods described, and we now trust it more — but we need to do a little more research. We need to research things such as this product's profitability rates, supply times, the product's continuity, the product portfolio (sets), how our competitors present this product, and what we can do differently or better.

We can do this research in two parts:
a) Competitor analysis
b) SWOT analysis

4. Prepare Your Business Plan

A business plan is the roadmap where you set your business goals and the methods for reaching them, and bring your ideas, your thinking and your strategy together.

Making a business plan is surfacing the unknowns and defining them. Making a business plan actually consists of goals such as sourcing the products, setting up the website, taking product photographs, building ad campaigns and opening social media accounts.

A business plan is roughly an 8–15 page plan. We could look at it in more detail in a separate article, but I will move on by giving the headings.

What headings does a business plan consist of?

Executive summary
Company overview
Products and services
Staff
Market research
Marketing plan
Logistics and operations plan
Financial plan

5. Create Your Brand

This is the stage where you create the brand name and brand elements you will invest in over the long term, the things that will set you apart from your competitors.

What are brand elements?

Brand name
Slogan
Logo
Colours
Brand character (fonts)
Symbols
Internet addresses
Other: packaging, labels and so on.

What should we pay attention to when choosing brand elements?

Memorability: being easy to recognise and attention-catching
Meaningfulness: evoking the product category or the brand's characteristics
Likeability: having characteristics consumers will like
Transferability: being usable in different geographies
Adaptability: being able to be revised over time
Protectability: being registrable

What should be considered when creating a brand name?

Every brand sets out to draw interest, stay in mind, be known and be preferred by the customer. To build a brand and create a value that defies the years, the name therefore has to be thought through very carefully.

What should the ideal brand name be like?

It should be easy to pronounce
It should sound good
It should be easy to understand
It should not contain Turkish characters
It should be easy to write
It should have few syllables
It should be interesting enough to stay in mind

6. Set Up Your Website

With today's technology you can start building your website without any technical skill. Above all, do not put your projects off by saying you have no software knowledge. There are options that let you build even websites that look very complex with zero software knowledge.

You can make use of our article below for this section.

11 Preparation Steps for a More Successful Website

Which software should you choose when setting up your website?

There are a great many e-commerce packaged software providers. You can research them, decide which one suits your business model and start. (I should note that I have only added service providers I have used myself to the list.)

Wix (low starting fee)
Shopify (low starting fee)
İkas
Ticimax (Turkish software)
İdeasoft (Turkish software)
RGS Yazılım
WordPress (WooCommerce — although it requires WordPress knowledge, installation is easy)

7. Establish Your Company Legally

Once you have your website ready, I recommend establishing your company legally.

To set up an e-commerce company, establishing a sole trader business is enough. To establish a sole trader business, all you have to do is meet an accountant and a financial adviser and get the necessary documents and paperwork to the financial adviser.

Documents needed for a sole trader business:

Power of attorney for the financial adviser
Proof of residence
A copy of the title deed or the tenancy agreement
A copy of the identity card
A passport photograph
A signature declaration
The vehicle purchase note and registration, if any

The 2020 paperwork cost of establishing a sole trader business is 550 TL. Together with the consultancy fee it varies up to around 1,000 TL.

8. Get Your Virtual POS So You Can Take Payments

To take credit card payments on your e-commerce website you need a virtual POS. You can get a virtual POS from a bank, but the easier and faster way is to contact virtual POS service providers. On integration, research in advance whether it integrates easily with the software you are using.

Firms providing virtual POS services for e-commerce

İyzico
PayU
PayTR
PayPal (for international sales and international citizens)
Because PayPal does not operate in Türkiye, a company needs to be established in a country where PayPal is available in order to open a PayPal account.

9. Set Up an Agreement for Your Shipping

To cover the shipping of your e-commerce sales at lower cost you need to talk to the courier firms that suit you and set up agreements. As your shipment numbers rise, your shipping costs fall. You can go to the nearest branch and get information.

Firms you can set up a courier agreement with for e-commerce:

MNG Kargo
Sürat Kargo
PTT Kargo
Aras Kargo
Yurtiçi Kargo

10. Launch and Start Selling

After this stage, set a starting budget using your friends, your social circle and your social media accounts and, bearing in mind your business plan and brand elements, launch the campaign presenting your brand and your products. Get everyone around you to try your products and to leave reviews under the relevant products on your website, recommend them and share them with their own circles.

Throughout every process, focus on increasing the number of customers who convert into sales.

When you have done all these stages and established your company and your brand, your chances of success rise considerably. In the processes after that we will focus on the digital marketing and communication processes for the brand and your products and try strategies aimed at bringing more traffic to the website. We will reach our goals one by one.

How to Start in E-Commerce: A 10-Step Beginner's Guide