Before you begin: ​

Having a business website is an essential part of your online presence. ​

• Your website: is part of your business identity, and branding allows you to communicate with your customers and enables them to get in touch with you and enable you to sell products and deliver services online.​

Taking your business online video​

• This video introduces all the steps you'll need to consider when you're preparing to launch or improve your business website.​

This video covers​

• domain names and hosting​
• different approaches to building a website​
• what content to include on your website​
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)​

Find Below the video​

Before starting you can see the following video for inspiration!

• Step 1: Get a domain name and URL​

​A URL is a complete web address used to find a particular web page. While the domain is the name of the website, a URL will lead to any one of the pages within the website. The most common one in Greece & Cyprus is Papaki.gr

• Step 2: Set up an email address to match your domain name​

​Create the domain name and email address. Log into your blog hosting control panel, or panel. Click on Email Accounts in the Email section

• Step 3: Find a web hosting company​

​For Example Google Cloud, or lookup.icann.org. In the search field, enter your domain name and click Lookup. In the results page, scroll down to Registrar Information. The registrar is usually your domain host.

• Step 4: Choose a business legal structure​

• You can refer to the educational material of 1ePoint!!

Why sell to your local area only when you can sell to the whole country, or even the world? When you are building your eshop, somewhere in between the “fun” parts of choosing your name, building your site, finding products, writing product descriptions, you will need to make your business legal! Incorporating your business is a “must”, as in the case where something goes wrong, you will be protected by the national laws.

• Step 5: Design your e-shop​

A well-designed e-shop can help you form a good impression on your prospective customers. It can also help you nurture your leads and get more conversions. When start building your e-shop, choose a thematic that is most well fitted to the needs of your shop!​

Tips: (1) when designing your e-shop make sure to include a customer service option. (2) information of how you can be reached (ie. Address, phone, email) (3) include any social media, if any and a Frequently Asked Questions. (4) think if you would like to be hosted at an online marketplace as Skroutz, Amazon,  etc. (5) connect a payment gateway and select payment options as credit card, deposit, bank transfer. Also, as part of pricing you will need to select the currency. (6) set up the shipping! Offer free shipping or a local pickup delivery! (7) decide which is your main target audience: where your marketing effort are focused on? who will buy your product? A target audience is the group of people your marketing efforts are focused on. When starting an ecommerce business, knowing your ideal audience is critical. It helps you find new customers easier and attract interested buyers to your website, resulting in higher conversion rates and more sales. (8) establish email autoresponder! This helps to both reach your customer but also verify the purchase.​

Ecommerce platforms are also available to help you, in a step-by-step process, to list your products, control your marketing, provide you with necessary tools to run your online business and provides customer support. It provides you with templates for your store in order to increase usability and accessibility, but it can also produce statistics on the visits. It is optional to use an e-commerce platform in the process of building your online shop, ,though you might consider to ease your selling profile.

• Step 6: Add and manage your e-shop content​

You shall start adding products and improve your store. ​

 Tips: (1) when building your e-shop make sure that you have photographed your products, or at least have an image representation! It is always more appealing for the customer to be able to see what he/she is buying. (2) make sure that you have the prices in a visible area! People prefer to see how much the product costs! (3) make sure to have a discount policy in place! It will help you forward your products in due time.

• Step 7: Publish your e-shop​

Through SEO tactics, publishing more content on your website generates more traffic. The first step to building an e-commerce store is knowing what products you want to sell direct-to-consumer. This often is the most challenging part of starting a new online business. In this section, we’ll highlight strategies you can use to find product opportunities, explore the best places to look for product ideas, and finally, look at trending e-commerce products to consider.​

The challenges of running an online store are like tentacles, expanding as your success increases. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re likely to want to manage it all yourself. That independent streak, after all, is a big part of your success. But when your business is growing in all directions, it’s important to take a step back and examine how other tools can help you manage it more efficiently.