How To Start an Online Business as a Student

The most common way to starting an online business is setting up your own online shop. To be frank, these days it's very easy to set up with just Instagram and a payment account like Paypal. A plethora of Instagram Shopts (aka IG shops) became the mainstream channel for students to buy trendy stuff. Compared to traditional brick and mortar shops, the advantage is you wouldn't need to pay rent for a physical shop and you can accept payment anywhere online. Tools like SHOPLINE, Shopify and Boutir can get you up and running within minutes. These tools handle almost all the technical debt and saves time for you to focus on the business and growth.

For students, starting an online shop might just be the option with the lowest cost and lowest barrier-of-entry. This semester, we provided students with whole, semester-long credits on SHOPLINE and asked them to come up with products to sell. On top of that, we provided them $500 HKD for operation. With all theese resources available, teams came up to ideas like selling hashtagged t-shirts, dried flower bouquets, nostalgic snacks and USB-C cables. If you are intersted in knowing more, check out #entr101shopshowcase.

Getting the shop up and running is easy, but finding the niche product to sell is difficult. Start by thinking about a value proposition that solves a problem you face in everyday life. Then, collect visual graphics to create content for your marketing campaign. It could be a series of posts about the nature of your product or product reviews from existing customers. It could be a special discount offered during holiday times.

Then comes the operations, where you would handle the incoming orders, fulfillment, price adjustments, AB Testing and remarketing. If you want to know more about how these work, message us at ENTR101.

In the next post, we will go deep-dive on one of the student online shops and get a glimpse at their entreprenur story. Stay tuned!