How to Start an Online Shoe Store Business

Write a business plan for your online shoe store. Will you sell designer shoes for a local market, or sell athletic shoes for worldwide Nike, Adidas and Puma fans? Interview other successful online shoe retailers for tips on writing your shoe retail business plan. Search the Small Business Administration's website for sample business plans for your online shoe business.
Register a domain name. Your domain name is a piece of internet real estate that your customers will use to shop for shoes. To please the search engines and your customers, reserve a domain name that includes the words 'online shoe store' to maximize SEO opportunities. The price of domain names can range from 99 cents to 10 dollars.
Design your online store and obtain secure hosting. Buy a ready-made template for your shoe store or use a web designer specializing in online retail websites. Ensure that whatever retail website application you choose provides options for sizing, photos of the shoes, available colors and product descriptions for your online shoe customers.
Get state and local business requirements for your online shoe store. A retail shoe store business, whether it is online or free-standing, must have a sales tax license, incorporation from the state and an EIN number. If you buy merchandise with a shoe wholesaler, you will need to provide proof of a retail license, a business account and corporation documents to complete a shoe order.
Obtain your shoe store merchandise through wholesalers and distributors. Look for store closeouts on eBay. Peruse online wholesalers for shoe brands that your ideal customer will purchase online. Contact shoe manufacturers directly to see if they will give you a deal for bulk orders. Start off with 10 sizes for each shoe style to ensure that your customer selection is varied.
Prepare for customer service and shipping requirement for your online shoe store. Create a designated email address for customer complaints and issues. Investigate the prices for drop shipping (where the designer shoes are warehoused instead of storing the merchandise in your home) or use Fed Ex or UPS for standard and overnight shipping requests.
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Consider using an open-source blogging software such as WordPress. These software platforms allow for the incorporation of widgets designed by third-party developers. Some of these plugins will allow for the posting of user content such as classified advertising. While the approach may not be very versatile, it is probably the simplest way to accomplish the task of accepting and posting web-based classifieds.
Research the opportunities offered by popular content management systems. If you don't have experience programing with a server-side scripting language or if you are not familiar with relational database programs then you will probably want to use a pre-programmed content management system which can be customized to your needs. Two of the leading content management programs which you should consider using are Joomla and Drupal. Neither of these programs charge for their use; however, you should spend the time to become familiar with each product prior to investing the time and energy to customize their system.
Develop the user-facing framework for your users. You will need to have a working knowledge of XHTML and CSS. These two coding systems can be written in a basic text editor and will allow you to design the structure which will appear on your users' browser screens. If you need assistance with these two languages then you should take advantage of any number of XHTML and CSS online tutorials which will explain the features available.
Deploy the server-side back-end scripting language and database program. You will need to process dynamic data which will need to be updated depending on user input. To do this it will be necessary to use a server-side scripting language such as PHP, Java, Pearl, Python or Microsoft's ASP.NET language. These scripts will take the data entered by the user and place it in the database. They will also retrieve the data upon request and present in in the XHTML and CSS framework which was mentioned above. You will also need to set up a relational database to securely house the data.
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