Published on December 14th, 2016 | by Guest

How to Open an Online Bookstore

There are plenty of ways to start your online business. However, if you want to make it your main activity with a steady profit, you should learn about the market you are about to enter. The best way to do it is from the inside starting with low risky enterprises. Online bookstore is a great example for that. These days, starting an online bookstore is becoming more accessible and choosing this niche is one of the most inexpensive ways to start.

How to start a bookstore?

Surely, looking at the most popular success stories among the online stores that had actually started as online bookshop, people might get a twisted idea that online stores are the easiest to run. Obviously, there are some pros and cons to consider. So if you want to run a bookstore, it is better first answer those questions:

Where will you get your initial capital?
What type of a bookstore do you want to open and where will you get the items for sale?
How are you going to ship the books?
What can make the content of your website differ from others?

As you see there are lots of things to consider before moving on to the next practical part of the business. Although, we are ready to offer you some help with that.

Opening an online bookstore: where to start?

Having a great business idea and tons of motivation is surely a great starting point for launching your new enterprise. However, there are some fundamental guidelines to follow if you want to succeed in your beginning.

Finding your suppliers

The first thing you should do is to decide where you will get your books from. Your further decisions will depend on such criteria as for whether you want to sell old/used books or new ones. Do you want to sell specific genres, such as academic books, textbooks, children’s books, etc., for a limited audience?

Or you want to sell any type of books for a general audience? Once you make up your mind on that, you can start looking for the suppliers. Surely the internet is your best friend here. Look for young publishing houses, big brands suppliers or just go to the local yard sales or start with the books you already have and don’t need. Eventually, you will find your best personal approach to the suppliers’ search.

The importance of the right name

First of all, you should be prepared that most of the names you will come up with might be already taken. That happens all the time. Moreover, you should be confident that the name you are about to pick is not similar to other online bookstores names since you don’t want to lead your potential customers to your competitors. Therefore, your two main principles here are:

Pick the name which is easy to find in the search box, in a way that the name clearly exposes the context of your web site. Also, make it short and memorable.
Go with the “.com”. It is the most popular, appropriate and accessible among all other options.

The US rules on legal enterprise registration

This might be the part that scares most of the beginners, although there is no need to panic before its time. If we are talking here about starting your online store in the US, you should know that nowadays, most of the states allow you to register your business online.

It noticeably eases the procedure, what’s more, there are lots of advice online on how to do it correctly. Since we are talking here about a pretty small business, you will need to acquire a general business license and permissions according to the specific type of your business.

Online business registration

Once you finished with the necessary legal procedures, you might move on to the fun part of the deal. Picking the “placement” of your future store. Now there are lots of ways to go when you are looking for an online store builder. Nevertheless, many options may be only confusing for those who are opening their first startup. Our first tip is to look for the e-commerce platform that can be appropriate for specific purposes of the clients. Pick a platform that can actually help you to sell books online by making a web page more qualified for your type of business. With GetSocio you can feel the support on each level of your work.

The benefits of choosing GetSocio

Let’s just say that it is really hard to overestimate the importance of a rightly chosen e-commerce platform, such as GetSocio, when you run a bookstore. And here is why:

It is not only easy to open a bookstore with GetSocio but also very fast. All you need to do is to register and customize it in a way you want to. Two steps and you are in the market!
Moreover, it is very cheap. Especially considering that you have a chance to use a 14 days trial period absolutely for free!
GetSocio has great tools to customize your web page and to help you choose essential features for an online store. For instance, it helps to create online shopping cart which makes it possible for your customer to pay online and offline, on their choice.
It truly cares about the web design of your store. The interface of your storefront will not be forgotten or confused with others.

Set up a bookstore right now

As you can see there is a clear path from your home business to the success story. The best piece of advice we have is to open a bookstore now. Don’t hesitate and lose your time, the competition is high and the sooner you start the better. Work on your business plan, maybe look for the franchise to buy, register it on the platform you will feel most protected and supported. Just follow our tips and start gaining profit out of your startup.

Tags: bookstore, business, online, open, sales