Are you ready to reap some of those online sales? Starting an online store can be difficult for small businesses, which are typically short on time, budget and employees. However, there are ecommerce vendors, who can assist you in designing and maintaining your online store relatively simple and affordable.

Here are 10 important questions to raise when making your business’ online store:

1. How do I begin building my online store?

If you don’t have the budget to hire someone to create a custom online store, don’t worry. There are many ecommerce vendors you can choose to help you in building one quickly. According to Julian Barkat, director of ecommerce and online marketing at Eggs to Apples, a Philadelphia digital marketing agency, they can take the hassle and headache of hard coding, hosting and maintaining server out of the online store equation.

Companies such as Shopify, Goodsie, Jumpseller, Bigcommerce and Volusion allow you to design the final look, feel and functionality of your online store. They also allow you to do other things like uploading you product catalog, setting up consumer shopping carts, securely accepting payment and handling order fulfillment. There services firmly host your online stores on their own servers. You’ll be able to link your online store from your main website.

These ecommerce services typically require some basic initial set-up work on your half. For example, in Shopify, you can choose a storefront layout from a group of templates and customize your fonts, color scheme and image sizes. Shopify users may also upload their own logos and backgrounds.

The prices for those services vary from about $10 to $700 a month, depending on the quantity of the products you sell and the amount and type of services provided.

2. How can I best customize the look of my online store?

Usually, if your business already has a website, your online store should reflect the look of your website, including the logo and color schemes. If you don’t have a website, pick a background and accent colours for your ecommerce site that looks great with your logo.

Most of the design templates from ecommerce vendors comes with theme settings that doesn’t need any knowledge about HTML and CSS to be able to customize. Therefore, it should be easy for you to upload your logo and images and add banners,slideshows and more.

3. What is the best type of payment system should I use?

Paypal is the most recommended payment system for businesses that are just starting out their online store. That is because the third-party processor is widely known as a secure system for receiving payments online.

While there are no sign-up or monthly charges for Paypal’s services, Barkat cautions that Paypal’s seller fees can add up quickly. Paypal sellers pays a 2.9% transaction fee on the overall sale amount, and an additional 30-cent fee on every transaction.

4. How will I handle customer service?

You may want to choose an ecommerce vendor that will provide you access to a dependable customer relationship management (CRM) tool, to help you respond to consumer’s issues efficiently. Some ecommerce vendors offer CRM options for free and some for an additional fee ranging between $25 and $75 per month.

CRM tools document and structure the different ways mechants interact with the customers in one place, including customer contact information, their recent puchases, complaints and pending orders.

Founder of Girl Charlee Inc., a signal Hill, Calif-based online distributor and wholesaler of vintage and rare knit materials, Heather Peterson, proposed obtaining a toll-free phone number particularly dedicated to customer service. Another option is to arrange a live chat in your online store, however provided that you will operate it 24/7, which customers have come to expect.

5. How should I determine shipping costs?

It is typically simpler and more correct to entrust precise shipping-cost calculations to your carrier. Most of the carriers will calculate shipping costs for you for free of charge, and most ecommerce vendors let you integrate those prices into your store’s checkout section.

On the other hand, you may want to offer free shipping, at least for orders with a certain amount. If your competitors offer free shipping, you should consider doing it too, as long as you can afford it.

6. How do I make effective product images and descriptions?

According to Barkat, your online shoppers don’t get to see, touch, feel or smell what you sell, so the next best thing is a clear product image. Although he said you should not cut corners on photography, you do not need to get a professional photographer to get high-quality images. But he advises that you use a “16-megapixels DSLR camera, a nice lightning and a light box”. A light box is a container with many light bulbs aimed towards its interior that photographer typically use to make a high-quality pictures of objects. 

Peterson says that product description should be short, but also rich with interesting details to get the attention and interest of the customer. Except for noting the price, you may also want to incorporate product uses, dimensions and other characteristics.

7. Should I enable customer reviews and social sharing?

Allowing your customers to rate and leave comments on your products can help boost their confidence in your store. Although positive reviews and social media shares can lead to more sales, there’s still a risk of negative comments. Many ecommerce services offer customer review options that let you reply to or delete negative comments. 

Although Peterson hasn’t let her clients leave comments on her online store, she has made it possible for them to “like” her products on Facebook, “pin” the images of her products to their Pinterest pages and email images and descriptions of them from the product listings.

8.How will I begin to attract customers?

After you finish building your store and made it live to the public, spread the word both online and off. Inserting links of your store to your company’s website and in your emails would be a great start. It is also recommended that you start creating Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube accounts representing your store. Updating your social media site everyday can lead traffic to your store by attracting customers to daily deals and different promotions.

It is also recommended to choose an ecommerce vendor that uses search engine optimization(SEO) for your store’s content. SEO techniques can provide your store a higher ranking in search results on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

9. How should I handle returns?

Every store has to know how to deal with returned items. Check if your ecommerce vendor has a built-in tools that allows you to quickly and easily replace products or refund purchase cost, restock your inventory and send emails to consumers about the status of their return.

10. How can I know if my store is successful?

Try to choose an ecommerce vendor that provide free self-service analytics, typically driven by Google Analytics and other reporting tools to help you track how well is your store’s performance. These can show you how many visitors did you get and how often do they visit your store, where they live and how they found you. These can also tells you which website lead the most traffic to your store and what items do customers look at and purchase most and least often.