How to Start an Ecommerce Business

Thinking about opening an online store? ​​Maybe you’ve come up with a product you can’t find anywhere else, or your side hustle is starting to take off. These days, more Australians are turning to ecommerce to build their own business without all the overheads of a traditional brick-and-mortar store.

Today, more than half of customers (53%) prefer to engage with businesses digitally. Online shopping is ubiquitous, and with the right ecommerce tools and strategies, any entrepreneur can start an ecommerce business.

Do you have an idea for a new business venture? Here are seven steps to successfully launch an ecommerce business.

• What is an ecommerce business?
• How to start an Australian ecommerce business in seven steps
• How much does it cost to start an ecommerce business in Australia?
• Key considerations for the Australian market in 2025

An ecommerce business business is a company of any size, in any industry, that sells goods or services online. A website that sells concert tickets is an ecommerce business. A streaming service that sells monthly subscriptions to access films and live events? Also an ecommerce business. If a consumer or business buyer can browse and buy your products online, you have an ecommerce business.

Digital sales channels (like websites, mobile retail apps and social commerce) make it possible to sell to anyone, anywhere. This means ecommerce businesses can reach exponentially more customers than companies that only operate with physical shop fronts.

Starting a business can feel like a big venture that’s out of reach, but once you break it down, it’s not as complicated as it seems. Whether you’ve got a product ready to go or you’re just getting started, here are seven practical steps to help you launch your ecommerce store.

If you're reading this article, you probably already have a business idea brewing. Excellent — you're on the right path! The next step is to conduct research to gauge demand for your product or service. Here are a few research methods that will help you to collect the information you need.

Surveys and interviews provide direct insights into the needs, challenges, and preferences of your target audience. Responses will help you understand whether your product solves a real problem and how potential customers feel about your idea. You can also uncover any concerns or objections potential customers might have through their direct feedback.

Researching your competitors will give you a better idea of what's working in the market and reveal any gaps you can fill. Start by analysing competitor websites, reviews, social media, and their marketing to identify what is resonating with your potential audience. By studying their strengths and weaknesses, you can find opportunities to differentiate your business as you build your presence online.

Search trends and keyword research tools can help you track interest and identify emerging purchasing patterns. These tools can reveal whether demand is steady, seasonal, or growing, and provide insights into long-term sustainability. Additionally, this research can show where customers look for products like yours and how they prefer to shop, guiding your marketing, sales, and commerce strategies.

Another effective way to validate your business idea is by creating and testing a prototype. You can start with a simple, low-cost version of your product using basic materials or digital mockups. Tools such as wireframes, sketches, or minimal viable products (MVPs) allow you to test core functionalities without a huge investment. Keeping the process simple and focused on essential features allows you to gather valuable feedback from potential customers, validate demand, and refine your idea without breaking the bank.

Now that you've solidified your idea and know what you want to sell online, it's time to figure out how much it will cost to get started. The good news is that launching an online business can be significantly less expensive than a physical retail store. For example, you won't need to spend money on rent, utilities or in-store staff if your ecommerce business is strictly online. Here are some of the core costs you'll want to consider in your start-up budget:

• Ecommerce platform: Monthly fees for your ecommerce platform covering your digital shop front, hosting and customer lifecycle tools.
• Product sourcing: Costs of purchasing or manufacturing your products, such as raw materials, inventory or wholesale items to stock your online store.
• Shipping: Expenses for shipping products to customers, including boxes, labels, tape, and carrier rates.
• Marketing: Funds for paid advertising campaigns, SEO, ecommerce content marketing, email marketing, and more.
• Payment gateway: Setup fees and processing transaction fees for credit card processing.
• Inventory management and fulfilment services: Warehousing and shipping services.

You wouldn't start construction on a new building without a blueprint, and you also shouldn't start an ecommerce business without a business plan. Your plan should outline your mission, goals, and strategies that will guide your decision-making and help you stay on course. This outline will steer you through every stage of building and growing your ecommerce company. Here are the critical elements to include as you write your business plan:

• Executive summary: Give a brief overview that offers a clear snapshot of your entire business.
• Company overview: Provide information on your company's structure, industry, background and key team members.
• Mission statement: List the core values and business goals that drive your ecommerce strategy.
• Market research: Use tools like Google Trends and ecommerce industry reports like those from the Australia Post to understand buying behaviour in the local market.
• Competitor research: Add your competitor research, highlighting the main opportunities to differentiate your business.
• Products and services: Clearly describe your products, including details such as sourcing, pricing and delivery logistics.
• Marketing and sales strategy: Explain how you'll attract and retain customers through channels such as SEO, social media, content marketing, email campaigns and paid ads.
• Business roadmap: Present a timeline with key milestones for growing your business, from launch to scaling. You might even be eligible for small business grants or support through business.gov.au .
• Operations plan: Provide details about your supply chain, order fulfilment, inventory management, and day-to-day operations. Depending on how you plan to deliver orders, you might use Australia Post or instead team up with a third party for warehousing and fulfilment.
• Financial projections: Estimate your pricing, sales goals, profit margins, cash flow and funding needs.
• Legal and compliance: Cover your business registration, tax setup, licensing, and any relevant legal considerations. You’ll need to register for an ABN, choose your business structure (like sole trader or company), and make sure you’re meeting any ASIC or ATO rules.
• GST: If you’re planning to earn more than $75,000 a year, you’ll need to register for GST. This is a legal requirement in Australia.
• Tech stack: List the platforms you will use to run your business, including your ecommerce platform, customer relations management (CRM) and customer support tools.
• Customer service plan: Outline how you will support your customers, whether through live chat, email, or phone. Ensure your returns and refund policy complies with Australian Consumer Law .
• Risk analysis: Identify potential challenges or risks your business may face, such as supply chain disruptions or market changes and how you will mitigate them.

Now that you know what you're going to sell, consider how you will source the products. What's the most efficient and cost-effective way to deliver a high-quality product that your customers will love? Here are some of the top ways ecommerce businesses source their products:

If you are a manufacturer or an artisan looking to sell creative, custom, handmade, or digital products, your products will be created in-house. Examples of this could be anything from artisanal candles, jewellery, custom-designed clothing, or locally made leather goods. When you create your products in-house, you control every aspect of the production process. Creating your own products gives you the best brand differentiation, but it can also make it harder to scale. You'll need trusted partners to help you produce more and grow.

Sourcing from manufacturers is a good idea if you are mass-producing items with detailed specifications that need precise consistency. For example, if you sell coffee tampers, wine, or tech gadgets, you want every product to be consistent and match the product description perfectly. To start, research potential manufacturers, request samples, and then negotiate terms.

Dropshipping is a method of selling products without holding inventory. Commonly drop-shipped items include phone cases, fashion accessories, and home decor. These are lightweight, easy to ship, and have broad appeal. When a customer orders, you forward it to a third-party supplier for fulfilment and shipping. This approach minimises your upfront investment. However, strong supplier relationships are also important to prevent delays and stock issues.

Print-on-demand is another low-investment way to source products. With print-on-demand, you can sell custom products such as T-shirts, hats, and accessories without holding inventory. A third-party service will print and ship the items when a customer places an order. This allows you to test designs without committing to large orders. But keep in mind that third-party printers often charge a hefty commission.

You've settled on a product and have a production plan. Now, it's time for the fun part: setting up an ecommerce platform so customers can start placing orders and you can start making money. There are several ecommerce platforms on the market, and you'll want to choose one that taps into modern tech, makes it easy to set up a gorgeous ecommerce website, and runs all your business operations from a single space. Here are a few features your ecommerce platform should have:

Your website is often the first interaction an online customer will have with your business. You'll want it to be sleek, responsive and customer-friendly. Not a designer? Don't worry. The best ecommerce platforms come with front-end tech that makes it easy to create a beautiful site to boost engagement on both mobile and desktop.

You shouldn't have to be a developer to use an ecommerce platform. Choose a platform that's simple to navigate and lets you manage your store without technical issues. Everything from setting up product listing pages to tracking orders should be intuitive, so you can focus on growing your business rather than troubleshooting.

On average, consumers engage with companies across eight channels. That means you want your customers to be able to find and buy from you on your website, social media, mobile app and more. Not only that, but it's important that all of these experiences on different channels feel cohesive. Choose an ecommerce platform that syncs products, inventory and customer data across every channel to create a smooth, connected experience for you and your customers.

If the ecommerce platform you're researching doesn't offer AI-driven product recommendations, you may want to consider other options. The best platforms use ecommerce AI to assist with tasks such as offering personalised product suggestions to your customers based on their browsing habits. These smart recommendations help increase average order value and drive more sales by showing customers highly relevant items, without extra effort on your part.

Imagine how much time you could save by automating repetitive work such as order confirmations, inventory updates and customer follow-ups. The right platform handles these everyday actions so you can focus on strategic decisions and scaling up.

Your platform should make make managing orders seamless by tracking every purchase from start to finish. Real-time delivering updates keep customers informed, while an easy return process builds trust. The ideal system offers full visibility into your order pipeline, ensuring that every stage — processing, delivery and delivery — goes smoothly.

Staying on top of inventory is essential to prevent overselling or stockouts. Your platform should monitor stock levels in real-time across all sales channels so you're always in sync. Whether you're managing one warehouse or several, look for a platform that offers real-time updates so you can confidently fulfil orders and avoid any gaps in availability.

Your platform should connect with top social apps and CRM, ERP and marketing systems to provide a full view of your business and customer interactions. These integrations help make your operations more efficient and enable you to deliver personalised experiences that foster loyalty.

As your business evolves, your platform should, too. Opt for customisable technology that can adapt to changes in site design and large increases in traffic and sales without missing a beat.

Choosing the right ecommerce platform provides you with all the necessary tools to build an engaging customer experience on your website. But how do you attract customers to your website in the first place? The right marketing strategies and tools will help here.

After performing market research and identifying your ideal customer, marketing your products and services to them should become much easier. A deep understanding of your target audience will help you to determine where to market and what kind of messages will resonate. Here are a few channels where businesses build a presence and reach a wide audience.

You can promote and sell your products on social channels like TikTok, Instagram and Meta. This is what’s known as social marketing and social commerce. You can run paid ads, promote user-generated content (UGC), create your own marketing content and even sell your products directly on these platforms.

When you’re browsing the web and you see prominent digital ads for a brand you love, that’s not a coincidence. Those are paid ads — and they’re a great way to garner attention and sales from potential customers as they search online. These ads run on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, which means they cost your business a certain amount each time a user clicks your ad.

Ecommerce content marketing encompasses all the written content on your site, like product descriptions, blog posts, FAQs articles and more. This content can help you build brand awareness, establish trust and capture more customers. Content marketing is a major part of establishing your brand voice and tone and it should also be a critical piece of your ecommerce SEO strategy.

Ecommerce SEO, or search engine optimisation, involves all the actions you take to improve the visibility of your digital shop front and your products in search engines. This includes content marketing, but also more technical elements like internal linking, tagging product pages and URL structures to help your pages rank higher in search engine results pages.

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels for ecommerce merchants. Why? Because subscribers actively opt into your email marketing lists, indicating interest and showing that they’re eager to hear from you. Once someone has given you their email address, you can send them highly personalised emails, encourage them to make purchases, and track their engagement.

Before going live, consider a soft launch. This involves releasing your website to a smaller audience to gather feedback, track commerce metrics, monitor site performance and fix any issues with speed, customer experience, payment gateways or inventory management. This step helps to ensure everything is running smoothly before you expand to a larger audience.

Also, make sure to test your site's load capacity to ensure it can handle traffic surges during promotions or product launches. You must also ensure your transaction processing is secure and functions smoothly across all payment methods. Test the user experience by checking for broken links, slow load times or difficult navigation. Confirm your site is mobile-responsive and verify that the checkout process is simple and glitch-free to prevent basket abandonment.

Depending on what you’re selling and how you set things up, you could launch your new ecommerce site for as little as $500. However, if you want something more customised and don’t have the skills yourself, the costs can add up. Here's a rough breakdown of the costs you’ll need to be aware of when starting your ecommerce business.

• Business setup
• Domain registration
• Website platform
• Branding
• Product stock or materials
• Packaging and shipping
• Marketing and sales tools

Start small, test your idea, and grow from there. There are plenty of free tools online to help you keep costs low in the beginning.

Before launching, it’s worth understanding a few things that make the Australian ecommerce landscape unique.

• Consumer behaviour: Aussie shoppers value trust, transparency, and fast, reliable delivery. Clear returns policies and good customer service go a long way.
• Logistics: Australia’s size can make shipping tricky, especially across states or to regional areas. Plan your delivery and fulfilment strategy carefully.
• Competition: Ecommerce is growing fast, so it’s important to carve out a niche and make your brand stand out from the rest.
• Compliance: Make sure your store meets Australian consumer laws and privacy regulations, especially around returns, refunds, and handling customer data.

Understanding these basics can help you build a store that meets local expectations and sets you up for long-term success.

Starting an ecommerce business can feel like a big task, but when you break it down step by step, it’s more achievable than you think. Whether you’re growing a side hustle or launching something completely new, the best approach is to start small, test as you go, and keep building from there.

With a comprehensive, connected ecommerce platform like Commerce Cloud, you can take advantage of out-of-the-box tools for front-end design and back-end operations. And it’s all included in one intuitive system. A platform that enables innovation and speed is crucial, especially when you consider that 65% of customers expect organisations to adapt to their changing preferences.