Your guide to selling online and starting e-commerce

Selling online has become popular in recent years, because increasing numbers of business owners have realized the important benefits that selling this way offers their businesses.

But because starting to sell online is not an easy thing for beginners without following specific directions and steps, in this article we will explain to you how to start making a profit by selling online in more than one way, and we will also provide you with a set of useful tips that will help you succeed in this and overcome… On competitors.

The concept of selling online

Online selling or electronic commerce (E-commerce) is a commercial process that takes place through the Internet, whether by relying on platforms dedicated to selling and purchasing products, such as electronic stores, or by relying on general platforms that can be used to sell online, such as Social media platforms, or otherwise.

The online selling process includes two parties, one of which is the seller, who may be an individual or a company, and the second is the buyer or customer, who may also be an individual or a company, meaning that this process is a buying-selling process, but the term online selling itself is intended to focus on this process. The process is from the perspective of the seller, not the customer .

In online selling, the customer does not visit the store, nor is it necessary for a traditional physical store to exist, as the payment process is done electronically through payment gateways, and the product is delivered to the customer via shipping if it is a physical product, while it can be downloaded directly from the store. If it is a digital product.

It is worth noting that e-commerce is growing in all countries of the world with the passage of time, as its share of the total revenues of commercial projects increases every year over the previous year, and this is due to the knowledge of business owners and their understanding of its benefits for their commercial projects and customers alike.

Benefits of selling online for businesses

Selling online provides many important benefits that make it easier for business owners to obtain and increase profits. The most prominent of these benefits include the following:

Reducing the costs of the commercial project . Compared to the traditional method of selling, you will not necessarily need to rent a store or consume a lot of electricity and obtain other services necessary to operate a traditional store, because it is not necessary to own a traditional store.
Facilitating and accelerating the sales process , as there are many platforms and tools that help a lot in creating an online store and automating everything related to the buying and selling process, such as displaying and marketing products, answering potential customers’ inquiries, receiving payments, organizing orders, and others.
Expanding the geographical area of the target audience . While you can target part of a city or a maximum of a city in the traditional selling method, and you will need to open branches of the company if you want to target more regions or cities, selling via the Internet provides you with the possibility of targeting a country or even the entire world without the need to To create a physical store.
The ability to collect data and make better use of it , as online selling allows us to get to know more about shoppers and customers by collecting data about their behaviors in the online store, by providing them with questionnaires, and through their ratings and comments, and by taking advantage of this data to provide them with the products and benefits they want. After processing it electronically.
Selling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week . Because many tasks in online selling are done automatically without the need for human intervention, including displaying products, receiving payments, and organizing orders, customers can browse and buy products from your store at any time, even if You were not available to respond to them.

Customers and shoppers also benefit from the advantages of selling online, as they can browse and buy products and sometimes obtain them without leaving their homes, in addition to shopping for products that are not available in traditional stores near them. Therefore, selling online is beneficial for both business owners and customers, and for this reason It can be relied upon to increase revenues and profits.

Methods of selling online

There are many methods that can be followed to sell products and services over the Internet, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. There are also many tools that can be relied upon to sell over the Internet in the same way, and more than one method of selling can be relied upon at the same time.

But the most convenient way to sell online, and the one that is important to rely on whether you adopt one method or more, is to sell by creating your own online store, because this allows you to customize the features and options of your store according to what suits you exactly. Below we show you the best methods you can rely on to sell online and start e-commerce.

Selling by creating an online store

Selling online by creating an online store means building your own website that allows customers and potential customers to browse and purchase products and services , where you are the one who manages all aspects of the store, including adding products to it, processing orders, responding to customer inquiries, and so on.

You can rely on special programming to create an online store and display and sell products through it, but it is better to use an e-commerce platform, as e-commerce platforms make it much easier and faster to create and manage the store, and also have many useful tools that allow developing the store and improving its various aspects to attract visitors and customers.

In order to start selling online by relying on this method, you can apply the following steps:

Step (1): Choose products and define the audience

Choosing products and determining the audience you will target in your online selling process is the first step. Various types of products and services can be sold online, but care must be taken, at least initially, to choose products that meet the following two characteristics:

Solve the problems of the target audience.
Related to keywords with high search rate.

Of course, products must meet some basic conditions necessary for success in selling online, as it is important that they are of high quality, at reasonable prices, and that they possess a competitive advantage or advantages that other products do not offer.

As for the target audience, it must be able to pay for the products or services you provide, and need them. It is also important that the number of its members be large and easily reachable, and it is not necessary that they live in a specific geographical area.

It should be noted that defining the products and audience at the beginning is important, because many of the subsequent steps in the process of starting to sell products and services online can depend on the quality of the products and the audience. For example, if you are going to sell digital products, you will not need to set up shipping operations.

Step (2): Determine the appropriate e-commerce platform

After determining the products and services that you want to offer in your online store, in addition to the audience that you want to target, you must choose the appropriate e-commerce platform to use to create and manage your store. As we explained previously, it is better to rely on an e-commerce platform, because it greatly facilitates and speeds up the process. .

There are many platforms that allow you to create professional online stores and start selling online, but not all of them provide the same features, and some of them are not always appropriate. However, there are platforms that are appropriate in all cases, or at least the vast majority of them, and the best of these platforms is the WooCommerce platform, which is available in the form of a WordPress add-on that turns the site into an integrated online store.

WooCommerce has many advantages that make it the most popular e-commerce platform ever, and among its most important advantages are the following:

It is free and open source , meaning you can use the add-on and modify it as you want without paying any money.
WooCommerce stores can be highly customizable , as you can literally customize any part of your online store however you want.
There are many plugins available that can be used to extend the functionality of WooCommerce online stores.
There are many templates that integrate with WooCommerce , and this facilitates the creation and design of the online store.
It supports many payment gateways , and any payment gateway can be added to it through the use of plugins or special programming.
It is easy to use to manage the online store , and it is not difficult to create and set up the store with it.

WooCommerce also has many other features. It is available in many languages, including Arabic, and there are no restrictions surrounding it. Therefore, because it is suitable for use in almost all cases, we will rely on it to explain how to start selling online by creating an online store, but You can apply the same general steps to most other e-commerce platforms as well.

Step (3): Obtain hosting and a domain

Any website, whether it is an online store or another type, regardless of the program or platform that will be used to create it, requires web hosting and a domain name . Sometimes these two requirements are obtained by purchasing a plan from the e-commerce platform that will be relied upon, but in the case of WooCommerce, you must obtain them from other providers and then install WooCommerce on them.

Hosting can be obtained from web hosting providers. There are many hosting providers in the market, but we advise you to rely on cloud hosting providers , such as Digital Ocean , as the cloud hosting provided by these companies is the best in terms of performance and price thanks to its nature. Regarding the domain, it can be obtained from one of the providers that we mentioned in the list ( the best sites to buy a domain at a low cost ).

After you obtain hosting and a domain, it will be necessary to connect them together if they are from two different companies. To do this, you can follow the explanation that we provided in the article ( How to connect a domain to hosting, and make the settings correctly ), as we explained in it how to do that in detail and with pictures.

Step (4): Prepare and create the online store

In order to create an online store and sell online through it, you need to implement a set of steps, which are as follows:

Installing WordPress on the hosting : WooCommerce works within the framework of the WordPress content management system , so before you can use WooCommerce to sell online, you must install WordPress on the hosting as we explained in the article ( How to download and install WordPress on the hosting ).
Installing WooCommerce on WordPress : Installing WooCommerce is no different from installing other WordPress plugins, as it can be implemented through the WordPress control panel itself, as we explained in the article ( How to install a WordPress plugin and activate it on your site correctly ).
Adjusting and setting WooCommerce options : The basic WooCommerce settings are adjusted by filling out the setup wizard tabs that appear after installing the WooCommerce plugin within WordPress.
Setting up shipping : Selling physical goods online requires adjusting shipping settings, and to learn how to do this on WooCommerce, you can review our comprehensive article on this topic ( Explaining how to manage shipping options on WooCommerce ).
Setting up payment methods : Because payment is essential for any purchase, you must set up payment gateways before you can start selling online through the online store. To learn how to do that, see the article ( Payment methods in WooCommerce stores and how to choose the most appropriate method ).
Adding products to the store : There are many ways through which products can be added to the online store, and we have explained the best of them in the article ( The best ways to add products to the WooCommerce store ).

It is worth noting that the steps that we mentioned in the list above are general steps that can be implemented in any e-commerce platform other than WooCommerce. In any platform to create an online store, you need to prepare the program used, shipping, payment methods, and adding products, but the detailed steps differ from one platform to another. You will find detailed explanations online explaining how to use the platform you have chosen to create an online store.

Step (5): Marketing the store and starting to collect profits

After you have prepared all aspects of your store to start selling online as we explained, you will be ready to start receiving purchase orders and collecting profits, but most likely you will not receive enough orders to make a profit or even cover the expenses of operating the store if you do not market it and the products that you sell. Sell it in it.

There are many ways through which an online store can be marketed, the most important of which are:

Marketing through SEO : This means using search engines to attract customers to the website by targeting keywords used by visitors who need your store’s products or services. In order to learn how to use SEO to market the online store, you can review the article ( Improving SEO for your online store in 11 practical steps) ).
Marketing through social media : This means marketing your store and products on a social media platform in order to attract members of the social platform to visit the store and buy the products. The best platforms that can be used include: Facebook – Twitter – Instagram – LinkedIn – Snapchat. It is necessary to be careful about marketing through the platforms that the target audience uses, and it is preferable to stay away from marketing through the platforms that they do not use.

There are also many other marketing methods that can be relied upon to improve the revenues and profits of selling online through the online store, and we have talked about the best of them in a separate and detailed article entitled (A Comprehensive Guide to Electronic Marketing ).

Selling via social media sites

Social media has hundreds of millions of active users daily, and this makes it a convenient market for displaying and selling products online. Social media can be used to sell online as an aid, but it can also be used to sell online as a primary method.

Each social media outlet has its own tools that enable business owners to sell online through it, and many of them go beyond that, as they support the possibility of creating an integrated online store such as Instagram, which we will explain how to use to create a store and sell online in the following paragraph.

Selling via Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, with 500 million daily active users, and it is also one of the most used platforms for shopping, with approximately 44% of its members using it to shop weekly, according to a study conducted by the company.

For this reason, the platform constantly innovates tools, options, and features that help business owners sell through it. One of the best and most prominent features that help sell on Instagram is the Instagram Shopping feature, as it provides the ability to create an online store on the platform.

Starting to sell online via Instagram Shopping is very easy, as you can, without any programming experience, create your own store on Instagram, display products in it, market for them through stories, posts, and advertising campaigns, and allow the customer to complete the purchase process without leaving the Instagram platform (even Now this feature is only available in the United States).

To do this you can follow the following steps:

Make sure that you meet the conditions for selling through Instagram , as selling through the platform requires that you have an online store that represents your business, that the market for your business is supported , and that you must confirm that your account on Instagram represents a business or content creator account (if not, you can convert it) And meet the conditions listed on this page ( eligibility requirements for trading on Instagram ).
Link your Instagram account to your Facebook activity page . To use the Instagram Shopping feature, your Instagram account is required to be connected to a Facebook page. You can do this by following the steps described in the Facebook Help Center ( linking or unlinking your Instagram account to your Facebook page ).
Upload the product catalog to your account . There are two ways to do this, the fastest and best of which is the one that relies on importing product information from your online store if it was built on a supported platform, such as WooCommerce , Shopify , or other supported platforms. The second method relies on entering product details manually. By using Catalog Manager .
Send a review request to subscribe to shopping features on Instagram , to verify the accuracy of the information you provided, in addition to ensuring your eligibility to use the feature. You can submit a review request by logging into your business account on Instagram, then going to ( Settings ), then going to ( Register for Shopping on Instagram ), then following the steps shown on the page to submit the account for review.
Turn on the shopping feature on Instagram . After your request to use the feature is approved, you must go to ( Settings ) in your account, then click on the ( Business ) option, then on the ( Shopping ) option, then on the ( Continue ) button . After that, you select the catalog you want to link to your Instagram account, and then click the ( Done ) button.

Now your Instagram store will automatically appear on your account page, and shoppers will be able to visit it by clicking on the ( View Store ) button on the page, and you will of course be able to market products through posts and stories by taking advantage of the marketing features provided by the Instagram platform.

It is worth noting that you can create a store on Facebook in a similar way, as the stores feature is common to the two platforms, and you can manage product catalogs for your stores on the platforms by using one tool, which is the brand manager .

We would also like to draw attention to the fact that most of the popular social media platforms provide the possibility of creating an online store on them or provide features that allow products to be sold online through them, and this includes, but is not limited to, YouTube , TikTok , and Snapchat .

Selling through multi-vendor stores

Multi-vendor stores are online stores that constitute marketplaces for products or services, which sellers can use to display their products or services, and which buyers can use to shop for and purchase sellers’ products and services. This method of selling online can be relied upon along with the other methods we talked about, as you can create your own online store and sell online through multi-vendor stores at the same time.

There are many multi-seller online stores, the most prominent of which are Amazon and eBay. There are also multi-vendor Arab stores, including the Noon store available in several Arab countries, the store dedicated to buying and selling digital products, and the website dedicated to buying and selling mini-services, in addition to many other stores.

Selling via Amazon

Amazon is the most famous online store on the Internet, and it is a multi-seller store that allows both buyers and sellers to take advantage of the options and benefits it offers. Amazon provides the ability to start selling online through it with great ease, as in addition to the ease of registering and creating an account, it offers attention to the most difficult selling tasks, which are shipping, storage, and customer service.

In order to learn how to start selling online through Amazon, you can review the beginner’s guide to starting selling through the store. It has been completely translated into Arabic, and can be downloaded directly by clicking on this link . If you want to create a seller account and start selling on the store, you can Do this by following the steps described on this page on Amazon .

Selling via eBay

eBay is a multi-seller online store that allows the buying and selling of various types of new and used products, including books, toys, cars, clothes, shoes, electronic and electrical tools, smartphones, tablets, computers, etc., but unlike many multi- stores Other sellers allow the possibility of selling the product in more than one way, as you can sell your product through the ( buy now ) option, which helps sell the product quickly, or through the ( auction ) option, which is likely to provide you with the highest price.

To start using eBay to sell online, you can create an account on the site, then list the product by clicking on the ( List Item ) button, then entering the product information, then selecting the selling method, and filling out the other required forms, including the preferred shipping method and pictures of the product, Then wait until the product is approved to be displayed on the site to buyers. For more details about using the site, you can review this page on eBay .

It is worth noting that you can also create a multi-seller online store to allow sellers to sell in it, by using the WordPress content management system, as we explained in the article ( Creating a multi-seller online store, and attracting merchants to sell with you ), but making a project like this successful may not be easy, and may require A large amount of money to attract sellers to sell through your store, and attract buyers to buy products from it.

Important tips for success in selling online

Starting to sell online may not be difficult, as you can easily create an online store through WooCommerce, or an account in one of the multi-seller online stores, and then display products in it, but achieving good profits from selling online and constantly increasing revenues and profits may be difficult. Especially for beginners who have no previous experience working in the field of e-commerce, and for this reason we present to you below 7 valuable tips that will help you start selling online, and succeed in achieving and increasing revenues and profits:

Make a plan and implement it accordingly : Before starting to sell online, you must develop a comprehensive and detailed plan for what you want to implement and achieve, based on an in-depth study of the market, the target audience, and the products you provide. Make sure the plan includes all the steps you want to follow.
Be transparent, clear and not misleading : Make your store’s product descriptions and benefits clear and real, because customers do not buy from an online store a second time if they do not get what they expected the first time.
Pay good attention to the customer experience : All aspects of the shopper or customer’s experience in the online store are important, and it is necessary to ensure that all processes of browsing, filtering and searching products, implementing payment operations, and managing the personal account in the store are easy and uncomplicated.
Use social media : Since social media includes a large number of potential customers, and there are many tools that help take advantage of it to achieve more sales, it would be a big loss not to rely on it.
Market your products based on SEO : Search engine optimization (SEO) in the online store helps direct customers who are highly likely to make a purchasing decision to your product pages, and thus using it will contribute to obtaining high-quality visits, and thus increasing revenues and profits.
Use split testing (A/B) : If you are confused between adopting one of two designs, phrases, etc. in your online store, you can run an A/B test to find out which of the two options is better and more beneficial to the store.
Keep up with customers’ desires and needs : Your customers’ desires may change over time regarding products, payment methods, product browsing preferences, and other aspects, and you must be careful to keep up with that by providing what customers want in the way they want.

And here, dear reader, we finish explaining the concept of selling online, and how to start e-commerce by creating an online store through ready-made platforms such as WooCommerce, and through the use of social media, and multi-vendor online stores. We would like to point out in conclusion that the path to success in selling online It requires patience and following the best advice and practices, so be sure to follow the directions and tips that we have provided in this article in order to succeed in achieving and increasing profits.