How to start your e-commerce business in 2022

E-commerce keeps growing, with ever more online shops opening, and many people dream of launching their own with the hope of a substantial income. However, you can’t improvise as an entrepreneur — online or offline — without careful preparation. Competition is fierce, and without serious thinking and daily effort, bankruptcy is what awaits you. Here is our advice for starting your e-commerce business in 2022.

Find your niche and write your business plan

Your first task is to decide what you’re going to offer in your online shop. Take the time you need, because your entire offering will be built around your products or services.

If you launch in a space where competition is already fierce, you absolutely must stand out from the others through your content or your commercial strategy. Otherwise, you’ll never find your place in the market. If you choose a niche market, make sure your target audience is large enough to support your business.

Ask people around you to test your ideas, browse the web to study the competition, check Amazon to see if your products are likely to succeed, and so on.

Market research and business plan for your e-commerce business

Once your idea is set, you need to validate it with a business plan that includes, among other things, market research. This research must be extremely thorough, as it determines the customer base you can reach and confirms the profitability of your project.

As for the business plan, it includes a written section describing your e-commerce business, the composition of your team, and the commercial strategy you intend to apply. The other part consists of various financial tables that demonstrate the viability of your future business.

The business plan is essential for finding investors, or at the very least a bank, and it will serve as your roadmap for the first years of operation.

Choosing your website

It’s time to get into the concrete build of your e-commerce business by building your website. It can take several forms depending on your products or services.

For online products, the classic online store format is perfect. You line up your items along with descriptive sheets to convince visitors of the usefulness and quality of your offering: benefits for the buyer, economic opportunity, improved comfort, reliability, value for money, and so on. If you offer services, your site will take a different form, with more written content.

This type of site requires an additional section in the form of a blog. It lets you attract traffic by offering written articles about your business, tutorials, information about your product updates, and so on.

You also have the option of presenting a “one-page” site, but this requires a specific strategy, since you can’t rely on adding content to attract an audience. Yet, for people to buy, you absolutely need to build up heavy traffic. A one-page site can be designed to promote a single product or service. It can also send your prospect to a request for documentation, a quote, or an appointment.

Think carefully about your site’s name

The domain name you reserve and your brand name must be carefully thought through, because it’s no longer possible to change them afterward without disrupting your entire business. Changing your brand name means changing your logo and visual identity; changing your domain name forces you to carry out complex technical operations so as not to suffer a drop in search engine rankings, as well as the loss of your audience.

Names should be evocative, easy to remember, and easy to spell. They should also reflect a spirit that matches your e-commerce business. You wouldn’t choose the same type of name if you sell items for dogs and cats as you would if you offer management services to business owners, for example.

The most common and recommended extensions are .fr for France and .com, which is more generic.

Legal notices on your website

E-commerce activity is just as regulated as traditional retail. Your site must include the following legal notices:

• company name;
• legal structure;
• address of the establishment or registered office;
• amount of share capital for a company, or your name and home address if you are a sole trader;
• email address;
• phone number;
• name of the publication director;
• registration number in the trade and companies register (RCS);
• intra-community VAT number;
• contact details of the site’s host;
• terms and conditions of sale;
• prices in euros, VAT included;
• delivery costs and timeframes;
• payment terms;
• right of withdrawal;
• any specific elements depending on your status: registration number in the trades register for a craft activity, professional rules for regulated professions, etc.

Website security and payment solutions

Your site must be fully secure, and you must comply with data protection policies. Display all required notices and make sure to reassure your visitors about the confidentiality and security of their personal data.

In addition, it’s important to offer different payment solutions so everyone can choose the one they prefer, but also depending on your products, services, and target market. If you’re aiming for an international customer base, look into the payment methods preferred by each nationality.

French customers most often pay by card, Italians favor cash on delivery, while Germans prefer payment by invoice or direct debit, and so on.

The most commonly offered payment methods are: bank card, cheque, bank transfer, postal transfer, e-wallet, prepaid card, PayPal, direct debit, and cash on delivery.

Accounting for your e-commerce site

Whatever your offering and whatever your legal status, you are subject to accounting obligations. You must issue invoices to your customers and declare your income to the tax authorities. The goal of e-commerce accounting software is to take up as little of your time as possible. It should be configurable and should give you the maximum amount of automation.

Invoicing software for e-commerce like Bizyness offers many advantages. It adapts to a wide range of legal structures and follows your growth. This means that if you start out as a sole trader (micro-entrepreneur), you’ll need to change your company structure once you exceed the thresholds allowed under that status. You may also need to change your legal structure if you take on a business partner. Bizyness handles this conversion automatically.

Automating your sales documents

To avoid worrying about your accounting on a daily basis, you need to automate the creation of sales documents for your customers: quotes, purchase orders, invoices, delivery notes, credit notes, and so on. Software like Bizyness also lets you sync your business bank account with your online store.

Accounting obligations for e-commerce businesses

Your accounting software must adapt to your legal structure to export your data in the formats required by law. Depending on the type of company you run, you must produce various documents to declare your income: accounting ledgers, general ledger, journal, annual financial year, balance sheet, inventory, VAT return, and so on.

Store invoicing software handles all these obligations on a daily basis. It then lets you generate customized accounting exports to prepare your revenue declarations for the tax authorities. These exports are also intended for various stakeholders: accountant, consultant, banker, insurer, investor, etc. They also help you approach new investors or potential business partners.

Bizyness also lets you keep digitized copies of all your supporting documents, which may be requested during a tax audit.

There you have it: your site is ready and your accounting software is synced to your store, ready to issue your first invoices. It’s time to launch your commercial strategy and open your site to the public.