Simple Steps & Big Picture: Launching Your First Online Store

Working with hundreds of online stores, we see that merchants often struggle with prioritization. For example, if your store isn’t live yet or you haven’t made a single sale, you shouldn’t focus on making the order confirmation email look perfect. This isn’t holding back your sales. What I’ve found is that breaking the process down into simple steps can be very helpful in showing what you are currently focusing on and what you should focus on instead.

So here’s a simple step-by-step approach that lots of merchants have found helpful:

Step 1. Finding the niche & products: Research what you want to sell, who you want to sell to, and where you can source the products. If you prefer high-quality dropshipping products from real brands, we at Hertwill provide that. Also, you can find more of my thoughts on this topic in my article, Guide: How to Choose a Niche for Dropshipping.

Step 2. Building the store: This includes technical setup, design, choosing a domain, adding products, writing great product descriptions, etc.

Step 3. Bringing traffic to your store: This might include organic social media (e.g., Instagram or TikTok), paid ads (e.g., Google Search ads), or building SEO.

Step 4. Conversion rate optimization: Turn visitors into buyers. This might involve running sales campaigns, updating product descriptions for the most visited products, sending shopping cart abandonment reminders, adding Klarna, or running remarketing campaigns.

Step 5. Post-purchase experience: How can you improve this? How can you turn buyers into repeat buyers? How can you maximize your customers’ lifetime value? Is your order confirmation email perfect?

Step 6. Scaling 📈: If you’ve found something that works and orders keep coming in, how can you scale it to 5x, 20x, or 100x?

And of course, moving on to the next step doesn’t mean you can’t go back if necessary (e.g., some conversion problems might really be niche or product selection problems) and improve all the other areas. But if it’s your first online store launch, it helps you understand what you should focus on the most. Good luck on your journey!