DIY: What is needed to set up an online store

Implement your own online store It is a good idea, despite the fact that there is a lot of competition on the net, online businesses are on the rise and are the present and the future. Having an online store as a unique business model or combining it with a physical store and then expanding the business, in the first case you can save money on personnel, rental of premises and other equipment, while in the second case it would not be a crazy idea either to expand your sales beyond the borders of your locality.

With a good positioning and if you have creative ideas, such as selling novel, personalized products, or that are not easily found, you can achieve very high sales levels. The logistics are already in charge of the delivery companies with which you partner to get your product or service to all places of the plan or nationally. You already know that times are changing rapidly and businesses are adapting to them, not being left behind can be the difference between success and failure.

What is e-commerce or electronic commerce?

El e-commerce or electronic commerce It is a type of internet based business. It consists of buying and / or selling products or services online. For this method to be possible, you need an online platform, marketing (online in this case), logistics to get the products to their recipient in the case of being a physical product, and a payment platform (PayPal, transfers bank, card payment, cash on delivery, etc.).

This type of business has grown exponentially in recent years, stimulated by the use of new technologies and the advantages it offers. Before we talked about and advantages for the seller, but there are also them for the buyer, since from your smartphone, tablet or PC, you can comfortably buy anything in minutes from anywhere and receive it at home in a matter of hours or days.

The most frequent mistakes when creating an online store

One of the main mistakes is to leave your products in the hands of a bad logistics company, since the customer can get tired of waiting. The supplier or dropshipper of the products or raw materials is also important to be fast and of good quality, sometimes saving on suppliers can cause us a bad reputation. Other vendors who supply parts or material for some kind of practice forget to create a blog to accompany the store and where articles with tutorials, ideas, DIY, or ways to use the product are published. That can encourage a buyer who has not been captured by the product but by the idea.

More frequent mistakes are to enter this world without knowing the market well. Carrying out a good analysis of this and of the competition is a guarantee. Competition is never looked down uponYou can always get ideas from it or avoid problems that they have made. The list of common errors is completed with projects in which you do not get involved or do not take seriously, platforms with very high prices, or not worrying about the traffic that your website generates.

Legal requirements to create your own web store

By supuesto the legality, not only of the products that are sold, but of your business, payment and tax declaration, etc., are vital. Since a fraudulent business can lead you to have to close the store at best or have problems with the law at worst. When opening an online store, it is best to seek help from professionals who can give us simple keys to have everything in order and can advise us with our doubts.

The legal aspects that you have to watch vary depending on the country where you reside, since the laws are not the same for Spain or for other countries, as they are not the same at any time. I mean, maybe a law will change and what was legal yesterday may not be today. Be sure to:

• Carry out the procedures prior to the opening of the online store, that is, to register in the Economic Activities Tax or IAE if you are not.
• Stick to the Retail Trade Regulation LawIn other words, comply with the requirements to sell online, which in principle are the same as for a physical store except for the opening license, which is not necessary for online businesses.
• LSSI (Law of Services of the Information Society and Electronic Commerce) in your virtual store. It is the most important regulation that you must respect, since it is in charge of regulating the obligations when selling online. In it they enter from the data required for sales or purchases, to the cookie policy of the web, therefore it is very broad.
• Data Protection Law (LOPD) with the confidential information of the clients, which not only intervenes in what you do with that data, but also the level of security of where it is stored, etc.
• Conditions of use, that is, where the obligations and rights of customers and users are collected. These must be accepted in advance before purchasing the product.
• Consumer Law and electronic commerce. Finally, electronic commerce is regulated and must adapt to the new European requirements. For example, you must clearly and unequivocally show the final price of the product and not mislead, have a return period of 7 business days to 14 calendar days, have a withdrawal form, assume the risks that the product or service may cause. , do not charge surcharges for paying by credit card or any other type of payment that implies a price higher than what the products cost, etc.

It seems complicated, but it is not, and as I say, with the help of a specialist or agency easily resolved ...

What do you need to set up your own server to host your store?

To have our website and everything we need hosted on a server, we need to either contract a third-party hosting that will give us accommodation on their servers, or set up our own free server. Perhaps this last technique is recommended if you do not want to invest money in the store, but perhaps you need more money if you need a website with a high traffic load, investing in decent hardware and a powerful network connection ... But there are many hosting services and of all prices, such as SiteGround, which offers your plan WooCommerce Hosting high performance that we recommend because it already comes with the pre-installation of everything you need for your sales platform and you can save installing and maintaining the software that we will talk about in the next section. It also includes free SSL certificate, automatic updates for WordPress and fast technical support 24-7-365.

If you still opt for your own server despite everything, you can set up a LAMP server, that is, for those who are not familiar with the term, it is a server server with GNU / Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL ( or similar like MariaDB) as a database management system and PHP (Perl, Python) as programming languages ​​for web apps.

All the technologies combined in the LAMP server are free and free, therefore it will not cost us a penny. We just have to have a physical infrastructure (hardware, network connection, ...) to make it possible. In addition, this system is the one used by most of the sites currently hosted on the web, as it is reliable and robust, much more than other alternatives ...

WordPress + WooCommerce

Once we have the server mounted, now the important thing will be to create our website where we can offer the products / services and all the tools for the seller / buyer. Here we can also go to third parties to design the website for us or some portals that already offer pre-designed sites, something not highly recommended in my opinion. Another great option would be to create our website in a simple but flexible way using WordPress, that will allow us to have a very good base on which to build easily and without costs.

In addition, WP has a large number of plugins that can help us to manage social networks, very important for marketing, counting visits, performing SEO tasks, etc. One of these plugins is WooCommerce, specially designed to create our own online store. It is a free plugin, in Spanish and other languages, that integrates with WordPress and makes it possible to set up an online store with a repertoire of up to 50 products.

The main functionalities of WooCommerce are:

• Management of different payment:
  • PayPal
  • Contrareembolso
  • Bank Transfer
  • Check
  • Credit card payment gateway
• Configuration of the shipping costs (if any), according to weight, dimensions or destination.
• Configuration of the impuestos like VAT.
• Management and creation of coupons.
• Add different attributes and variations of characteristics of each of the 50 products or services allowed. As for example choosing colors, sizes, versions, ...
• Offer inventory reports to view the available stock.
• And creation of status reports of orders, sales and customers.
• Add more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) necessary for search engine optimization. That is, if your page comes out of the first in Google and other search engines it will always have more visits and sales success than if it comes out of the last ...

And a recommendation, you can link this to other projects like MailChimp , to create marketing campaigns via email to your customers, that way they will receive emails with new products, offers, etc. to your emails without going to the spam tray.

I hope this article has helped you, please Do not forget to leave your comments.