Launching An Online Store? Read this Checklist To Save Your Time & Cost!

6 min readNov 24, 2021

Starting your own online store isn’t hard at all nowadays. However, it is not a mere one-time simple decision but indeed incurs hundreds of small decisions and tasks. If you want to succeed, you need to move through them step by step as well as systematically.

You may have a great idea or nice design or even already have sourced and/or produced a good product. You can see the opportunity that if you can build a website and start selling it, it could have a chance to make a big hit. So you want to launch your online store business but has little clue to start from there.

The whole process of building an online retail shop or eshop can be quite confusing especially if you are a beginner. It take some good planning and need you to pay attention into details because there are quite a lot of various tasks. In order to get you a whole picture of how can you create a successful ecommerce store easily and quickly, we have written a handy checklist for you.

Why You Need The Checklist?

The checklist is indeed an action plan and a to-do list that you need to get them done one by one if you want to successfully launch your eommerce store. Our checklist will tell you the actions (to-do’s) in a way through the whole process timeline. The checklist are based on our decades of our experience as well as updated researches by studying successful online businesses. The checklist can serve as a roadmap to your success and as long as you can follow it, you will not lose your direction as well as be confused or overwhelmed by the unnecessary actions and steps. You can stick to and only spend your precious time and effort into the most substantial action steps needed to be taken first so that you can get your online store up and running.

1. Find a Market Niche

What is your focus? Your focus should be totally at the customer. Put yourself into the shoe of your buyer and figure out what they need as well as their pain point? Remember that your customer need a solution to a problem fixed.

2. Product

You have found the niche and now you need to know if it is possible for you to get the product that create value to the customer (solve the problem). If your product can create value, ie, solve the problem at customer’s affordable budget, you are half-way to success.

3. Your Expertise and Passion

Now you find the market niche and the solution (the product). Then it is time for you to ask yourself if you are having good knowledge, deep interest and passionate towards that product. Having good understanding about the product can avoid big mistakes and pitfalls while being with passion can make sure you will enjoy during the journey.

4. Domain Name

If you can figure out the above 3 points, then you should be able to easily think of a domain name. Treat the domain as your brand name or your business name but it is there online for people to refer to. High recommend that you can stick to .com but .shop or .store are still acceptable if you can’t get your desired domain name in .com.

5. Register Domain Name

There are many different company online you can register your domain name with. You can easily google the keywords “domain name” and “registrar”. You can find a lot of them. My personal recommendation will be NameCheap.com as it is relatively cheap, user-friendly interface, stable service and many add-ons service that you can buy and use together in one account. Click the following affiliate link and see check out if their service can suit your need: https://namecheap.pxf.io/mgZdRD

6. Build the Online Store

You may build the online store from scratch but mostly, you will choose to use open source platform like Wordpress or SaaS platforms like Wix, Shopify, BigCommerce . . . etc. Decide the one that suits all your current and future needs (best the platform is expansible and can be upgraded once your business grows).

7. Online Store Pages

Be noted that you have at least to prepare some content for the following pages on your online store: Home, About Us, Contact Us, FAQs / Help, Blog, Terms of Use, Privacy Policy. Luckily, the best, easy and fast way is to check on other websites that sells the same or similar items like yours.

8. Online Store Backend

You also need to set up some variables for your online store at the backend and they are: checkout process page (mainly the accepted payment methods), member login area, shipping options, automatic email message (once an order is made and shipped emails will be sent to buyer) . . . etc.

If you want to know the detailed steps in setting up your online store, we have other articles in our blog telling you about that. You may click on here.

9. List Your Product

Go to the backend of your online store and start listing your product one by one. Carefully think about the content and description and then you can copy and duplicate them fast and easily.

10. SEO Optimization

SEO is an ongoing process and here are the most primal steps you should start with:

- Keyword search: Find and list keyword phrases and terms and let customers that may use to find your store;

- Keyword optimization: Use the selected keywords in product descriptions, category descriptions, meta titles descriptions, H1s, and URLs;

- Images optimization: Use “alt attributes” and image meta descriptions to improve your ranking in keywords search.

- Schema markup: Using schema markup improves your chances of getting rich snippets displayed at the top of the search results by Google and other search engines;

- Creating and submitting sitemaps: Design your sitemap and submit it to Google (Google Search Console) for their robot crawlers to visit your pages easily. This will help Google to easily categorize your pages for better search results; and

- Content marketing: Write articles on your blogs to get your pages rank higher in search result via carefully putting keywords in and get back-links to your high-value pages.

Again we have other articles that render in-depth tips and advice, check out the page listed below: Quick and dirty beginners guide to ecommerce SEO.

11. Further Marketing Campaigns

Once your website is started and running, you must launch marketing campaigns to attract more visitors and buyers. Below we list a few suggested campaigns you can consider doing:

- Email Marketing: following up and cross-selling customers;

- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): pay for ads display in Google, Youtube. Facebook . . . etc.;

- Social Media Marketing: opening your social media pages and drive traffic from there;

- Influencer Marketing: pay the influencer and KOL for a shoutout, tweet and sharing.

Summing Up

If you have read until here, you might a little bit overwhelmed or even astonished to find out that there are quite a lot of tasks to work on step by step in order for you to launch your ecommerce store. I have to admit that it is really long ecommerce checklist. But I also have to admit that it is not the complete or the checklist is static one. As time goes by, the items on the list may be changed too. Many new entrepreneurs like me years ago do feel like they’re at a loss when they start out. Get yourself well prepared will mean you are able to avoid pitfalls and mistakes and half the battle is already won. I hope that knowing every tasks and decisions can let you become discreet and lead you step by step towards and closer to the success and liberty lifestyle that you always dream of.

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