You will need a few things to setup your online store. This includes small one time fee for a premium theme and a recurring web hosting fee where you will be hosting your online store website.
1- Web Hosting & Domain
Domain name for your website is the most important part of your online business. Choosing the domain name wisely is a key. This will give the first impression to the buyers of your online store. You can buy domain names from Godaddy or eNom or any other domain registration service you like.
Next, you need is a web hosting service. There are thousands of web hosting services available online. You can choose the one you are comfortable with. However there are a few I can recommend that I know works well in the long run for your online store business. As you grow with your online store, you will need to make sure your website is always available, optimized and loads in a matter of 2-3 seconds for user to stay with you and ultimately make a purchase.
- SiteGround – If you choose SiteGround, I recommend you start with GrowBig Plan. You can later upgrade to GoGeek once you start to scale.
- BlueHost – If you want to go with BlueHost, make sure you go with one of their WordPress hosting or Cloud hosting plans, that will help you scale your website down the line.
2- WordPress
You may be already aware of WordPress. Its the most popular CMS software on the internet and will help us grow with our online store business here as well. We will do a secure installation of WordPress on your web hosting service and configure theme using it. If you are not aware of WordPress, you can learn more about it on www.wordpress.org or you can sign up for a free www.wordpress.com hosted version (with ads) and get a feel of using it.
3- WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the fastest growing ecommerce plugin for WordPress that helps people like you and me to setup our online stores free of cost with the most effective tools included for online sales and inventory.
4- Premium WordPress Theme
There are thousands of free and premium themes available for WordPress. However using a theme that is helps you grow is important. Usually premium WordPress themes offer a large variety of features and options that helps you customize the site according to your needs. Specially color schemes, fonts, product layouts etc. We will be using iStore Multipurpose WooCommerce Theme for WordPress. This theme offers variety of features that we will require for setting up our online store.
Since you are now enrolled in this Mini Course, as a token of appreciation, we will give you a 30% discount. Use coupon code 30Off for a straight 30% discount should decide to buy this theme.
5- Collect Emails & Build List
While you are promoting your online store for visitors and buyers, it is always good to offer an instant discount to your visitors for an exchange of a discount coupon. I will teach you how to use an opt-in popup form plugin and build your email list. It is important that you store your visitors email securely and build a list so you can later sell new/other items to the same customer, offer new coupons or deals. For this purpose, we will be using Opt-in Samurai. The reason we use this plugin is, it can collect the emails and store directly on MailChimp Mailing List. You can also choose another email service like Aweber or GetResponse etc. The plugin comes with 19 pre-built email services and 100+ pre-designed opt-in popup forms. This will make your life easy and save some dollars as well. The plugin is bundled with the iStore theme (which I discussed just above). So you don’t have to buy a separate license for this plugin.
6- Harden Security of Your Website
WordPress CMS is very popular so there is a high chance of hacker to attack or inject a malware into it. It is crucial to have a highly secured WordPress website. We will install Wordfence security plugin and I will walk you through a step by step process to harden the security of your WordPress website. That will make your WordPress website pretty much hack proof.
7- Auto Backup
In a case of crash or a mishap, we need to ensure we have the backup of our website. This can cause serious damages to your online store and business overall. I will walk you through setting up an auto backup plugin so your WordPress website, its files and database are always backed up and available in case you need to restore or move the site on a different host.