It’s always hard to start a new venture, but it can also be rewarding in the long run. The most important is to start with a step in the right direction. In this article, we’ll cover how to start an online boutique so you can create your online store and start selling your products to thousands of customers.
How to start an online boutique that generates sales
In the last few years, online sales have grown exponentially with the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased use of online resources. Ecommerce sales have reached new records and continue with no sign of letting down anytime soon.
Considering that ecommerce continues to grow, it’s a great idea to start your online boutique or store. It may seem like a complicated endeavor, but it’s not as complicated as you think. Plus you’ve got this helpful resource to help you get started so you can create a boutique that attracts many customers.
1. Find the right idea for your online boutique
This may be the most important part of creating your online boutique. You need to find what you will sell. If you want your business to succeed, you need to find an attractive product that is the solution for your clients.
You can focus on a niche and targeted product or choose more general products. Nonetheless, if you’re going to sell general products, we recommend you do plenty of research and make sure you can offer enough value to compete with larger companies. Those businesses will have faster delivery times and cheaper prices as they take more advantage of wholesale. So make sure you can compete with them.
Going with more niche products is often the best solution. You can use this niche to target your audience and define who your core customers are. A niche is a highly specialized segment of the market for an exact product, service, or topic.
How to find your niche market
First of all, you should tie your niche to you. What do you love? Know a lot about it? Do you have any things you are passionate about outside of work? Do you have any difficulties pursuing your interests? What type of service or product can you offer? How is it different from other solutions?
That’s a lot of questions. But these questions are primordial to your business success. If you choose a niche market that is too crowded, your business may never take off. Make sure your niche is not too narrow and focused. Your audience should be targeted, but not too limited.
The biggest key to creating a successful online boutique is to be an expert in your target market and understand the needs of your audience. Even your potential customers will know if you know much about the market or not by looking at your website and reading your content. You should instill your product descriptions with all your knowledge. Show you are passionate about your products or services.
2. Make sure there’s demand for your product and research the market
Sometimes, great ideas on their own fail. You may have found the ideal product to sell. However, researching the market will ensure that your product will sell. Not only will it give you a better image of your business’s potential, but it will also give you lots of helpful information you can use to build your business successfully.
Look for data and analyze the market
Find out how much your product is needed. How many people are looking for your product? How many people want or need it? Is the market growing? Are there other products that compete with yours?
Answering these questions is essential to figuring out if you have a great product to sell. Make sure people are not only looking for your product but also want to spend money to buy it.
Make sure you make conclusions and take decisions based on real numbers. Only data can support your opinions. So don’t make any hasty decisions based on your perception. You may be missing out on something that tells a whole different story.
Do lots of keyword searches based on your niche and product
You can research the keywords related to your niche and product to get estimates of the number of people searching for those keywords online in your country or city. This connects to the point above, as you’ll get real data estimates to see how many people could potentially find you and your product.
There are so many tools out there for you to conduct keyword research. Some include Ahrefs’s keyword generator, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and SEM Rush’s keyword research.
When researching keywords, you want to find keywords that are not too broad but not too specific. If your research is too broad, you’ll find keywords that attract many people but are too competitive. If your keywords are too specific, only a handful of people search for them. You want to find the right balance of high search volume and low keyword difficulty. (or competition)
If you prefer to focus on other tasks to optimize your time, you can buy keyword research services on ComeUp to get an SEO expert freelancer to do the keyword research for you. This will free up your time and help you get better, more accurate results.
Run a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is an important analysis in business. The goal is to find strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your online boutique. Threats are considered factors that you have no control over like your competitors.
To run a SWOT analysis, you can use the below image. You’ll want to create four sections. One for each point. Then you will add all the elements you can consider to your sections to paint a better portrait of the market and your business prospects.
Consider the four sections in the following way:
- Strength: What are your advantages? What makes you stand out? What qualities do you possess?
- Weaknesses: What do you need to improve on? What are your limitations? What do your competitors do better than you?
- Opportunities: How can you improve your existing product and your customer’s experience? What market opportunities can you take advantage of?
- Threats: What are the key elements holding you back? What elements beyond your control could hurt your business?
Now that you know what you need to complete your SWOT analysis, you can conduct an in-depth analysis that will leave you more assured about your chances of succeeding with your online boutique.
Build your buyer personas
Buyer personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal customers. There doesn’t have to be only one persona, as you can have different personas representing different customer segments. For example, if you have three key age groups as customers you can have three different personas for each age group.
You need to create buyer personas to understand your customers’s motivations, how they find your products, and what information they value or need to order. This will enable you to create more targeted and relevant marketing messages.
How to create buyer personas?
- Imagine who your ideal customer is. Try to understand their age, gender, what they do for work, where they are based, their lifestyle, income, education, hobbies, and values.
- Imagine the types of behaviors your ideal customers engage in. Where do they spend their time, look for information, what social media platforms and apps do they use? The more information you can have about their behavior, the better you can communicate with them. Not only will you know the right messages to talk to them, but you’ll also know where to reach them.
3. Establish your business organization
This is usually the stressful part for people who don’t like paperwork.
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Choose what type of business you want to start
There are multiple options open to you. The two most famous ones for beginning entrepreneurs are limited liability companies (LLCs) and sole proprietorship companies. The easiest one to start is a sole proprietorship company, but it’s also slightly riskier as your personal possessions can become liable. An LLC creates protection between business accounts and your personal account. If this is your first time creating a business, we recommend starting an LLC, as it will offer you more safety for this first experience.
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Prepare yourself for taxes
To sell online, you need to make sure you know everything you need to know about sales taxes. These taxes depend on your business’s location and where your customers are, so research everything you need to know to collect the correct taxes and remit them back to the IRS.
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Open a bank account for your business
This is essential to separate your personal life and business. You’re going to have assets for both, and you need them to be separated. From a legal perspective, you have to be able to make this difference. Otherwise, you could lose a lot of the safety an LLC provides.
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Get a credit card for your business
Just like for your assets, you need to separate your personal and business expenses. In terms of cash flow, it can help a lot.
4. Choose a supplier you can rely on
Your online boutique will depend on your products, so ensure the supplier providing you with your products is reliable and offers competitive prices. Find a supplier that you can entirely rely on. They also need to propose high-quality products, great customer support, and deliver their products safely and quickly.
You can use some of the popular supplier platforms if you’re going to be creating the products you sell using materials. Some of them include Etsy Wholesaler, Alibaba, Aliexpress, and eBay.
For ready-to-sell products, you can buy products in bulk on wholesale platforms like Alibaba, AliExpress, and DHgate.
One thing to consider is storage space. You need to have enough space to store your products and that the space is optimal for safekeeping them in case they are in storage for a medium to long time. If you don’t have any storage space, one solution could be dropshipping, which enables you to sell products on your online boutique without having any physical space to store your items. You will find a place that handles all the logistics to deliver your products to your customers, so all you will have to take care of is what happens before the order and convince people to place an order.
If you’re interested in dropshipping, we recently wrote an article on how to start dropshipping for free. You will still need to have a great supplier you can fully trust.
Do extensive research about each supplier and product. Read reviews and contact people using these suppliers to ask about their experiences. The more information you gain, the more you will make an educated decision.
5. Create your business plan
You’re going to need a solid business plan for your online boutique. That way, you will have a plan you can follow with clearly outlined goals. You’ll have a plan of action where you can keep track of your results.
You will need to follow these steps:
- Draft an executive summary
- Write a company description
- Perform a market analysis
- Outline the management and organization
- List your products and services
- Perform customer segmentation
- Define a marketing plan
- Provide a logistics and operations plan
- Make a financial plan
If you have no experience writing a business plan. You can read this guide on how to write a business plan written by Shopify. You can also buy services from freelance business experts for them to help you write the best business plan.
6. Choose a name for your business and your logo
This is also an essential part of building a successful online boutique. You’ll want your brand name and logo to attract your audience. You also have to create a strong business and brand identity so people recognize your brand wherever they come across it.
Here are a few tips for selecting the perfect name for your brand:
- Make it short and easy to understand
- Choose a unique name that people can easily remember
- Don’t use a complicated name or people will have trouble pronouncing or spelling it.
- Try out some names with your friends and family.
Your logo is the visual representation of your brand. You want a relatable logo that represents your business and makes it likable.
Here are some tips for selecting a logo for your online boutique:
- Understand your logo’s purpose
- Choose a color that stands out
- Learn about different logo styles
- Find the right balance between your design elements
- Create a versatile logo
- Get expert help
Designing a logo can be difficult if you don’t have much experience in the subject. You can always buy services from an expert freelancer to design your logo.
7. Choose your domain name
Once you’ve chosen your brand name and logo, you’ll decide your domain name. Make it close to your brand name and not something entirely unrelated. First, you’ll need to ensure the domain name is not used currently. Do some research to see if anyone else is using it already. If it’s available, you should also check if it’s available on social media platforms such as Meta, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms.
Once you’ve found a name available everywhere, register your domain name. Sign up for social media accounts under the name you want. There are many websites you can buy a domain on. Some include DreamHost, Namecheap, Hostinger, Godaddy.com, NameSilo, and Bluehost.
8. Create your online boutique using an Ecommerce platform of your choice
To sell products, you’ll need an ecommerce platform from which you sell them. You’ll find that there are many options available to you, but there are three platforms considered to be the best.
Shopify
There are many advantages to using Shopify. First of all, it’s one of the leading platforms in ecommerce. They have an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder for you to build your boutique. There are also helpful integrations to help you get the best results and optimize your website.
WordPress
While WordPress is used for blogs more often. It can be used for ecommerce stores. There’s an integration called Woocommerce, and it’s free to use. With it, you can easily create and edit your boutique.
Magento
Magento is a bit more technical as there is no drag-and-drop builder, and Magento relies on coding to design your website. If you have no coding experience, it will be difficult to create a website that generates lots of sales.
Ultimately, if you have little to no experience building a website, you can always call on someone with experience. On ComeUp, you’ll find freelancers with experience setting up online stores with various ecommerce platforms.
9. Market your online boutique and start selling
Now that your online boutique is live and you’ve run some tests to verify everything is working smoothly, it’s time to market your online boutique and let people know about the products you’re selling! You need to generate more visitors to your website, and to do that you need to grow your brand awareness. The good news is that there are many ways to get the word out there and attract more people to your website.
Generate lots of useful content for your audience
Creating high-quality content online on your website and your social media accounts is a sure way to attract more people to your website. The more interesting your content is, the more other people are likely to share it and talk about it. If you have lots of experience in your industry, use it to educate and help others. We even recommend starting a blog to attract even more users. If you want to learn how to create a blog, you can learn how to do so here.
Invest in advertising
Running ads can be costly, but if you have some money to invest, you can see an immediate positive return on investment. Grow your sales immediately by tapping into the power of online advertising platforms. If you have no experience running ad campaigns on different platforms, you can still run campaigns with the help of a freelance marketing expert on ComeUp.
Use Email Marketing to convert your existing users and improve your customer retention
It can be costly and time-consuming to attract people to your website, so maximize your return on investment by getting their email addresses to remarket them and send them helpful information. Create email automation flows that convert your customers from one-time buyers to brand ambassadors who will actively promote your business.
Leverage UGC, customer testimonials, and business referrals to grow your online boutique
When you’re starting a new business, you need to be scrappy to get it to succeed. Using the power of word-of-mouth and testimonials to get your existing customers to promote your business can be an effective way of generating new customers. Your existing customers are already in your niche and likely to know many other people who could be interested in your products. Use user-generated content to create a rollercoaster effect where many people share your products and talk about them on social media.
If you want to learn more about how to leverage customer testimonials, we’ve created a useful article on the subject. We also wrote an article for you to learn more about UGC.
10. Analyze your data and optimize your boutique to increase sales
This is a part new business owners often overlook. But data tells stories about your customers and their experiences. Analyze your data to see what improvements you can make to increase your sales. Here are some key metrics to keep track of:
- Revenue
- CVR (conversion rate)
- CPA (Cost per acquired customer)
- Average basket (average order value)
- Cart abandoner abandonment rate
- Number of visitors
- Bounce rate for all the different steps in your customer journey
It can be hard to gather data. Let alone analyze it to make actionable decisions. If you need to automate some reports or need help learning how to leverage your data, you can buy ComeUp services offered by data expert freelancers.
Start selling products today on your online boutique
Now that you know what it takes to create a successful online boutique, we wish you lots of success in creating a boutique that delights many customers. Go through each step carefully and research the platform and services you will use before making important decisions. If you ever need an expert’s help to get moving faster for some of the steps you need to take, you can always use a ComeUp expert to help you grow your business more rapidly.
On ComeUp, you’ll find thousands of experienced freelancers who can help you complete your projects with the best results possible. Create your online boutique quickly and get the best results with an expert.
