If you finally have found that long-coveted market gap, nothing seems simpler than launching a webshop and watching the money roll in – or so a layman might think. Unfortunately, the story is not that simple, as there are many components where things can go wrong. Here are the 12 most important tasks you need to check off before launch.
1. Selecting a Winning Product
Let’s start with the most important element: the product or service you want to sell. We often discover a market gap because we ourselves cannot find adequate offerings for our needs. However, in such cases it is worth conducting market research to ensure there will actually be demand for the chosen product or service. Google Trends can be a great help in making this decision. Based on relevant keywords, you can determine how much interest surrounds the topic. Using the program’s smart filters, you can gain temporal, demographic, and geographic information, and draw far-reaching conclusions about how profitable the business venture will be.
2. Mapping Your Competition
If you are not fortunate enough to be first to market, it is very important to be aware of your competitors: what they are like, how well they are doing, what revenue they are generating, what share of the market they cover, etc. Also pay attention to what mistakes they make and what complaints they receive (customer reviews), as this can give you insight into what customers find important and where you can do better than the competition.
3. Developing Your Pricing Strategy
When monitoring your competitors, also observe their pricing. This is a good starting point, but most importantly, before you set your price list, write down all your fixed costs: SSL, hosting platform, domain, email, website templates, themes, plugins, monthly fees, account fees, rental costs, advertising expenses, storage costs, packaging, shipping, taxes, etc.
4. Establishing a Logistics Plan
Dropshipping, using a fulfillment company, or managing your own webshop logistics? Each has its advantages and disadvantages. If you think small and don’t want to invest significant capital and effort, then dropshipping might be right for you, since in this case you don’t need to maintain inventory or pay for warehouse space, and often you don’t need to worry about shipping either. However, this tempting solution also has drawbacks: you cannot control inventory since it is not yours. You have less influence over shipping time and product quality itself, since you never actually handle the product. And there is one more complicating factor: the legal framework is still quite underdeveloped, so to ensure you don’t run into any legal issues, you need to do substantial research.
If you decide to use a fulfillment service provider, they will take the burden of warehousing, packaging, and shipping off your shoulders, but they will charge for it, so these costs ultimately fall on you. However, since these companies handle logistics for multiple webshops, they can negotiate better rates with courier companies.
Running a webshop with your own inventory is straightforward. Obviously you can still have issues with suppliers, but you have much better control over the processes. The profit margin is also higher in this case, but to get started you need to dig deep into your pocket, as you need to procure inventory, rent your own warehouse space, and arrange for packaging materials. It’s worth outsourcing the actual shipping to a courier company, though if you have few packages at first, you’ll need to expect significant costs. As you can see, this solution requires the most in-house labor.
5. Choosing the Right Courier Company
There is a large selection available, and it’s worth doing some research to find which company specializes in what. The csomagnet.hu website can be very helpful here, where you can use a calculator to determine which company will handle shipping for what price. Of course, you can negotiate better rates through individual agreements.
If you need domestic shipping and your package is under 40 kg and not extremely large, you should consider these companies: Magyar Posta, DPD, GLS, Express One, Sprinter Futárszolgálat, Packeta. All of them have pickup points as well, which is important because this way shipping costs are lower and you also help the environment. Their tracking and notification systems work smoothly, which is an important factor in customer satisfaction.
If you need air freight shipping, TNT Express could be a good choice. If you need pallet shipping, Palletways Hungary provides such services.
6. Choosing Your Sales Channel
Three options are available:
- Jófogás, Vatera, Facebook Marketplace, Meska: if you think small scale, this could be a good choice, where you really only need to worry about uploading products. However, you should know that this solution will not be entirely free if you actually want to make sales, because to always appear at the top of the search results you will need to pay something.
- Rental webstores: In Hungary, Unas and Shoprenter are the most popular. You can launch with little financial outlay and no programming knowledge is required to set up and operate a rental webshop, which is why many choose this option. The downside is that your options are more limited, so this is not the right choice for implementing custom requirements.
- Your own webshop: The advantage is that it will look exactly as you envision it. The disadvantage is that in the short term it costs more than renting.
In all three cases, product categorization, product photography, and product descriptions must be good and professional quality.
7. Developing Your Return and Withdrawal Policy
You need a menu item that clearly, thoroughly, and practically informs customers of their rights, options, and what to do if they change their mind and want to return the product.
8. Terms and Conditions, GDPR
The presence of general terms and conditions and a data processing notice is mandatory for a webshop. Serious penalties can be incurred if you fail to upload them or if they do not comply with applicable laws.
9. Payment Options
Although cash on delivery is still very popular in Hungary, a modern webshop must offer the option of online credit card payment.
If you set up a Virtual POS terminal on your site, you need to make an agreement with your bank. These solutions are very reliable, but depending on your transaction volume they operate with fairly high transaction fees.
Bank-independent flexible payment systems include Borgun, SimplePay, Six Payment Services, and Global Payments. Paylike offers a simpler solution, which doesn’t redirect to a bank page but allows payment in a popup window on the webshop itself. Paypal, Barion: offer not only online credit card payments but also bank-independent virtual accounts to their customers, from which they can send and receive money. It always first sends the payout from the virtual balance, but if there is not enough available there, it debits the credit card linked to the account. PayPal is a foreign development, Barion is Hungarian and operates with much lower transaction fees.
10. Acquiring Invoicing Software
The era of hand-written invoices has passed. Professional online invoicing programs are available even for free, or for a few thousand forints per month, which help you keep your invoicing in perfect order and can even be integrated with the NAV system. The two most popular systems are Számlázz.hu and Billingo.
11. Customer Service Tasks
You would be surprised how much of your time will be consumed by handling individual customer needs. You need to respond to email inquiries, keep order statuses up to date, manage inventory, confirm orders, handle phone calls, and deal with complaints. And the better your business goes, the more of these there will be. Developing action plans for potential situations can be a great help, and when you calculate for human resources, allocate substantial capacity for these tasks.
12. Making Your Finished Webshop Visible
Once you have checked off all the above points, there is still one major task: marketing. According to some recommendations, it’s worth spending 50% of revenue on marketing, since this is an investment. If you can’t allocate such a large percentage, spend as much as you can, but do it wisely using the advanced analytical capabilities available today! So you need to target carefully. To handle online marketing tasks, depending on whether you do it yourself or hire an expert, you need to allocate both financial and human resources.
