The Saudi e-commerce market is growing strongly these days, especially with the increase of enthusiastic consumers buying online. Consequently, the idea of creating an online store targeting the Saudi market has become attractive to investors and entrepreneurs around the world, given the facilities and support provided by the government.

Salla, the Future of E-commerce: An Easy Platform to Start Your Business

Market reports on e-commerce in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have been highly positive recently, both in terms of growth and future prospects. This has encouraged many young people and entrepreneurs to invest part of their money in creating an online store, especially after the emergence of professional online store design companies at the lowest possible cost, such as the Salla platform. You too can create a buying and selling website at the lowest possible cost through Salla, which is the perfect way to bring in some extra income.

In this article, we will take you on a detailed tour on how to create a professional online store that you can use to sell your products.

 You don't need to be a technical expert. We help you create an online store to sell your products without writing a single line of code, through a series of simple and smooth steps.

To help you follow this guide easily, we have divided it into 7 different sections:

1- What is an online store?

2- Business plan for an online store

3- Steps to create an online store

4- Designing a professional online store for free

5- Steps to market your online store

6- How to activate the best Saudi payment gateways on your store

7- How to choose the best shipping companies for your store

1- What is an online store?

It is known in English as an Online Store or Ecommerce Website and is an integral part of online marketing operations, serving as a website to display services or products on the internet in a dynamic and interactive way.

It enables people to view products and learn about their details through attractive images and accurate descriptions in order to urge consumers to buy them. The store also tasks shipping companies to deliver purchases to the customer.

Creating a professional online store for your trade or business is no longer a luxury today, but rather an effective way to improve your sales and increase their revenues.

Advantages of the online store for the customer

1- They can buy anything that comes to mind while sitting on their sofa at home. The customer enters the online store, browses its various sections, chooses the product that suits them, puts it in the cart, and then completes the purchase process—all in a few minutes. Follow the most important stages of the customer journey to your online store.

2- It helps them easily discover offers and the best prices. The customer interacts with several stores or platforms without moving from their place to find out the best prices and the best places. In fact, there are now websites whose primary idea is to display the prices of a single product from multiple online stores.

3- It gives them the opportunity to review different options within multiple stores before completing the purchase process.

4- It provides them with diverse, guaranteed, safe, and easy payment choices.

5- It shows them previous customer reviews for any product before buying it. 

6- It facilitates the search and shopping process for specific products.

Statistics about e-commerce in Saudi Arabia

E-commerce sales are expected to account for 17.5% of retail sales worldwide by 2021. Revenue is also expected to show an annual growth rate (2020-2024) of 7.1%, leading to a projected market volume of US$8,290 million by 2024.

 Are you still hesitant about entering the world of e-commerce?!

I know that many people have great ideas about starting an online store and entering the field of e-commerce, but they fail in execution because they do not know how to make a site suitable for buying and selling rather than just showing off.

"Knowing what you want to sell online is one thing, and knowing how to do it successfully is something completely different."

2- Business plan for an online store

With the evolution of events around the world, changing consumer patterns and behaviors, and their strong shift toward buying online—especially after the Corona pandemic—and with the emergence of modern theories and trends in commerce and marketing, creating a dedicated online store has became an urgent desire for many entrepreneurs and young people who want to get rid of their boring and limited jobs and move toward a better investment of time, money, and ideas.

But before you take the practical step, there are some steps you must think about first. It is worth spending some time thinking about the business plan. In this section, we will cover the essential elements of an e-commerce business plan.

How to build a business plan in order to create a professional online store 

At the beginning of the planning stages, it is good to develop a framework for your store. This business model will continue to evolve as you create each section, so do not strive for a complete and perfect plan on the first try. You will make adjustments to the plan with specific steps along the way.

There are many ways to sell products online, as well as different business models. The exact business model that you and your team follow will be the one that makes the most sense with your resources, skills, and interests. 

In order to create the best business plan for your store, you need to define the following things:

1- General overview: 

This section includes detailed information about your business, covering features such as:

• The brand name (your store), founder's name, and partners

• Store link (Domain): It is the URL. It should be short, simple, distinctive, preferably reflect the nature of your store, and not contain numbers.

• The message: It is a short statement showing how clear your idea is.

• Goals: The reasons behind your business's existence.

• Vision: The goals you want to reach in the long run; they must be realistic and ambitious to be motivating.

2- Market analysis:

Everything about the target market, its size, and the nature and characteristics of the target audience.

3- Products and services:

What you sell, and the key features of your products or services. It is preferable to make a detailed analysis including: 

- Strengths.

- Weaknesses.

- Opportunities.

- Threats / Challenges.

- The competitive advantage of your store and products over the rest of the market.

4- Marketing plan:

How you intend to introduce people to your store, what steps you will follow, what marketing channels you will rely on, ads, etc.

5- Pricing plan: 

What plan will you rely on to price your products?

This guide will help you in pricing products with professional pricing tools and strategies.

6- Operations and implementation:

The steps that will take place starting from testing product quality up to its delivery into the customer's hand and obtaining reviews.

7- Financial plan:

It is important to take a look at your current financial projections. This section includes three main financial statements: the income statement, balance sheet, and return on investment.

How to write an online store creation plan using this free template:

There are some important guidelines other than the tips included in this free business plan template, which will help you write an effective and complete plan with minimal distraction:

• Know your audience: Whether you are writing this business plan for yourself in order to get clear ideas about your store or to send it to investors, pay attention to knowing your audience well, and scrutinize their study as much as possible.

• Know your goals: Understanding the goals of your plan can help you determine the correct scale of growth and develop your business.

• Take it step-by-step: Do not limit yourself to the number of lines attached in the template; you can elaborate or reduce according to your needs, and do not commit yourself to filling them in the same order. Make the appropriate changes to help you and your work team benefit from it.

3- Steps to create an online store

To create a professional online store, you must give sufficient attention to each step you take to ensure you have a shopping site capable of attracting consumers and selling your products. During this process, you will go through a number of essential stages and sub-steps.

 3 key stages you go through while creating an online store

1- Preparation stage: In this stage, you prepare for the activity and type of store.

2- Implementation stage: This is specific to how to create an online store, set it up completely, and then display your products on it.

3- Testing stage: After preparation and launching, you need to test every page and every strategy you work on in your store to ensure continuous development of your business.

In the next part of the article, we will try to cover some of these stages in as much detail as possible, and for others, we will dedicate special articles that you can refer to after reading this article.

Preparing to create a professional online store

Certainly at this stage you are one of two people:

•  You work as a merchant and already have an existing offline business.

•  You are taking your first step in the world of e-commerce.

- You work as a merchant and already have an existing offline business

If you are within this category, you are likely looking for the best way to create an online store, or for steps to create a professional online store to transfer your business from physical reality to the internet world. 

This step is the best thing you have thought about lately. But beware, there is a common mistake that occurs with most merchants in this category, which is not dealing with the online store seriously enough, and consequently, their business fails.

Creating a professional online store is not just a complementary service to your physical store on the ground, but it could be the essential step that guarantees you the continuous success of your store and doubles its profits. Therefore, you must pay special attention to the following points: 

• Updating products continuously: Synchronizing the number of products in stock with all sales processes, whether in your physical store or your online store, helps you continue successfully. There is many software you can invest in to perform this task automatically.

• Attention to marketing: Many merchants think that marketing is not a necessary factor to increase sales like direct brochure advertising does. The online store requires different marketing operations such as: sponsored ads, content marketing, search engine marketing, and others. (Learn how to market products of the online store and achieve the highest return on investment).

• Order delivery: Order delivery will be one of the newest things to you. Previously, the customer came to the store, chose, paid, and then carried their items with them, but with online stores, the matter is completely different. If you think that your employees can do the delivery task to save expenses, this will not be a practical solution, especially during seasons and occasions.  

It is better to rely on delivery representatives or companies specializing in shipping and delivery to ensure a good experience is provided to your store users (we will dedicate an entire part to this point shortly).

- Taking your first step in the world of e-commerce and thinking about creating a professional online store

Although the previous merchant—the owner of the traditional store—may be steps ahead in the field of commerce and perhaps has greater experience in dealing with consumers, the nascent merchant has a unique opportunity for success that the traditional merchant does not have, because they are:

• Often young, more connected to technology, constantly updated with its developments, and flexible in handling it.

• They do not have fixed mental patterns or methods about trade and selling.

• They are keen to provide a good service that surpasses the traditional merchant.

• Keen on learning and discovering weaknesses in their work and addressing them.

At this stage in particular, we advise the nascent merchant not to give in to thinking, trying to search for that genius idea that no one has discovered before. It is okay sometimes to observe others, discover gaps, and work on fixing them. Start where others finished.

The nascent merchant may suffer from weak financial capabilities, which deludes them into thinking they cannot create a professional online store, especially when searching for the cost of creating an online store or the best online store creation companies. But this illusion ended a long time ago.

Whether this is the first time you are creating a shopping site or you have been playing the game for a while, you need to focus on several things at the start of your online business.

- Preparing to put the operational business plan before creating your online store

Before embarking on creating an online store, there are several essential things you must know and study well:

What do you sell on your online store?

This is the first operational step before creating an online store, because defining the products is an essential element, based on which the rest of the steps will be taken, and it will also significantly affect the success of the project.

The last thing any merchant wants is to create a store that no one buys from, especially with millions of products available online. Therefore, you must choose the products your store will specialize in selling very carefully.

You can choose from many categories to determine what you will sell on your store, including: 

Physical products: Clothes, shoes, and home goods.

Digital products: Software as a service, online courses, e-books.

Services: Consulting services, home cleaning.

You can start by searching for the best-selling products in major stores, and tracking reviews on these products to discover the problems facing the target audience, and whether you can provide solutions for them or alternatives to them? 

To whom will you sell your store's products?

The world has become more open today than before; you can reside in Africa and manage an entire business in Europe or America, and vice versa. Everything has become possible with the presence of the internet. But is the method of selling and marketing the same in all these places? Does choosing the most appropriate marketing strategy for your store depend only on geographical location?

Of course not, there are hundreds of things that can change the map or strategy of your online store. One of the most important of these is determining the selling strategy you will follow on your store:

• Business-to-Business (B2B): Your store will specialize in selling to organizations, companies, and non-profit organizations instead of individual customers.

• Direct-to-Consumer (B2C): This means that your online store will sell directly to individual consumers instead of companies.

• Promotional market: Meaning that your store will act as a broker by bringing companies and customers (B2B or B2C) to a single website.

How will you get the products?

Owning capital is no longer a prerequisite for creating a buying and selling website on the internet. A little is enough for you to start, but this will result in important choices and decisions about your store's products and how you will obtain them. Will you rely on:

Manufacturing products in-house: 

You will manufacture your product or service in-house, by owning a workshop or factory specialized in manufacturing your store's products.

A third-party manufacturer: 

You outsource the manufacturing of your product or service by agreeing with factories or workshops owned by other people, in order to supply the products you will display for sale on your online store.

Dropshipping: 

Dropshipping is selling without bearing shipping costs or storage costs. This means that you will be a partner with a factory; they manufacture, package, and ship directly to your customer, while your store is the direct broker with the customer.

The customer orders the product from your store and pays the price in advance, then you buy the product from the grand store or factory at a special price, while putting a profit margin percentage. This profit margin is your earnings from the operation.

Wholesale:

You buy goods or services from other companies in large quantities, and resell them on your online store. You will pay the price of these products in advance before displaying them on your store. After buying these products, you determine a profit margin after adding transport and shipping costs and other side costs.

This method is considered one of the best methods in e-commerce; the more you invest, the larger the profit margin.

- Type of products on your online store

When we talk about products, you will find that there are two types of online stores:

 Multi-product online stores

You find this type of store selling many diverse products, which fall under several diverse classifications. So you find the same store selling clothes, home tools, and decor, for example: the global Amazon store.

Online stores specializing in a single product 

You find this type of store selling one type of product or one product, such as stores specializing in selling phones or selling coffee. For example: Al-Humaidhi watches store.

- Things to focus on before creating a professional online store 

1- Define your niche in the market:

It means what you sell, and to whom you sell it. Many new entrepreneurs do not focus on their niche or specialty. 

Defining your niche affects many things: 

• Your sales figures.

• Pricing of your products.

• How much effort you need to put in.

• Will you have repeat customers or not?

Your niche is divided into three parts: price, audience, and market opportunity.

What do you think about focusing on pricing? Pricing products is the art of translating the product's value into a specific number at a certain time, its key is building value for the product and determining the appropriate price for it, with the aim of increasing sales and achieving profits.

Pricing the product is an important decision and a cornerstone in the structure of your project, and a clear indicator of the extent of your understanding of the nature of the market and audience, what your product's journey will be like, and how you will achieve profits and returns from the pricing process correctly and systematically.

There are countless ways to price products online, but some pricing strategies can result in large losses, so you must make sure to choose the appropriate strategy for your products.

The correct strategy helps you achieve your goals in an organized way. You can discover the most famous global pricing tools and strategies from this article.

2- Make a commercial registry and register your brand domain 

We sometimes see that entrepreneurs are obsessed with choosing a unique name in order to make an online store, which wastes a lot of their time, so we advise you to set a specific and strict period for choosing the name, let it be a week, for example. Here are some tips for choosing the name:

• Choose a name that is easy to pronounce.

• Beware of writing numbers in the domain name.

• Choose a name decent across all dialects, and think about future developmental stages.

• Try to make the domain related to your business activity.

We recommend our clients at this stage not to enter blindly into a place they know absolutely nothing about. If you find a suitable niche but it is new for you, take your time in conducting some market research. In the end, the more you understand the market, your competitors, and how the industry you intend to specialize in works, the better your chances of building a successful online store will be. 

4- Designing a professional online store for free

Online store design includes all the means that help you display your products in an attractive way and start sales operations. Many wonder what is the best site to create an online store? Or search for how to design an online store at the lowest costs.

When you decide to design a professional online store, you will have to rely on one of these three options:

1.  Contracting with a company specialized in design and programming

2.  Designing your store yourself or through your work team

3.  Using one of the ready-made smart solutions

1- Contracting with a company specialized in design and programming

This is the most difficult and most time- and money-consuming method, and its difficulty is due to several reasons, including:

• Extremely high cost (6,000 to 30,000 SAR)

• It consumes a relatively long period (from one to 3 months)

• The probability of technical glitches is high (this depends on the skill and precision of site usability testing performed by the design company)

2- Designing your store yourself or through your work team

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