How to open an online cosmetics store

An online store is a site with a large number of pages that contain descriptions, photographs, price and characteristics of the goods. Also, the attributes of a quality online store include a shopping basket. The site is supplemented by pages of the information type: "Contacts", "About the store", "Delivery and payment", "Frequent questions", etc.

Instruction manual

1

Decide on the assortment, find a supplier. Calculate right away how many products will be offered. Consider, if there will be few of them, then the choice for buyers will be small. And if there is too much, updating prices and information will take you more time. Therefore, the optimal amount will be 5-8 thousand goods. Finding a cosmetics supplier is easy enough; you need to know the manufacturer or brand. Contact a representative and state your position. If the representative does not work with dealers directly, he will tell you who to contact. Usually these are large importing companies with which he collaborates.

2

Choose a domain and name. Ideally, the name of the store should reflect the theme of the site. Parfums.ru or parfumshop.com are good for perfumes. Also remember about domain zones, check if the domain is occupied for all the main domain zones, such as ru, net, com, com.ua, biz. An online store is best done on a commercial hosting and a separate domain, it is much more convenient in the future and looks more solid than on free sites.

3

FTP access and hosting. Do not save on hosting, especially since it is not expensive. For an average store, there will be enough space in 1Gb. The cost of high-quality commercial hosting is in the range of 30-50 dollars a year, choose the cheapest rate. If it is not enough, you can change it at any time.

4

Select a site engine. For the online store, free engines are quite suitable: Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop. If you are not happy with the free ones, there are paid SunShop, CS-Carts, ShopCms, WebAsyst Shop-Script, Bitrix. They are largely similar in terms of convenience and purpose, and differ in the number of free modules, ready-made designs, technical support, technical documentation. But you still can’t do without improvements, for your tasks there is no 100% ready-made solution.

5

Fill the site with content. Content includes articles, photos, and product descriptions. The time procedure is quite capacious, so it is better to seek help from a remote employee (freelancer). An exchange for finding freelancers is easy enough to find on the Internet.

6

Design and usability. For starters, you can take the finished design for free, and from the first revenue order an exclusive one. Developers in good usability scripts have already taken into account, but if you think that it is not enough, order a revision from freelancers.

7

Promotion and promotion. This stage is the most responsible and costly. If you do not understand anything about this, then it is better to turn to seo-specialists. Give the online store in his hands or follow his recommendations. It’s better not to contact seo-studios, as they do it faster, but more expensive and more crooked. For SEO companies, you are just the “next customer”, so they do everything fast. A bunch of text on the main page or links to other sites are their distinguishing features.

8

Payment and delivery options. Think over and be sure to place on the website the possible delivery options for the goods and payment methods. Also indicate which countries and cities you are selling.