How to Build Your Own Small Business eCommerce Storefront

Before you do things like register a domain or install your store, you need to know how to find your niche. There is a very big difference between a market and a niche.  A market is something very big and broad while a niche is smaller, but more targeted and focused segment of a certain market, and therefore more profitable.

For example, the pet market is a market. It is very big by definition with lots of customers and products, but also a lot more competitors and therefore tougher to get into. This is something we want to avoid. We want to focus on something more specific, more targeted so that we can maximize our profits with the same amount of work.

So, to take our pet market example, the dog training market is a niche. It is a smaller market and more targeted as well. This is very important to help you and turn niche business from being one of the many niche websites out there to one that has lots of visitors and more importantly, customers.

The next step is to find out how people can find your store. Because people use the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to look for things, such as dog training, you need to build your niche website around these keywords. We generally want to target keywords that have a reasonable level of searches with a low level of competition. We do not want to target keywords which have no competition because that means that there is no money to be made there.

So for our ecommerce storefront, let's say we want to sell dog training equipment. That would be our keyword which we build our ecommerce store around. If we do a quick check on Google for the term "dog training equipment" (with quotes), we can see that there are 171,000 competing pages. Then if we go over to the Google Keyword Tool to see how many people are searching for that term. The Google Keyword Tool reports back to us that there are approximately 5,400 searches per month for that term. That's a good indication that there are people looking for that term.

Find about 3 to 5 keywords which you can build your niche ecommerce store around.

Once you have your set of keywords, then you need to find suppliers. There are many sources from where you can find suppliers from. A very good (and free!) way to find suppliers would be to do a Google search. Just key in your search term and add '+suppliers' to the term. So to look for suppliers selling dog training equipment, you search for "dog training equipment +suppliers".

Get in touch with your suppliers and establish a relationship with them. Find out what products they carry and make a list niche products you can sell those products on your niche ecommerce store.

Once you have your suppliers and know which niche products you are going to sell through your ecommerce store, you will want to price these products. Basically, you want to get your products from your suppliers at, say, a wholesale price. You then sell the product at a higher price known as the retail price. The difference is your profit which you get to keep.

Now that the basic groundwork has been done, the next step is to build your ecommerce store.

There are 5 sub steps to building your ecommerce store:

• Register Your Domain
  
  Select a name for your ecommerce store and register that as your domain. Preferably pick something memorable and easy to remember. Following on with our example, dogtrainingequipment.com is a good name which right away explains to your visitors what your ecommerce store is about. However, you can of course be more creative and come up with a much more catchy and memorable name.


• Sign up for Web Hosting
  
  Your e-commerce store needs to be hosted on a server somewhere. While you can host it out of your own computer at your home, this is not reliable or recommended. A much better solution would be to pay someone to host your ecommerce store for you. That way, you can be guaranteed that when your customers are looking for your e-commerce store, it will always be online and available to them.


• Install an e-commerce shopping cart platform
  
  This is a big step and that is to install your e-commerce shopping cart platform. An e-commerce shopping cart platform is a ecommerce software package which you install on your web hosting server that acts as your ecommerce storefront and niche product catalog. When people come to your ecommerce store, this ecommerce software package allows people to see what products you offer, how much it cost and make orders.
  
  Many ecommerce software platforms out there today allow you to customize the look-and-feel of your storefront so it looks exactly the way you want it to look. You can do things like add your logo, add a FAQ section and other information which you want your customers to see when they come to your ecommerce store.


• Setting up your credit card payment gateway
  
  Obviously once people make an order, they need to pay you. So you will need to set up your payment gateway so you can accept payments. One such example which comes to mind is PayPal. When people pay you via PayPal, PayPal credits their credit card and transfer the money to you. PayPal takes a small commission of the transaction to provide the service.


• Setting up your product catalog
  
  After all that, you can start inserting products which you want to sell into the e-commerce shopping cart software. The shopping cart software allows you to store all this information for you and makes it easy for you to manage your product catalog easily. You can also insert other pages which you feel will be beneficial to your customers. For example, you could add an "About Us" page, a "How to use Your Dog Training Equipment" page and so on and so forth.

With that, your ecommerce storefront is now complete and is ready for business! People can now come to your ecommerce store and start buying products from you right away.

I hope you found the information above useful to you. However, it is only a very brief overview of the process to setting up your own small business e-commerce store.

For more information on how to set up an e-commerce store with more thorough steps, I would highly recommend you check out the Niche Blueprint system.

The Niche Blueprint system is a complete course on how to set up your own small business e-commerce store from beginning to end. It takes you from selecting your niche and market research all the way to how to promote your storefront after you have built it, how to run your ecommerce store and even sell your ecommerce store if you wish.

Niche Blueprint is created by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey together with Dave Hermansen and Mike Hermansen., Dave and Mike Hermansen, both brothers, were featured in a New York Times article entitled "Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It's Web Sites, Not Houses)" in July 2008. You can check out the article here:

By using the steps in Niche Blueprint, the makers of Niche Blueprint were able to make $173,000 from an ecommerce site selling bird cages, $14,134 per month from another e-commerce site selling train horns and $7,123 per month from another e-commerce site selling sewing machines

Niche Blueprint includes 27 videos and 31 PDF manuals across 9 modules explaining the whole process of starting up your own store.  To find out more about the modules in Niche Blueprint, you can read my blog post entitled "Great Content, Great Product, Niche Blueprint" here .

In addition to the main course material, Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey has also bundled together some great bonuses in Niche Blueprint.  I talk in great detail about these bonuses in my blog post "The Incredible Niche Blueprint Package"

You may also find out more information about Niche Blueprint at my blog, www.iboughtnicheblueprint.com.