What is E-commerce and How To Start It

The inception of e-commerce goes back to 1994 and now buying and selling online is becoming people’s no.1 priority. As per a recent study, online selling has recorded a boom in 2024 with 70 million more people choosing this way over traditional buying.  

That means if you are not adapting to the e-commerce model, you will likely lose a good number of potential customers. But what is e-commerce and how can you get started with that? Don’t worry, you will get to know all the details about e-commerce in this interesting blog post. So, without further ado, let’s get started. 

What E-commerce Means?

In simple words, e-commerce means to buy or sell over the Internet. Such transactions take place over smartphones and websites. The most common components of e-commerce business are mobile stores, Internet banking, online auctions, and electronic payments. 

How Can You Start an E-commerce Business? 

As you have a good understanding of the e-commerce meaning, let’s get to know how you can start an e-commerce business. The basic model of an e-commerce business is to list the products online and then find buyers for those products. In real-time, it’s not that simple since a series of operations takes place to set up and run a successful venture. Let’s get to understand the steps you need to follow to begin with an e-business. 

1. Deciding Your Business Model 

The first step of starting an e-commerce business is to understand what you will sell online. If you are already running a business offline (the traditional way), you can turn that into an online business as well. Like, if you own a physical clothing store, you can start an online clothing store too. 

2. Establishing Your Online Identity

Now that you are certain about what to sell online, you need to publish your products on the internet where potential customers can find you. How can you do that? Here’s how you can do that: 

a) Creating A Website

One of the best ways is to establish a website for your online business. For that, you will need a unique domain name which will be similar to your business name, and a hosting which is basically a space to store your data online. The prices of domain and hosting may vary depending on the availability of your domain name and hosting quality. 

b) Picking an E-commerce Platform

Now that your website is live, you need to install a proper e-commerce platform on it to support the e-commerce features. You get so many options with that ranging from Prestashop to Shopify, Woocommerce, and more. Prestashop is an open-source platform that offers several e-commerce features for free. Hence, it is a perfect starting point for new business owners. Still, you can check platform comparisons like Prestashop vs. Shopify to understand which one will be the better option for you.  

If you need our opinion on that, we will strongly recommend the Prestashop because it is free and gives you the freedom to tweak everything you want to make your e-store perfect. 

c) List Your Products

Once your website is set you can start listing your products on it. Continuing from our example of a clothing store, you can post a variety of products for potential buyers to view and purchase.  

3) Customizing Your Product Listings

Once your product listings are live, you can customize those web pages to make more potential customers buy your products. For customization, you can include good images, product copy, and other technical details that the potential buyers should know. Let’s say you have picked Prestashop as your e-commerce platform for the online clothing store. You have listed the products and now want to improve the page appearance for the end users to convert them into customers. You can either use coding for that purpose which is time-consuming and not very fruitful. Instead, you can rely on the Prestashop addons like the FME Modules which are like extensions for adding more features to your product pages on the website. 

4) Making Your Products Visible in Buyer Searches

What’s the use of uploading your products when no potential customers can see them? That’s right e-commerce is a competitive world and without proper optimization, your products will not be visible to your target audiences. That’s why you need to do proper SEO of your e-commerce site so it can appear in the relevant searches. Continuing from our example of a clothing store on Prestashop, you can rely on the best practices of Prestashop SEO to boost the search engine visibility of your e-shop. 

5) Make Your Online Store A Brand

Simply making an online store won’t be enough these days. The high competition demands that you work on building your brand’s reputation with excellent services and an online presence on different social media platforms. This way, potential customers can trust your brand over your competitors when making purchases online. 

Publishing regular blog posts on your website also works to boost your brand’s identity. That’s why the experts suggest regularly publishing blog posts on your website with information and commercial intent. E-commerce websites running on the Prestashop platform can make use of the innovative blog module that makes blog writing more fun and fruitful. 

Types of E-commerce Business

Now that you know what is e-commerce and how can you start such a business, it’s time to understand the two most important types of e-commerce businesses. 

1. Business to Business (B2B)

The B2b E-commerce business model focuses on transactions between two e-commerce businesses. A paper seller supplying papers to a book publisher is an example of a B2B business. This model is also termed as B2B industrial e-commerce.

2. Business to Consumer (B2C) 

In this e-commerce business model, a merchant directly sells to the end consumers. Like an online bookstore selling and delivering books to the buyers ordering through their website. 

Take Away

E-commerce is all about selling and buying online. It’s different from the traditional business model as everything takes place over the internet. In e-commerce, physical stores are turned into e-stores where Internet users are your potential customers. Hopefully, you now have a good understanding of what is e-commerce and how to start your successful e-commerce business today. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Which is the Best Platform to Start Your E-commerce Business?

Prestashop is one of the top e-commerce platforms that is home to 300,000 websites and offers great features for both starters and experts. 

2. Why Should I Start an E-commerce Business? 

There are more potential buyers online than you could get at a physical store, thanks to the smartphones and internet. Missing an online presence means losing sales along with an opportunity to be a brand. 

3. Is It Hard to Get Started with E-commerce? 

No, it’s easy to start with an e-commerce business. Innovative platforms like Prestashop are enabling even new starters to become established brands.