The first thing you should decide what you want sell on your online store. Always sell the items that you know a lot about. There are tools like watchcount.com, Google trends and Google keyword planner to know about the popularity of any product or niche.

If you are starting your business alone, you can register your business as a sole trader and if you are starting up with a team, you can register as a company. Starting with the simplest business structure saves your time and money because there are not many legal documents to prepare for a sole trader.

Register a business name and make sure that the domain name for that business name is also available. You can visit namevine.com for checking the availability of your domain name and page names on social media.

Visit your country’s official business registration website to find out if the business name your are looking for is available.

There are hundreds of platforms for setting up your online store. For example, the most popular platforms are Bigcommerce and Shopify. The platform should be chosen on the basis of your budget, team, products, business structure, etc.

Set up your online store on the chosen platform. The support teams of Bigcommerce and Shopify will help you set up the website. Setting up your website means setting up payment methods, shipping methods, about page, contact page, marketing features, etc.

Setting up marketing features can help increase you store sale and bring you customer repetitively. It is about email marketing, customer relationship management(CRM), automatic feedback request notification, live chat, social media marketing, etc.

Buying or managing inventory takes a lot time and effort. In the initial phase of your business, you have to divide your budget for different products so that you can test which products perform well and which don’t.

You will need to take pictures of the products you are going to sell. It’s better to have a definite spot where you can take pictures with ease. Set up lighting and keep your camera in standby to take pictures whenever you want.

Listing out products is a big job. You have to take photos, write description, weigh the products, write ‘how to use’ tutorials, etc. This can take from 1 week to several months depending upon your team, budget and the number of items you have in stock.

Keeping records of your sales and purchases is very important. There are several popular online accounting applications you can use for your business. We recommend Waveapps and Zervant.

You can use Smore, Mailchimp and Google contact to keep a list of subscribers to send them coupon codes and deals related to your products. The right tool will help you categorise the customers into different groups.

You need to send emails to your customers regularly. Most of the emails are related to delayed shipping, product features, item stock, product tutorials, etc.

Most of the online store platforms have inbuilt tools for checking the performance of the store. The tools tell you the best selling products, best categories, etc. Google analytics helps you track number of visitors, page views, top landing pages, etc.

Organising your store helps your process orders quickly and operate other tasks effectively. You have to keep computer, printer, label printer, packing bag and other stationery items in proper place to operate the store effectively.

Most postal offices and shipping companies all around the world provide tracking codes for shipments. You need online tools to track your packages. 17Track.net is one the popular websites for tracking shipments.

Customer Relationship Management application gives a platform to focus on your relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, blog readers, service users, colleagues, manufacturers or suppliers.