SELECT YOUR LANGUAGE

E-commerce (or electronic commerce) is the act of buying and selling goods or services on the Internet. It encompasses a wide variety of data, systems, and tools for online buyers and sellers, including mobile shopping and online payment encryption. To start an e-commerce business, you must first come up with a business name.  Then, submit an application to obtain an EIN number from the IRS.gov website, which is FREE.  Your free EIN number is used for tax purposes to identify your business.

​

After you have your EIN number, file the appropriate paperwork required for your State to register your business.  You will also need to set-up a website for your business or set up a web hosting account.  Your website or web hosting account, must include an e-commerce page, where you can list your products, pictures of your products, product descriptions and details, services, and costs.  Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix and SquareOnline are some e-commerce websites that you can start with. Make sure you read their website descriptions and costs to determine which one is best for you.

​

You may want to view websites that offers similar products and services to determine how you want your website to look to your audience.  After you have your website built and your products and details are listed on your website, you will have to register your domain name.  Your domain name is the URL address (website address) for your website.  Make sure that when you are purchasing a domain name that you shop around, before purchasing it from the website builder website, because the website builder website could be quite expensive and you might have problems transferring your domain name to another website host, if you decide to do so at a later date.  Dreamhost usually has less expensive domain names, but it integrates with WordPress, which is not that user friendly, if you are not tech savvy and have never built a website.  You might need to hire a website developer.

 

After you have a registered domain name, you can add your bank account information to your website, so that you would be able to receive your payments.  Make sure you set up the tax, and shipping costs with your product descriptions as well.  From your website, you can set up email marketing campaigns to attract and retain customers after your website is published live.

​

An e-commerce business allows you to reach more people globally over the internet.  You will also need to utilize social media marketing and other forms of marketing strategies as well to promote your business. If you are interested in starting an E-commerce website at a reasonable price, start by searching for website designers on Fiverr.  E-commerce websites can be an extensive project at the start-up, if you have a lot of products that you are selling, because all of the pictures and details will need to be entered into your website.  After the initial set-up, you can either pay someone to maintain it or maintain and update your website yourself.  Good Luck!

​

​

By Jason Torrents