How To Make a Website To Sell Stuff: 6 Steps to Success (2025)

Building your own website gets easier every year, but building an ecommerce store for your online business takes a bit more planning and effort. An ecommerce website should include features like a custom domain name, an intuitive user interface (UI), an appealing website design, a frictionless shopping cart and checkout flow, and search engine optimization.

As a small-business owner, you have many ecommerce website builders to choose from. No matter what ecommerce platform you choose for your website, you’ll follow similar steps to get your online store up and running. Here’s a step-by-step rundown.

How to make a website to sell in 6 steps

1. Determine the purpose and target audience of your website
2. Choose a domain name and web hosting service
3. Design and develop your website
4. Optimize your website for search engines
5. Launch and market your website
6. Monitor and improve your website

Starting a successful online store has much in common with establishing a brick-and-mortar store: You identify a target audience and make efforts to connect with them, invite them to shop, then close the deal with a positive retail experience. Here are six steps to tackle on your way to getting online and selling.

1. Determine the purpose and target audience of your website

Your ecommerce business’s success hinges on your ability to connect with online shoppers who want to buy your products. Before you start selling online, take time to do the following:

1. Determine your target audience. Your target audience consists of the people most likely to buy the physical products, software, or services you offer. Research the common behaviors, pain points, goals, personality traits, and demographic information among your target market, and create a buyer persona to guide future decisions.
2. Analyze your competition. Find out who else is competing for your customers’ online shopping dollars. Run a competitive analysis and an overall market analysis, then use the results to stake out a market niche for yourself.
3. Analyze yourself. Consider what makes your company unique. Consider what only you can offer to any potential customers. You can assess your ecommerce business idea by running a SWOT analysis (which looks at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and determine your unique selling proposition.

2. Choose a domain name and web hosting service

It’s common for small business owners to launch an ecommerce website to sell things using a professional website builder. You’ll likely want to choose a platform with a built-in online store builder, which lets you list and sell products on specific pages of your website. Here are the steps that go into launching your ecommerce site:

1. Choose a custom domain name. Your website’s domain name is your online digital address. The best domain names tend to be short, brandable, and memorable. Once you’ve picked an available domain name, buy and register it.
2. Choose a website builder. Research the best ecommerce website builder for your business’s needs. Whether you go with a Shopify site, a Squarespace site, a WordPress site, or something else, you’ll want a platform with built-in ecommerce software. A Shopify website is a strong choice for people who want to house all their ecommerce operations—from web hosting to inventory to checkout—in one place.
3. Purchase web hosting capabilities. Web hosting is the operation of internet-facing hardware and software that provides web services to end users. Websites live on computer servers, and to host yours you’ll rent server space via monthly or yearly subscriptions. The cost of a web host varies depending on your business’s needs, but it’s safe to assume that you’ll spend somewhere between $5 and $50 in monthly fees.

3. Design and develop your website

Website builders like Shopify, Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace offer content management systems (CMS) that let you design the custom look of your site. Here are some components of website design:

1. Design for your target audience. Good website design for small businesses involves selecting a clear and consistent visual language (including color schemes, icons, fonts, and graphics) with your target audience’s preferences in mind. You can find inspiration from ecommerce site design ideas or use an ecommerce template that comes with your CMS.
2. Build a clean, intuitive user interface. User interface (UI) is the layout, design, and interactivity of a digital product (in this case, ecommerce platforms). Your customers interact with your site’s UI on their computers, tablets, and smartphones. A site-building platform like Shopify offers ecommerce website templates that send customers on a seamless customer journey from browsing to checkout.
3. Create content for your site. Content on an ecommerce site includes product descriptions, images, and perhaps a blog or audio-visual content to help educate consumers about your products or services. You can also give customers the option to review your products. Ecommerce reviews offer social proof to other prospective buyers.

4. Optimize your website for search engines

SEO stands for search engine optimization. You can reach far more customers with an online store built for search engine visibility. When thinking about how to make a website to sell, here are some strategies to improve your SEO rankings:

1. Learn the basics of SEO. Website SEO is a type of digital marketing that aims to make your website appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).