According to a recent study by Statista online sales are set to grow by 246.15% by 2021. If you want to get a bite out of those numbers, open your own online boutique today!
E-commerce is only going to continue to grow, so there is no better time to start your boutique than now. Not only is it easy to do but it’s a great way to earn a little extra income as well!
Here’s everything you need to know to open your own online boutique today.
Table of Contents
1. Decide Your Niche
The first step to making it big is finding your niche market. Unfortunately, you cannot compete with all of the different brands and competitors. Picking a niche market will help your brand specialize and grow faster.
Finding your niche can sometimes be the hardest part of the process. Choose something that you will enjoy writing and talking about time and time again. If you are not excited about it, it’s likely that your customers won’t care too much about it either.
Your niche can be as specific as Vincent Van Gogh inspired clothing, such as the Yizzam boutique.
2. Understand Your Customers
The second step to create your boutique is to understand the type of customers that are interested in your product. If you haven’t shown your product to anyone yet, this is the time to do it.
The more you can talk to people about your ideas, the better you’ll be able to understand the type of people that care about and are willing to buy your product.
This is important because it affects everything that you do with your product, from how you market it to where you sell it.
3. Find a Place to Sell
That brings us to our next step. Knowing where to sell your product. If your customers like to browse Etsy, start selling your product there. There are plenty of seller platforms, like Etsy, that are already established and can help get your brand name out there.
This is a great way to also get more feedback about your products before you launch it in your own store.
4. Start Building Your Own Store
Even if you are having great success selling on other platforms, you should still build your own webstore. This will help your brand recognition and give your most loyal customers a solid place to go for your products.
There are a couple things you need to do in order to create a stellar online store. First, you need to choose a good domain name. Make it an easy name to remember and spell.
Here is one of the best free web hosting platforms. This will help you to get your site up an running fast. Another question we often get is whether cPanel hosting is valuable for small business as they start out.
We answered that question for you here.
Building a solid webstore will take time. Don’t rush through this process or you could end up damaging your brand image. However, once you have created a solid site, it’s time for the next step.
5. Market on All Channels
The next step is marketing. There is so much that you can do to help your online boutique. Here is a list of some of the most popular marketing trends:
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Blogging
- SEO
With social media marketing, it’s important to set up your profiles in the most lucrative channels. This is where your market research comes into play. During the research stage, you should learn which social media channels your customers use the most.
Pinterest and Instagram are fairly popular platforms for brands.
Email marketing, blogging, and SEO are all strategies that can help your webstore get more traction.
6. Set Up Seller Accounts
The next step is to set up seller accounts. This is important for selling on channels, such as eBay and Amazon.
Amazon is the biggest e-commerce website in the world. Getting your product on their platform can be a big benefit. It’s also a great way to make money if you are having trouble getting traction on your website.
If you don’t want to have your own online store, you can rely completely on platforms such as these to sell your product. However, your profits will not be as high if people buy your products off of these pages.
7. Advertise
The next step is to advertise. Advertisements are a great way to get your brand in front of people’s faces that have never seen it before.
Advertise on the social platforms that your customers use the most. Social media advertisements are beneficial because you can target people based on specific characteristics, such as the type of posts they like and their interests.
This will help you to reach the customers that are most likely to purchase your product.
You can also invest in Google and print advertisements. Like social media advertisements, these have their own strategies that make them beneficial.
Learning how to open your own online boutique today, isn’t as hard as your competitors would have you believe.
8. Get Paid
The last step is the best, it’s getting paid! After following all of these steps you are ready to reap the reward.
In order to have a successful online boutique, you need to make the payment portion of the process as easy as possible. There are apps, such as Shopify, that can help make ordering your products as easy as possible.
That’s everything you need to know to open your own online boutique today.
Open Your Own Online Boutique Today!
Now that you know all the steps you are ready to get started. If selling unique and much-needed products is your dream, there’s no better time to start than now! Waiting will only give the competition more time to get ahead.
You’ll be surprised how much fun, designing your store will be.
Think we missed something? Comment below on some other helpful tips you’ve discovered as you’ve created your boutique. We can’t wait to see how your new store turns out!