How to create an online store in 2024 and not go bankrupt

Step 1 Choose a niche

This is the most serious point, until you decide what to sell, do not move on. Do not create a domain name "sellall.com" (Unless you are Jeff Bezos). If you do not have the necessary tools with you, you can hit the bull's-eye with the same probability as when fortune-telling on coffee grounds. Therefore, we recommend using Google Trends, the Google ADS Keyword Plannerr, or best of all, Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. The service is paid, but you can buy a "trial" version for $ 7 per week.

This is where you can spend a few hours to sort out and find interesting keywords. For example, we recommend searching for the phrase “buy” in your region, while setting the “key complexity” to no more than 3-5. You need to search for the larger the value of Volume - this is the number of requests for this keyword per month. Of course, “buy” is not the only suitable query for this study, you can try other options as well.

Step 2 Find your supplier

Here either an acquaintance of an acquaintance who works at a wholesale warehouse, or the same Google, will help you. If you start from the second point, this is also not a mistake, but do not forget to check the tools from point 1 to see if they are generally looking for a product on the Internet that you can buy at wholesale prices.

Variant 1

Find a friend who works at a warehouse

Variant 2

Use Google as a provider, but do not forget to check with the tools from point 1

Step 3 Choose a domain

Yes, this is also important. Here you need to look at the future, because the name of the site will always be with it. Also, more and more often recently, drop domains are being bought for such purposes. This is also a trend in 2024. Drop domains are domains that were previously used, well promoted, had good traffic, but the owner, for some reason, did not renew it and such a domain became free. How to find such domains - you can contact a selection specialist, or an SEO studio, or find services for the purchase of vacated domains yourself. But there are many pitfalls here, so without enough experience, you can get a domain worse than a new one.

Step 4 Select a platform

Find a company, that can help you launch your store and can maintain it. There are a few tricky traps to fall into:

create an online store for free

• cheap
• the skills of a good programmer are required
• the need to screw in the necessary functionality yourself
• constant search for freelance programmers

expensive creation of an online store

• good companies with experienced specialists
• high probability of encountering charlatans
• long time of site development and launch
• rapid loss of relevance of the idea and design

create an online store temporarily

• quickly
• instagram / olx / prom marketplaces are good for starting a business
• very limited functionality
• not suitable for a more serious level of sales

The main criteria of the good web studio according to Solomono

• 1

  Usability

  The functionality of the store and the admin panel should be thoughtful, flexible and convenient.

• 2

  Flexibility

  It should be possible to change this functionality to suit your requirements.

• 3

  Design

  There should be a high-quality and thoughtful appearance of the site. Pay close attention to the loading speed of demo stores. To do this, you can use the Google Page Speed service or GTmetrix. Website speed is the undisputed must-have criterion for online stores in 2024.

  100

  https://demo.solomono.net/

  0–49 50–89 90–100

  GTmetrix Grade

  Performance

  100%

  Structure

  99%
• 4

  SEO-ready

  The template and the store as a whole must meet ALL SEO requirements. There are a lot of them, this is the subject of a separate article, but this is very important. Especially if nothing can be changed in the chosen platform and it is not suitable for promotion, you are at a dead end. Easy - if you can improve the necessary functionality. But if somewhere it is already ready - why waste time and money?

• 5

  Support

  Many years and multi-site experience, adequate support service, good reviews, free bug fixes and constant work on the engine.

• 6

  Fill the site with content

  The most correct approach here is migration from another platform or import of your supplier's product database (usually XML, CSV formats). In 2024, in most cases, this approach is required. In 10 minutes you will receive a ready-made catalog with products, descriptions, pictures and characteristics. Otherwise, you will spend months and thousands of dollars manually filling your site.

• 7

  Promote your site

  Don't make the majority mistake - don't invest a lot of money, time and effort in the first 5 points! Let it be 20%. The remaining 80% must be invested in website promotion. There are several options for advertising, but we will focus on SEO-promotion, because we consider it the most conversion and justified from the point of view of long-term investments.

  Of course, there are even more charlatans here than among store creators, so you need to be very vigilant, study reviews, cases, statistics of the company to which you plan to entrust not only your money but also the future of your online store.

  In our opinion, a good SEO company must meet several criteria:

  

  • have many years of experience in website promotion
  • have good cases (examples) of the results of their work
  • to be well versed in the technical part of the site
  • be very flexible, constantly evolve, and revise their own approaches

  If these criteria are met in your opinion, then you can safely start cooperation. Our company, also by popular demand, opened an SEO department several years ago, a great advantage of which is direct knowledge of the engine, its structure and the correct approach to it

• 8

  Extend the functionality

  As necessary, unless of course you have chosen a platform in which it is impossible to change the code, order refinement of the design and functionality. Therefore, here you need to first seriously approach the choice of platform.