Starting an Online E-commerce business

Currently, I am working as a Web Developer and looking to start an online business in my spare time.
My Project is to create an ecommerce website, initially in the UK, for the latest mens and womens clothing (including hoodies, t-shirts etc.). We have a clothing industry back in South Asia. I can
easily get products at a good price.

Any suggestions or advice on things
which I should consider before starting an online business? It will be my first attempt, so I want to make sure I do the proper research and investigate
before putting things in right direction.

• WEBSITE - You are a web developer, so I assume you can easily take care of the technical aspect of building the website, setting up the e-commerce and doing organic SEO.
• PRODUCTS - You have easy access to your products, at a low cost
• INVENTORY - You'll need to consider where to keep your products. At your location or you can often outsource this. Have your products stored in some other companies warehouse. They get a notification of a sale and then box it and ship it out for you.
• MARKETING - Probably your biggest hurdle. You need to figure out how to reach your target audience. There are millions of e-commerce sites built on cafepress.com, bigcommerce.com, shopify.com, yahoo stores etc. that sell 0 everyday. You need to get your store in front of the people who will buy your products.
  1. Google organic SEO
  2. Google Adwords
  3. Facebook ads
  4. Organic Twitter / Facebook messages
  5. Get print ads in the places your prospects read magazines, online blogs etc.

Sounds like you can get 80% of the way there no problem. You'll need to do lots of promotion and marketing. Save your money for that!

I created an eCommerce site for a very similar business and what I would suggest is to create the marketing plan first. Like the business I made they got the products (knockoffs of top brands in this case) at excellent pricing.

But because they were not the manufacturer they were still a middle man and the $7.50 profit per item was quickly swallowed by all the Google ads. For 5-7? years they persisted with this hoping to somehow create traction but since they were not a brand what traction was there to make?

(Their marketing was supplemented with college fairs, festivals, etc... almost always sold out!.. did it create enough new customers?...nope...people like prefer buying personal items in person. Even if there's 10 of the same shirt, same color, same size, they're just not exactly the same and people prefer to choose (cause they want certainty).

People found them, and bought from them, because of price, not speed or service... it's hard to create loyalty for a distributor. People say they love k-mark or target or walmart but if a new fresh looking store opened with better prices then they would be the place to be... when it comes to shopping for commodity what's cool is getting it for cheaper, there's no cache to "I bought it at k-mart."... it's not the same as carrying around a Tiffany bag.

Prove it can work. The marketing research.

Before starting your website, consider what type of website you want, how you will market your products, the product price and how you will process orders.
Marketing plans include the four "Ps" of product, place, promotion and price. Set your prices to be competitive with other eCommerce businesses offering the same or similar services. In the beginning you may offer special deals to increase website traffic and sales as a way to kick start your online initiative. Consider your costs for doing business to avoid adversely affecting your business in the long term.

What I would suggest is to create a mobile-friendly website version or a native mobile application. Regarding to the statistics, mobile usage on e-commerce websites doubles to 21% At one fifth of all online shoppers, retailers cannot ignore mobile behaviors and shopping demands.

As per my work making a e-commerce website can be done in no time by taking help or open source tools like prestashop and other. But before starting your company make sure you have initial investment. If you have that you can start your company now. Else start searching for angels. Finding Angels is very tough than making e-commerce website. So, first find investors.

Also without a specific reason angels do not invest on your product. You have to tell them something (feature) which is more better than other top websites that stand alternate to you.