Do you want to start a small or medium-sized online store? In that case, this guide is for you. We want to give you a head start on all things about starting online stores. Once we’re done, you should know all the basics and what to look out for in the future. In particular, we’ll focus on the technical requirements that an online store should meet.



Start your online store in 7 steps:

1. Pick a product to sell
2. Find a domain name that’s available
3. Define your ecommerce website requirements.
4. Choose the adequate online store provider (ecommerce software).
5. Set up your online store.
6. Start a marketing campaign.
7. Check your results and take some action!

For years now, online commerce revenue has known only one direction: up. Just take a look at the black line on the chart – that’s the sum of all ecommerce sales in the USA. The blue line above it shows all retail sales in the USA. And while retail still has an advantage over ecommerce, Statista predicts that this advantage will shrink, favoring ecommerce in the long run.


And that makes perfect sense, too – after all, every new generation grows up knowing the Internet and seeing online purchases as completely normal. In fact, ecommerce will soon be the most common way to buy.

By the way – you’re on a good track if you’re catering to English-speaking markets: Nobody spends more money online than people in the USA and the UK.

And it doesn’t matter whether you already run a brick-and-mortar business or whether you’re starting from scratch. If you want to plan your own online store, put that plan into action, and see your store succeed, then we want this ecommerce guide to help you do just that.

Check out our video below for a (short) visual introduction to ecommerce:

Why Start Online Stores of Your Own?


That’s a fair question when you consider the many, many places online where people can buy things: Amazon Marketplace, eBay, and Etsy all offer platforms where anyone can sell products online. And that might not be a bad idea for starters, either: You can use their visitor numbers to your own advantage without investing into advertising.

There is a problem, though: Depending on the products you’re selling, the brokerage fees you have to pay the platform may be anywhere from 5% to 20%, and over time, that’s a lot of money. You also don’t have access to customer data, so you can’t invest into the customer relationship afterwards (e.g. through an email newsletter).

By running your own online store, such fees will no longer be an issue for you. Instead, you have to keep payment provider and hosting costs (e.g. PayPal) in mind. But ultimately, this will cost you less than staying on a marketplace platform. Obviously, you can try and run both strategies at once and try and shift customers from the platform to your own store over time.

In the long run, a website and starting an online store of your own are, by far, the best way of creating brand recognition and winning over steady customers.

Finding the Best Products Niches

If you aren’t quite sure about what to sell, there are plenty of different ways of finding interesting niche markets.

The easiest option will always be to start off by focusing on an area you are already familiar with. Perhaps flying drones is your hobby? Maybe you have a passion for fine coffee? Or you might be a fan of retro headphones?

In all of these cases, there are small, very specific niches just waiting to be tapped into alongside the major markets. If we take coffee as an example, we might be looking at portable espresso machines or something along those lines. The key is to make sure that there are enough people showing an interest while ensuring that there are relatively few existing providers.

Researching product demand

You can look for these kinds of niche markets, for example, using Google Keyword Planner, KWFinder, Google Trends, or, best of all, Ahrefs. That way you can find out how many times in a month people are searching on Google for a particular keyword and/or product. Not to mention that all the aforementioned keyword tools generate related keywords that you may not have thought of otherwise.


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