If you’ve got a lot of stuff to sell but you haven’t the time to set up a yard sale or pitch up at a car boot sale, then you should simply sell your stuff online. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to use already established online marketplaces, such as eBay or Facebook, either. If you want to make selling your worldly belongings a business venture, then you should start your own online store.

To unearth the ins and outs of taking such a venture, check out the following information and advice.

Choose an ecommerce solution that suits you

The first thing that you need to do is choose an ecommerce solution that suits you. At this stage, you should take your level of expertise as well as how much money you are willing to invest in your venture initially into account. If you are selling physical products you may want to use a 3d model store to have them digitized for people to view on their phones that can then project into their homes, this can give you an edge on product advertisement and may potentially bring in new customers.

Below of three solutions that you can choose from when starting your online store:

Hosted

If you’ve had no prior experience in selling online or even when it comes to building websites, then you’re going to need an ecommerce solution that assists you every step of the way. In this instance, you should go down the hosted route. This kind of solution will house your store on their own personal servers – basically, it will build your site for you.

Licensed

If you’re adept when it comes to website building, particularly when it comes to the task of finding your own security protections, then you should opt for an out-of-the-box licensed solution.

Open source

If your budget is particularly tight, as this kind of solution is typically free, you should go for open source. By taking this route, however, just know that everything will be down to you. You will be tasked with creating your online store from scratch. This is great if you are an expert in this field and want free rein to customise your site however you want – this isn’t so great if you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to building websites.

To B2B or not to B2B… that is the question

An important question that you must then ask yourself is whether or not you wish to operate as a B2B ecommerce store – by choosing to operate in this manner, you will put yourself in a position where you trade solely with other businesses. With the amount of companies now operating around the globe, if you do enter into this particular field of ecommerce, you wouldn’t have to worry about there being customers for you to draw profit from. All you’d have to worry about is attracting them – to help you to do so at scale, you should check out Shopify Plus as a B2B ecommerce platform. Their patented services will allow you to customise your onsite navigation to ensure that it is tailored for other businesses. You can also create a vibrant user experience as well as offer 100+ payment methods.

To start an online store, you have to do more than just create a website and place a few of your items up for sale on it. As you can see above, you have to make a few tough decisions… to ensure success in this venture, the decisions that you make must always be tailored around what is best for you.