A Free Online Store - Learn How To Build It In 2024

Table of Contents

Introduction To How to Build A Free Online Store?

You have already sold a couple of products at online stores, whether through eBay, Amazon, Alibaba group, etc. Now, you are wondering how to build your own online store without having a budget. You are in luck because we will tell you how to build a free online store.

Online stores are like physical stores that you can see in the streets, except that you need to set up this store on the internet to sell digital products. In addition, it is not like you can fill your stock with hundreds of products and expect to sell them within a short time. When you start your online store, you start with a low budget, and you expect to make a profit in the future. Therefore, you have to plan what you have to do to sell.

The main goals are to find out what you are going to sell and how to build your online store. In this article, we will give you some tips that can be helpful in this process.

1) Finding The Product That Customers Need

Even when you build the best online store, you may not be able to sell any of your products because they are not what the customers need. That's why you have to do some research to find the trending products first.

Before launching your online store, try to find your right market and the products you will sell easily. You can find these products and their names for free without spending any money if you don't know.

What Are The Trending Products?

The best way to find the products that are being sold frequently today is to do a search online for the currently trending products. If you master this technique today, I can guarantee that you will start making profits in the short term and long term. It is imperative to note that you must find or search for products whose popularity is increasing and not declining.

Here are a couple of free tools you can use to find trending products. The most common ways are as follows:

Google Trends: Google itself developed this application. Using this application, you can search products and keywords used by users in the past and used by future users.

Influencers: Who is better than the influencers that promote certain products on Instagram or other social media platforms? These influencers will have their product sold very quickly, creating a large amount of money for themselves and the manufacturer they represent. So, let's start and learn from these influencers and add the same or similar products to your stock?

Evaluate Your Skills

Suppose that you have a big stock of a variety of trending products. Do you think that you can sell them very easily? Well, you can, but how long will it take before your first product is sold? Do you believe in yourself and your online store?

Evaluate your abilities and skills by asking yourself the following questions:

Do you have a passion for the market you have chosen?
Do you have enough knowledge about the free online store or activity you have chosen?
Are you willing to put in the time to create your store and continuously improve it?
Do you have the patience to wait for income to start coming in?
Do you think that your store will remain in business for more than 5 years?
Do you have any passion for the customers or people who are buying from you?
Are you passionate about helping people?

Find The Top-Selling Products

You have identified potential products by now but haven’t chosen the products you want to sell in your online store. Before building your free online store, you must prepare a list of products you want to have on your website. This is not going to be an easy task, but it is not impossible. You will have to do some legwork, though.

Well, I have good news for you. You are not the only one who has an online store. Check out other online stores such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify or other websites that you have been purchasing items from. All of these websites have included a certain page for the most selling products. Also, there is a page or couple of pages where you can actually see the reviews from multiple customers in which they stated their satisfaction or displeasure with certain products.

Using the above pages, you can find the products you want for your website without worrying about customers' displeasure with your products and, eventually, your website.

Also, do you want to know what the users search for on Google? That is pretty easy actually. Do you know where to look? The answer is “Ubersuggest.” Suppose that you have the required search terms (keywords), but you don’t know how to use them. All you need to do is to visit the following link:

https://neilpatel.com/es/ubersuggest/

and enter your keyword, and you will get suggestions about related keywords and how often these keywords have been searched for. Also, this will help you create content that the customers and users are looking for.

Light-Weight Products Are Easier To Ship

Before starting the process of creating an online store, you must remember that the products you are choosing must be lightweight so that you won’t have any problems shipping the products. This also depends on your location and the places where you want to send the items to.

Lightweight products are easier to package since they are usually smaller. You will need less material. Also, they are easier to handle. Remember, you will be the only one to manage the packaging and shipment process. Therefore, choosing light-weighted products will be much easier and simpler.

2) How To Build An Online Store In A Couple Of Simple Steps

Online Marketing Platforms

For those who are creating their online store for the first time, it is imperative to choose their online marketing platforms. There are many e-commerce platforms. Some of them are free, and some will charge you for using their services.

For this article, we chose to describe the free platform that you can use to initiate a website, online store, and web blog. This platform is known as WordPress. There are also two other platforms, Magento and Website Builders. However, we chose WordPress due to its ease of use.

Building An Online Store (Website) Using WordPress

You might have heard of WordPress. If you don’t know, it is an application you can download from the official website of WordPress and install it in your online environment. The online environment is the place where you access your website and the content.

Using this content management application, you can design your website with various details and create your own design. Also, you will be able to manage different parts of your website.

The good thing about WordPress is that it is completely free. In other words, every user can download related files and use them to create their own website. Sure, WordPress can realize some of the users’ most common needs. However, if you want to personalize and realize other requirements, you will need experts who will make the necessary adjustments and provide the required tools needed by the users.

Turning Your Website Into An Online Store

After creating your website, you will start writing articles to fill it with content that the users desire. Now that your website is ready, you want to realize your goal and sell your products on this website.

For this to happen, you can use one of the WordPress plugins known as “Woocommerce,” which will turn your website into an e-commerce website and make it functional. It is interesting to note that Woocommerce is also a free plugin and is powered by the same team who created WordPress.

If you use both WordPress and the Woocommerce plugin properly, you will be able to build an online store for free, no matter how big or small it may be. If you have been using these two, you must be proud of yourself because not too many individuals venture into doing what you have done. You just created a functional online store without incurring additional costs for website programming.

Choose The Best Elements To Create A Good Experience For Your Customers

Ask yourself this question: why should a customer revisit your online store? Have you provided the elements that customers need? In this part, we will explore elements that you want to include in your free online store.

Organizing Your Website

Have you decided what your marketing website will look like? This part you will have to do by considering one important factor:

“How will your customers browse your website?”

Therefore, you must create a proper website architecture that keeps customers interested. This design will include pages such as the home page, contact page, etc. In addition, the products must be categorized. For categorizing your product, we believe that the following example will be a great option to start:

You start your website selling food and toys for customers’ pets such as cats, dogs, birds and rabbits, which they love. You should organize prepare the product categories and lists on the website.' Categories and list about-face on the type of animals the customer has, e.g., cats, dog, fish, birds, etc., and then create two subcategories for the products for each of these animals based on toys, food, etc.

Do you know what will happen if you design your website just like the above example? When a customer visits your website to find a certain item for their domestic animal, they can narrow down their search time by going directly to the menu items for the products they really need. For example, if the customer needs cat food, he or she can check out the category cats and sub-category food and choose their cat's favourite food item.

Search Section (Bar)

Some customers don’t really know what they are really looking for, and they are just wandering around looking at your products until something catches their eyes. However, several customers will know what they really want and look for another way to search for that item without any trouble. For this reason, you will have to include a “Search” section on the website.

The search bar is a feature that every online market store has to have. It doesn’t matter if you created a big or small online store. Every online store has to include a search bar. This way, the customers will have immediate access to the trending products they are looking for.

Please note that a search bar will help customers to increase their satisfaction with your website because this way, the customers will find what they want quickly.

Reviews Section

Did you know that customer service has become the most crucial part for customers before purchasing a certain product? This is a fact that customers consider the reviews of previous customers a significant factor in their decision-making.

Even though you may have provided the best products in your online shop, if one of your customers states their own satisfaction or non-satisfaction about the product they bought, these reviews will greatly affect the other customers' decisions.

It doesn’t matter whether you have bad reviews or good reviews. You were confident enough to add the section for reviews on your website, and this shows that your products can live up to customers’ expectations. If you add reviews to your website, two situations will happen:

Either these reviews are positive, and the number of sales will increase.
Or the reviews are negative, and you will do whatever is in your power to use this feedback and reviews to make your product far better than before.

For example, you can look at the following reviews that are taken from a certain website. Please note that your website won’t be the only place where people will be posting reviews. Check our other websites, such as “Glassdoor,” to see if any of your old customers or new ones have posted any reviews about your website and products.

Conclusion

Are you thinking of creating your own online store? This short article has provided several tips that can be useful in creating your own e-commerce website. Due to our article limits, we only dedicated our article to three crucial steps that must be followed to create a functional online store.

These steps include a reviews section, categorizing the website, and online marketing platforms to create the online store and make it functional.

I trust you enjoyed this article on how to build a free online store. Please stay tuned for more blog posts to come. Take care!

JeannetteZ

Your Opinion Is Important To Me

I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experience, remarks, and/or suggestions about building your own online store in the comments section below. You can also reach me via email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.