Over the past 20 months, I have helped a few business owners transform their brick & mortar businesses in to click & order enterprises. Â You can either use Shopify, Shopmatic or any other paid, template based eCommerce solutions or you can build it from scratch like I did using WordPress + WooCommerce. Â Either way, you will need to grab a decent domain name that represents your business.
STEP 1: Â Getting a Domain Name
I used namecheap.com to secure my web domain name. Â I personally recommend using a dot.com domain vs a dot.sg domain because it is easier to set up (may save you weeks of pain) and provides higher perceived value (more international). Â You can also purchase it via your webhost (see Step 2 for details).
STEP 2: Â Hosting your website
If you are using paid, template based eCommerce solutions like Shopify, you can skip Step 1 & 2, as these steps are integrated when you sign up their subscriptions.
I am using ua.siteground.com as my webhost as they are pretty efficient on customer support and priced reasonably. Â More importantly, they provide good security and free SSL. Â You may also consider buying your domain name as a package with Siteground if you have not done so in Step 1.
STEP 3: Â Installing WordPress on your website
Once Step 1 & 2 is completed, you will need a content management system to house your business content. Â I used WordPress because it is open-source (FREE) and it is one of the easiest to build upon. Â Go to the cPanel of your webhost, you should be able to see the WordPress icon under Autoinstaller (if you are using Siteground).
You will be prompted to create an Admin ID & Password. Â This will be used for your website login in the next step. Â In the same location, you can start creating emails linked to your domain name which will be hosted by Siteground as well.
STEP 4: Â Installing WooCommerce Plugin
Once you have completed Step 3, you should be able to login to your (WordPress-installed) website via the following URL:
http://domain-name.com/wp-admin
Use your Admin ID & Password set up earlier, you can now login to the “back-end” of your website to start building your online store.  Head to Plugins -> Add New and search for WooCommerce.  Click install and activate plugin.  Once done, you will see an additional item on your left column of your WordPress “back-end”.
As you can see, it is a relatively simple process. Â As long as you have the guts to make mistakes, you will find the above steps easy to follow. Â If you are interested to render my service to build an eCommerce website for you, let me know.