How to Create an Online Store: The Best Platforms, Tips & Tools

But, with such incredible benefits, the competition in the online world is unsurprisingly thick, as thousands upon thousands of websites compete for the clicks and traffic that translate into sales. This can leave many small, new websites struggling to get by.

So, how can you be sure that when you create your online store, it becomes a hit and helps your business flourish? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today, detailing all the tips and tricks that can ensure you get the best start possible in the ecommerce world. We’ll cover:

• What are the advantages of ecommerce?

• What ecommerce tools can help your business flourish?

• Our tips for ecommerce success

• The best platforms to get your business online

By the time you’re finished here, you will have a plan ready for steering your business through the exciting world of ecommerce. So let’s get started!

What are the advantages of ecommerce?

Ecommerce has transformed the retail world in the 21st century, completely changing the way businesses connect with customers. Instead of relying solely on foot traffic, or local reputations, businesses can now reach shoppers anytime and anywhere, and have an international reputation without having any brick and mortar stores at all!

Whether you’re a small startup or an established brand, having an online store creates new opportunities for growth, brand visibility, and business efficiency. Ecommerce offers a wide range of benefits that can help businesses stay competitive in a digitally literate world full of online shoppers ready to spend with you. So let’s begin by clarifying the advantages you stand to gain from getting online:

• Reach a wider audience. This advantage is clear and obvious. If you only have a physical store, someone must come to you to become a customer. With ecommerce, anybody on the entire planet could make a purchase. It doesn’t mean they all will, but the potential is infinite. If somebody searches for products you sell, your store will be on the list. Or if they hear about your business, rather than travelling to you to take a look at your offers, all they need to do is go online. This dramatically increases your potential customer base and opens up new growth opportunities.

• Operate 24/7. Unlike traditional retail stores, the internet never closes. Customers can browse and buy from your online store day or night, making trade convenient for them and constant for you. All you need to do is process the orders placed overnight when business resumes in the morning.

• Lower operating costs. Running an online store is usually a lot cheaper than maintaining a physical location. While there are some expenses, especially if you want to keep the site generating traffic and looking impressive enough to convert that traffic into sales. But physical expenses such as rent, utilities, and in-store staffing are removed from the equation. These savings can then be invested into marketing, product development, or improving customer service.

• Improved customer insights. Ecommerce platforms come equipped with data capture technologies that provide valuable information about customer behaviour, purchasing habits, and popular products. These insights help businesses make smarter decisions, improve the website and any marketing strategies to ensure performance continually improves.

• Greater marketing opportunities. Online stores can connect with digital marketing tools such as social media advertising, local inventory advertisers, email campaigns, and search engine optimisation (SEO) tools. This makes it easier to attract new customers, build brand awareness, and encourage repeat purchases over time, leading to the dream combination of closer customer relationships and easier expansion of the customer base.

What ecommerce tools can help your business flourish?

There’s certainly money to made in ecommerce, but only if your website works efficiently across the board. This means equipping your website with all the right tools. These tools help guide the work you do by gathering data, and ensure users have a smooth experience browsing and then placing orders. So here are the main tools you’ll need to obtain:

Ecommerce platforms

The first, naturally, is the foundational tool of your online store. There are lots of different tools you can use as the foundation of your business from CMS tools to webbuilders. The easiest way to get started is with purpose-built ecommerce platforms like Shopify, or WooCommerce. These are user-friendly tools for building professional-looking websites without the need for coding skills. 

Choosing the right platform is important because it affects your store’s scalability, performance, design flexibility, and ability to integrate with marketing and sales tools as your business grows, so be sure to do your research into the different platforms before committing to one.

SEO tools

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is about putting your website top of the list when potential customers use a search engine to look for what you’re selling. The more visible your store is, the more traffic you’ll get to your website (and the more traffic you get, the more chances you have to make a sale!). 

SEO tools help you identify how to format your website to rank better for key search terms to help strengthen your performance on engines like Google. They’ll tell you what phrases to use on your website, highlight technical issues that are limiting your performance, and then track your rankings so you know where you’re placing on certain search terms.

Strong SEO can drive consistent, natural traffic to your store, reducing reliance on paid advertising and helping your business attract customers more affordably.

Website analytics tools

Understanding what’s happening with your website without website analytics is nigh on impossible. In a physical store, you can watch how visitors move through the aisles. What are they looking at? What are they not looking at? When do they move quickly and when do they stop? What kind of people are coming in? But with an online store, the only way you’ll know what people are doing is through website analytics tools.

Platforms like Google Analytics allow businesses to monitor traffic sources, user behaviour, conversion rates, and customer journeys. This data is incredibly valuable because it helps identify what is working well and where improvements are needed. By understanding customer activity, you can continually optimise your pages and create a smoother shopping experience that encourages more sales!

Heatmap tools

Heatmap tools could fall under website analytics, but they’re worth taking a little time to single out. Heatmaps offer you crucial data on how visitors interact with your website by showing where users click and scroll, and spend the most time. If lots of customers leave their cursor on one part of the page, it can indicate what they’re thinking, or even if they’re struggling with something.

Services such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg help businesses better understand user behaviour and identify potential friction points within the shopping journey. These insights can reveal if users find your layout confusing, if they’re ignoring your CTAs (call-to-actions), or why poorly performing pages have such trouble. Armed with this information, you can make informed design changes that improve usability and increase those conversions.

Inventory integration tools

If you’re expanding into ecommerce but keeping a physical store, you’ll be selling across multiple channels. But you’ll likely be sourcing your inventory from the same overall stock. That means you’ll need an inventory management system that gets sales updates from both sources and can adjust accordingly so you don’t oversell.

You can manage multichannel inventory by integrating your website with your POS system. Ecommerce integrations built by POS providers, like Epos Now's Shopify partnership, are designed to do this smoothly, but there are lots of ways of doing this with different providers.

However you do it, efficient inventory management saves valuable time, minimises human error, and ensures customers receive accurate availability information, which is essential for maintaining their trust and delivering a positive shopping experience.

Online sales portals

If you plan to sell online, you need to offer customers a safe, secure, and straightforward way of paying you, which means integrating an online sales portal into your website. Online sales portals link with banks, encrypting data to prevent it being stolen, and process the customer’s payment (or rejecting the order if the sale cannot be processed).

Online customers can be easily deterred from making a sale, so a reliable portal is a vital part of your setup. If a customer abandons their basket because they’re hesitant or struggling to checkout, it can be a real blow. You’ve done the hard part of getting them to this point, only to lose the sale right before they make the payment. So be sure to test your portal and refine your checkout process and never lose a sale.

Shipping and order tracking tools

Once you’ve made a sale, you need a streamlined process for fulfilling the order. You can do this as part of the digital process, or you can have a separate setup. Either way, you’ll need to provide your customer with tracking updates so they know when they’re getting their order. Fast, transparent shipping is a major factor in customer satisfaction, and reliable tracking tools help build trust while reducing customer service enquiries about delivery progress.

Our tips for ecommerce success

• Focus on user experience. When you work on your website, focus on making it better for the people that use it. That means easy navigation, visual appeal, and no clutter. The main reasons users abandon sales is because a site loads slowly or is too complex to browse enjoyably. A clean design and intuitive shopping journey can dramatically improve conversion rates.

• Optimise for mobile users. People don’t just go online with laptops anymore. A huge percentage of ecommerce traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets. Your online store should be fully responsive, with fast-loading pages, mobile-friendly menus, and streamlined checkout processes. A poor mobile experience can quickly drive potential customers to competitors.

• Use high-quality product images. Customers cannot physically interact with products online, so visuals play a major role in purchasing decisions. Use clear, professional images from multiple angles and include zoom functionality where possible. Strong visuals help build trust and give shoppers confidence in what they are buying.

• Write detailed product descriptions. Product descriptions should clearly explain features, benefits, dimensions, materials, and any important details customers may need before purchasing. Well-written descriptions not only improve the customer experience but can also strengthen your SEO performance by helping search engines understand your products.

• Build trust with reviews and testimonials. Online shoppers need to know they can trust who they’re buying from, and the best way to get that is hearing from other people who have shopped before them. Therefore, they often require social proof before making a purchase. Displaying customer reviews, testimonials, and ratings reassures visitors that your products and service are reliable. Trust signals such as secure payment badges and clear return policies can also give buyers more confidence.

Shopify

Shopify is one of the world’s most popular ecommerce platforms. It supports integration with a wide range of POS systems, including Epos Now, allowing businesses to synchronise inventory and sales across online and physical stores. Shopify offers professionally designed templates, secure hosting, app integrations, and powerful features suitable that make it popular with businesses large and small.

Users often highlight its large app marketplace as a major strength. While it has been noted that transaction fees can increase costs over time, Shopify remains a highly trusted platform for quickly building and scaling an online store.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a flexible ecommerce plugin built for WordPress websites, which works well for businesses that want more control over the design and functionality of their website. It can integrate with various POS systems, including Epos Now, and offers inventory management tools through plugins and third-party services, helping businesses connect online and offline operations.

One advantage of WooCommerce is the extensive customisation capabilities created through thousands of plugins, with strong SEO capabilities. This makes it especially appealing for content-driven ecommerce websites looking to get lots of clicks. Although beginners may find setup and maintenance more technical compared to other platforms. For businesses comfortable with WordPress, WooCommerce provides a highly adaptable and cost-effective ecommerce solution.

Getting online: a case of covering your digital bases

You can try to think of entering ecommerce as a small expansion of your sales channels, but the reality is it completely transforms the way your business operates. Suddenly, your audience is far greater as you make sales to customers much further afield. But to really succeed, you’ll need to do a lot more than just launch a website. 

You’ll need to choose the right platform, integrate your tools to help you manage the site and understand customer behaviour. Then, having a website is a matter of continually improving the user experience and building a profitable online presence.

Whether you choose Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform entirely, the key is creating a smooth and trustworthy shopping experience that keeps customers returning. With the right setup and strategy, your ecommerce business will continue growing for years to come!