How To Run An Ecommerce Store With Nothing But A Laptop

Last Updated on August 5, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas

A lot of people get ideas for ecommerce sites, but never do anything with them. They worry that they don’t have enough money or enough time — but the fact is that all you need is a laptop and some hard work! If you have an internet connection, you’re ready to get started. With so many free tools available on the internet, it’s becoming increasingly easy for anyone to launch a site, manage products, and maintain a fully functional online store all by themselves.

Finding the Time

First of all, if you want to start up your own little business, you’re going to need to find the time to do it. You’ve got your day job and all of the daily chores to juggle, can you really squeeze in time to run a business in between all that? The answer is yes. Here’s a rough plan of action:

• Setting it Up: Dedicate a weekend afternoon to putting together your website. This is probably the most daunting task in the early stages. Once you’ve got this first task done, it will get a bit easier: There are a lot of free tools that make this step easier too (more details below.)
• Little and Often: Check your site every day. You want to be aware of any orders that come in ASAP. Spend just five or ten minutes each day checking to see whether you need to respond to any customer queries or orders. If there are no orders, work on marketing.
• Longer Sessions: Sometimes you’re going to have to put in a bit more work. When it comes to these instances, why don’t you go to your favorite cafe? Get yourself a nice cake and a warm drink, then spend a couple of hours in that relaxed atmosphere working hard on your site. It’s good to treat yourself for your work, especially when you treat yourself while working.

As long as you’re not working on half a dozen other projects, you shouldn’t find it too hard to start up your ecommerce store around your other commitments. If you’re planning to do it as a full time job, you might like to look at this earlier blog post as well.

Online Resources

People have been using the internet to run ecommerce stores for a long time and, as such, many tools have been created to make the job easier. Here are a few different tools to help you with every aspect of the business:

• Google Trends: If you’re not sure about what to sell in your ecommerce store, perhaps Google Trends can help you to make a decision. You can compare the popularity of different search terms to get an idea of what sort of products are popular.
• Dropbox: This free service lets you back up lots of files for free. It’s ideal for keeping safe the images that you use on your site (in case anything happens) and for storing important digital documents.
• Free Logo Design: This an easy to use tool to help people without graphic design skills to make professional looking logos. It could be a valuable addition to your site and do a lot to help with branding.
• Shopify Store: If you want to make your ecommerce store through a website creation tool, Shopify could be a good choice. They’re one of the most popular options for template based website building. They offer a selection of more specialized services too.
• GIMP: This is a free piece of graphic design software which you could use to create some good marketing materials.
• Google Analytics: This is an extremely useful tool as it will let you know how many people are accessing your site and where they’re coming from.
• Hootsuite: If you’re doing social media marketing, this tool can help you to manage it all from one place. There are both free and premium versions of it.

This is just a small selection, but you’ll find that the internet provides tools to make pretty much everything simpler. If you’re a single person running a business alone, these definitely worth looking into. These can all help to save you a lot of time.

Tips to Make Your Life Easier

Here are a few general tips to follow if you want to excel in the business world. If you’re new to this sort of thing, these are going to be especially useful. Doing these things will generally help to streamline the process of managing your ecommerce store:

• Record All Expenses: If you record all of your expenses in a simple spreadsheet, it will make it a lot easier for you to keep on top of how much you’re spending. This will make things easier when you need to do a tax return and will help you to avoid spending too much.
• Training Courses: There’s always room for improvement. If you find you struggle with certain aspects of your business due to a lack of training, it could be worth investing in training courses.
• Consistent Marketing: Do one thing for your marketing and then see how it goes. When you’re working by yourself, you won’t have that much time for marketing, so try to focus on one thing at a time. Do Marketing Option A for a month, then Marketing Option B for a month. Compare the results of each approach. Consistently using one thing or another is the best way to identify what works and what doesn’t.
• Have a Work Space: Whenever doing a bit of work from home, you might like to set up a specially dedicated work space, like a home office. This will be a place for you to really concentrate and focus on your work. It will save you from the perils of procrastination.

Keeping all of these things in mind will make it much easier to manage an ecommerce store and, of course, all you need is a laptop. With the number of tools available online now, there is so much you can do even if you only have limited resources. At the end of the day, you’ve got nothing to lose so if you’ve got an ecommerce idea, you should run with it. What is your idea for an ecommerce store?