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Start Your Online Business In 6 Simple Steps

Online business in Kenya

You have a nice business idea, passion and dedication but you don’t have enough money to pay for all the basic requirements of setting up a typical store in town.

What about you start an online shop? You know, in today’s world of eCommerce basically anything and everything can be sold over the internet. Some benefits of starting an online shop as compared to a normal shop include:

  • Low start-up costs
  • Wider customer reach
  • Online shops are open 24/7 every day of the year
  • You can use various methods of online marketing to attract customers

Without much ado, let us take you through the steps of starting an online shop in Kenya or any other part of the world.

Step 1: Find Goods to Sell Online

how to shop online

Finding the right kind of products to sell online is one of the most important aspects of starting an online store. Ideally, you want to find products that people are looking for that cannot be found in ordinary shops in quantity or variety. In addition, you want to find a niche that is very specialized and narrow.

Ok great, so how do you do that?

Think about starting an online shop that deals with products like: jewelry, cakes, personalized gift items, office supplies (e.g. business cards, t-shirt printing, mug printing etc) and books.

First off, we would recommend trading in products that meet the following criteria

  • The product should not be fragile
  • The product should be easy to send as a parcel
  • The product should be timeless…avoid electronics because they lose value the longer they stay on the shelves

Step 2: Find a Webhost and Domain

online1

If you already know what you want to sell in your online store, make sure you choose a domain name that is short, catchy and memorable with no hyphens in the name. Then register your domain and choose a reliable webhost. You can look for the following attributes in your potential webhost providers:

  • They should have decent uptime of at least 99% uptime. (I don’t know what uptime is)
  • They should have good technical support
  • They should offer the features needed to run your online store

Lots of time, cheaper webhost providers will have poor reliability or slow performance because they shove too many accounts onto a single server.

Step 3: Select a Shopping Cart

cart

By now we are assuming you have (a)Registered your domain name (b)Signed up for your webhost (c)Established where you are going to get your stock from. It is now time to start working on your online store front.

Work with your IT company to select a shopping cart system that is appropriate for your use. The following are the most important features your online shopping cart should have.

  • SEO friendly urls
  • Single page checkout
  • Coupons/Gift vouchers

Step 4: Select an Online Payment Processor

Online payment in Kenya

Your online shop is worthless unless you can receive payments from your customers. There are many different ways to accept payments online in Kenya. For example, you can accept payments through PayPal, Credit Cards, PesaPal or even Mobile money transfer.
To make sure that your online shop is secure against hacking, make sure of the following:

  • Don’t store credit card numbers on your server
  • Make sure your computer or laptop is up to date on anti-virus and firewall software
  • Make sure you use SSL encryption when transmitting credit card data

It is best to have several payment options so that your customers don’t abandon their shopping carts in the process of placing an order simply because they could not make a payment.

Step 5: Put Finishing Touches to Your Online Shop

Front

If you have followed steps 1 to 4, we assume that by now you have a domain e.g. www.uzanunua.co.ke, a webhost, an online shopping cart and a way to accept payment from your customers. It is now time to make your online shop look attractive:

  • Make sure you have included the name, contact and location details of your company
  • You can play around with the color of your shop to suit your unique style
  • You might want to hire a web-designer to do the job for you.

Step 6: Get Customers & Start Selling

Online shopping in Kenya

Now that you have completed steps 1 to 5, we bet you are excited to start your own online shop. But wait a minute, what’s missing? You need to market your business to potential customers and attract them to your online shop. If you don’t do that, you aren’t going to make any money.

Start Now

With limited funds you can start a small online store and proceed to make it Kenya’s next Amazon.com or eBay.com. We hope to buy from your eShop soon.



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