We are living in the world of anyone can start a business with a few easy clicks. Unfortunately, before they can call it online success many of those businesses fail early. Starting a business and successfully running it are two very different animals.

From having to build a website, to running social media profiles, to order listing and fulfillment, there are many facets of running a business online. Here are some easy steps and tip to launch a successful online business.

Invest in fast Internet

It may go without saying, but you can’t even think about online success and have an Internet-based business if you have bad Internet. Your connection must be fast and reliable, so you can respond to any business immediately.

A slow connection could mean missing out on customer questions, interaction, and even orders. Another question is if you are selling one particular big-ticket item, or a large amount of items.

One way to achieve online success is by keeping all your items to a single theme or niche. You could build a shop selling one particular vanity, or a shop selling vanities and popular vanity accessories, but always make sure it fits a theme.

What are you selling?

It may seem like a no-brainer, but on of the first things about building a business is what that business is selling. In online commerce, most niches are thoroughly filled by awesome companies.

The important thing to do is discover what you can sell that doesn’t have too much competition.

If there is a lot of competition, you need to hone in on what stands out about your product and market the heck out of it.

Sourcing products

If you’re good at crafting and can create furniture with your bare hands, that’s great. However, many people don’t have those kinds of skills.

This is where product sourcing comes in. Online success depends also on they type and level of collaboration, be prepared to work with many suppliers to acquire exactly which items you’re looking to stock in your shop. You’ll also need warehouse space (if you sell larger items).

An easier option for the new business to gain a quick online success is dropshipping. This is a very popular business model. Many have achieved online success using this selling method.

It eliminates the need to keep physical inventory. Think of yourself as a middleman between the consumer and the supplier. You create the website, market the product, and sell to customers.

That order gets sent off to a supplier who will then ship the order to your customer on your behalf, and you get the lion’s share of the profits.

This is a less risky option because you don’t risk having physical stock you can’t sell off. You can switch up the items you sell without needing to worry about inventory.

You can find many apps that will automate the dropshipping process for you, making your path to online success much easier allowing you to focus on marketing and design.

If in the future you choose to create your own products to sell, you can easily incorporate those into your store as well.

The Technical Side

What is Hosting?

Unless you own your own server, which is very expensive to purchase and maintain, you will need to have your website hosted on another server. Remember, online success is what you are left with after your business expenses not how much sales you’ve generated.

You pay to have your website and all its contents (layouts, pages, images, etc.) hosted on a server so that others can see it. Every website you’ve ever gone to is hosted on a server.

When you build a website using a service like Wix or Shopify, you can purchase plans which include a domain name and hosting.

It’s a good idea to keep these services all in one place to streamline business matters and make it all easier to remember.

What is a Domain Name?

Put simply, a domain name is what you type into the address bar to go to a website.

Think of the domain name as an address. On the Internet, every computer has its own IP address, which is a series of numbers separated by dots.

You can go to a website by typing its IP address, but those are hard to remember.

Remembering a string of numbers is hard, online success requires an easy way for people to find your business online, so domains were invented to make it easier to remember where a website is on the Internet by using words instead of numbers.

What is the Cloud?

To many people, the meaning of the term “the cloud” is an unclear enigma. The cloud is basically the Internet.

It is every software and service that runs on the Internet, and not locally on your computer. If you have iTunes installed on your computer, that is on your computer, not the cloud.

If you use Google Docs, those are in the cloud, not on your computer. If you store photos or documents in Dropbox, they are in the cloud. If you use Internet Explorer, it is installed locally on your computer. It’s not in the cloud.

Using the cloud has a lot of benefits. You can save space on your machine by storing documents, pictures, and almost any file in the cloud. As discussed your online success depends on good business partnerships.

There are even cloud-based computing services that allow you to mimic running on a powerful machine even if your computer isn’t high-end. And that website you built? That’s in the cloud, too.