If you want to have a business, creating your own online store is the best way to introduce yourself in this world.
Years ago, when I decided to create my own business because I was tired of working for others, the first idea that came to mind was to start a physical store where I sold my products. But when I started calculating all the expenses, I realized that it was too expensive for me …
I would have to pay rent for a place, electricity, buy shelves and decoration, hire someone to help me with clients. And I did not have that much money to do all that. So I thought of something simpler and also much cheaper: create a Facebook page and sell my products there.
But I failed: Facebook does not work to sell online. People do not trust buying through a site that does not look professional, and that is dedicated to sharing photos with your friends.
In a month I only managed to make 3 sales and earn $ 26. It was a complete disaster and I left my dream parked aside for weeks thinking that I could never have my own business. Read more: How to set up a food business with little money
One day, while I was eating, I saw on TV a commercial of a new platform called Wix in which you could create your online store for free without knowing anything about web design.
So I decided to try it; I was not going to lose anything because creating my online store was free. And if it worked, I would finally be able to fulfill the dream that I had had for so long.
In a month I managed to make 32 sales with my Wix store and I earned $ 456 without advertising and without having the best products.
How to create an online store
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From that, I started to promote myself on Facebook and Instagram, to give discounts and coupons to attract more customers, and right now my online store generates me $ 2,200 in the worst months (in the best months I’ve made $ 4,500).
Since then, I have also helped many of Andres’s students create their own online store, and although they do not have the best business model, it is the safest to generate profits from their homes.
And here I will show you the exact steps that I followed so that you can also create your own online store in the next 15 minutes, and start generating income from your home as I did.
How to create your free online store to sell online
Decide what products you want to sell
The first thing you should know is what kind of products you are going to sell in your virtual store. It is important that you know this from the beginning because depending on the items you sell, your website must have a design that fits those products, and your strategies to attract customers will be different.
If you already know what items you are going to sell in your online store, go to Create your online store to sell below.
Create your online store to sell
The best platform to create your online store is Wix Stores. It is the place where I have my online store, and for me, it is the best because:
- It’s free: you just need to create an account on your page to start creating your virtual store
- You can sell all the products you want in it. There is no limit of items to sell
- It’s easy: you will not need to have design knowledge to create your Wix store
- They have more than 400 templates with different designs to choose from
- They give you the domain of your online store by creating an account with them
There are also other sites on the Internet such as Etsy or Mercadolibre where you can put your products for sale. But the big problem with these pages is that they charge too many commissions for everything.
On Etsy, every time you post an ad to sell a single product it will cost you $ 0.20. Each time you sell a product, you will be charged a commission of 3.5% of the total sale price.
And if you also accept payments through the Etsy Payments system, you will be charged a 4% commission plus $ 0.30 each time you sell an item.
If for example on Etsy you sell a product for $ 23, your costs and benefits would be these :
Your product ($ 23) – Sales commission (3.5%) – Use Etsy Payments (4% – $ 0.30) – Ad posting ($ 0.20) =
$ 20.77 for the product, and $ 2.23 for costs
Perhaps those $ 2.23 that you will lose in commission payments do not seem like a lot of money to you; but if you sell for example 30 products in a month, the total cost of the money you will lose will be $ 66.90.
In MercadoLibre or Ebay the rates are very similar, so in the end with the sales of your products, you will be losing a lot of money.
On the other hand, with Wix Stores, creating your online store is completely free, you can add all the products you want, and they will not charge you any commission for each sale.
That’s why this is the method with which I’m going to teach you here to make your sales website so you can start selling your products in it as soon as possible.
Conclusion
Starting an online business is hard work, consisting of several steps and decisions that must come hand in hand at the right time. To help you, we have compiled a comprehensive list of sources from the most popular publications in Shopify blogs. These articles follow a logical order, based on the way you search, create, launch and develop a profitable online store.
Creating your own online store is not an easy task. From the choice of a product, the evaluation of the viability and supply, to the creation, launch, and growth of sales, there are a lot of pieces that must be collected. However, we hope that after this recount about resources, you have a clear roadmap that allows you to build a profitable online business.
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