WORDPRESS
How To Build An Ecommerce Store With WordPress And CloudWays Using AI
If you have been holding a start-up or are already in the business for many years, having an e-commerce store opens the door to a large customer base.
Due to different complexities, it was tough to build an e-commerce store before. With the introduction of WordPress and other open-source platforms, things got easier than before.
With the AI evolution, it is now like a piece of a pie to go online and build an e-commerce store.
This article will be all about How to build an Ecommerce store using WordPress and CloudWays with the help of different AI tools.
Excited?
Let’s get into it.
Overview Of Ecommerce And Its Growing Importance
E-commerce is the engine of your online business. Traditional businesses concentrate on the local customers whereas ecommerce caters to global customers.
E-commerce platforms power the back-end of your tech stack, an e-commerce platform contains the necessary tools to help you build and run your online store, such as payment processing, marketing tools, inventory management, and more.
As per the latest report, there are around 26 million e-commerce stores live and the YOY growth rate is around 3.83%
You may choose to host your e-commerce store on any SaaS platform like Shopify or opt for a hosting platform like CloudWays.
Benefits of Using WordPress and Cloudways for E-commerce Stores
WordPress is an open-source platform with many themes and plugins to customize it the way you want. By default, WordPress does not offer an e-commerce module.
It has a plugin called WooCommerce that brings e-commerce functionality to WordPress. Woocommerce has close to 66% e-commerce platform market share as of 2024.
The benefit of using WooCommerce is that you can achieve any functionality using plugins or you can also customize the code to suit your requirements.
Cloucways is one of the pioneers in managed hosting and a perfect companion for your e-commerce business. With its state of the infrastructure, Cloudways is the best web hosting service for any e-commerce store.
The Role Of AI In Modern E-commerce
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of modern eCommerce, revolutionizing the way businesses operate and interact with customers.
AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, including learning, reasoning, and self-correction. In the context of e-commerce, AI is used to analyze data, make personalized recommendations, automate tasks, and enhance customer service.
Its role in modern e-commerce is crucial for businesses looking to stay competitive in the digital marketplace.
Setting Up WordPress On Cloudways
Why Choose Cloudways for Hosting WordPress?
Cloudways offers a plethora of advanced features that are essential for a WordPress website or blog. If you plan to run an e-commerce store, then it becomes essential to choose a web host that is secure, fast, and has an excellent technical support team.
Fortunately, Cloudways excels in all these areas and that is why it is the best choice for hosting an e-commerce store. If you would like to know more about what Cloudways offers, I would suggest you read the Cloudways Review article.
How To Sign Up For Cloudways
First thing first. And the first thing is that you need to buy a hosting plan. For that, you can consider clicking this link which will take you to the Cloudways Autonomous home page.
Click on ” Start Free” to access the signup page
Once you sign up, the next thing to do is to deploy your server. Select Autonomous Apps from the list and click on “Get Started“
Selecting The Right Hosting Plan
Choose a plan based on your requirement and click on ” Get Started “.
Setting Up The Server: Step By Step Guide
Once you choose a plan you will be presented with the application setup window. There you need to add the name of the application, choose the region, and select the type of application.
Once done, click on ” Add Application “. It will take some time to install the application.
Once the application is installed it will show under the application list.
The below window shows the interface that you will be presented with once you click on the application. All the options are properly laid out so that it’s easy for you to find different settings.
Under the “Performance” tab you will notice the options for Edge CDN, and Object Cache Pro. Both are enabled by default and you can not set anything. Everything is managed by the CloudWays team.
By default, CloudWays will create a subdomain for your application. For live sites, you need to add your domain under domain management.
You need to add the domain name here. All the CloudFlare features will be added to the domain automatically once you add the domain.
Once done, you can access your site using the domain name you have just added.
Choosing And Installing An E-commerce Plugin
WordPress by default does not offer any e-commerce functionality. You need to install an e-commerce plugin to activate the feature sets.
Although there are many plugins available in the market, WooCommerce is the best plugin that is developed and supported by the Automattic team which also developed WordPress.
With over 66% e-commerce market share, it is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms too.
Installing and Activating WooCommerce
Installing Woocommerce is like how you install any other plugins. All you need to do is navigate to Plugin-> Add New Plugin-> Search for WooCommerce-> Install
Initial Configuration Setting
As soon as you install Woocommerce, you will be presented with the initial setup wizard that will take you through some of the essential and basic settings.
It will ask for the store location and address and the kind of product you want to sell.
Based on the above selection WooCommerce will present the payment gateway option. Don’t worry, you can change or add different payment gateways later.
It will then ask for the recommended themes and plugins to install. You can either skip this step or install the plugins that you feel is required for your business.
Finally, you will be asked to install Jetpack which you can skip as there are many alternatives to Jetpack available in the market that offer better security and speed.
Designing Your WooCommerce Store
Choosing And Installing A WooCommerce Theme
There are many free and premium WooCommerce themes available in the market. Based on your business needs, you can choose the one that meets your requirements.
Some of the best Woocommerce themes are listed below.
- Storefront
- Rehub
- Astra ( With Pro Add On)
- GeneratePress
- Cadence
Best Practices for User-Friendly Design
Some key elements you need to consider while choosing a user-friendly theme are shown below.
- Responsive design
- Clear and intuitive navigation
- Fast loading time
- Accessibility
- Optimized checkout process
Adding Product To Your Store
How to Create Product Listings
Adding a product to your WooCommerce store is very easy. With the intuitive interface, things get much easier than before.
All you need to do is go to Products -> Add New and follow the new product form as shown below.
Organizing Products with Categories and Tags
You will need to segregate your product into different categories to make it easier for customers to navigate through various products.
You can also add tags to your products and filter the listing based on that.
To add categories, you need to navigate to Products-> Categories-> Add New Category
Optimizing Product Pages for SEO
You can use Rank Math or any other SEO plugin to optimize the product pages for SEO that include product metadata, meta title, meta description, etc. You also need to follow all the best practices for SEO that you usually follow for posts.
Using AI for Product Description Generation
You can use the Rank Math Content AI module to generate AI-powered Product descriptions as shown below. You need to provide the basic inputs to generate the AI-powered product description.
Setting Up Payment Gateways
Overview of Supported Payment Gateways
There are multiple payment gateways supported by WooCommerce. Your financial organization may have its custom code to integrate with WooCoomerce. 90% of the payment gateways available in the market are supported by WooCommerce.
How to Configure Payment Options
To configure payment options, you need to go to WooCommerce-> Settings-> Payments and add the necessary payment gateways.
Ensuring Secure Transaction
Most payment gateways offer robust authentication, enable encryption for all transactions, apply the principles of least privilege to user access, and keep software updated regularly.
Using AI For Fraud Detection
AI-powered fraud detection systems analyze transaction data in real-time to identify suspicious patterns and prevent fraudulent activities. These systems can detect anomalies and flag potentially fraudulent transactions, reducing the risk of financial losses for e-commerce businesses.
Configuring Shipping Options
Setting Up Shipping Zones and Rates
You can create different shipping zones and add different rates for that. To create shipping zones, you need to navigate to WooCommerce-> Shipping-> Add Zone
Integrating Shipping Plugins and APIs
You can also integrate third-party plugins and APIs like Shiprocket to automate the order-managing process.
When you integrate Shiprocket, all your orders will show up in Shiprocket automatically for shipping. This reduces a lot of time in fulfilling the orders.
Managing Orders and Shipments
Managing orders can be done manually in Woocommerce or using a shipping plugin or API to do the same automatically outside WooCommerce. Both have their positives and negatives but automation reduces a lot of order processing time.
AI-Powered Shipping and Inventory Management Solutions
AI for Inventory Optimization
AI algorithms analyze historical sales data, market trends, and other relevant factors to optimize inventory levels. This ensures that e-commerce businesses have the right amount of stock to meet customer demand while minimizing carrying costs.
Demand Forecasting with AI Algorithms
AI-powered demand forecasting models use advanced algorithms to predict future customer demand with a high degree of accuracy. This allows e-commerce businesses to make informed decisions about inventory replenishment and procurement, reducing the risk of stockouts and excess inventory.
Preventing Stockouts and Overstocking with AI
By leveraging AI for inventory management, e-commerce businesses can prevent stockouts and overstocking, improving customer satisfaction and reducing carrying costs. AI helps businesses maintain optimal inventory levels, ensuring that products are available when customers need them.
Enhancing Store Security with Cloudways
Importance of Website Security for Ecommerce
Security should be the utmost priority of any website including a WooCommerce store. You may get a web hosting plan for a dollar but have you ever thought about how they may compromise your website security?
When security is a concern, I highly recommend Cloudflare. Cloudways offers a bunch of advanced security feature that not only offers security to your woocommerce store but also enhances customer trust.
Using Cloudways’ Built-In Security Features
The following features are built into Cloudway’s Offering
- The dedicated firewall at the server level
- SSL Certificate
- Regular security patching
- Two Factor Authentication
- Advanced DDoS protection [ When you use the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN]
- Web Application Firewall [ When you use the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN]
- Safeupdate for WordPress
You need to install the SSL certificate manually. You can also opt for Safeupdate which is an optional offering from Cloudways. The rest of everything is built into the server or offered by Cloudflare.
Optimizing Store Performance
Speed and Performance Optimization Tips
Here are some of the optimization tips for your website.
Use A Good Web Server
Many of us don’t even check the web server before choosing a web hosting plan. That is a big mistake because a web server is the heart of your web hosting.
Apache is the default choice for almost all shared hosting and VPS. However, Apache is a very slow web server and is not recommended if you care for speed.
Instead, we can go for the LightSpeed server, if not at least go for the NGNIX.
Use A Cache Module
The cache module acts as a mediator between web browsers and web servers. Cache modules save static files in their modules so that whenever visitors request any web content, it is directly served by the cache module instead of fetching that from the main web server.
This helps in loading the website much faster than before. Below two cache modules below are very popular.
Both varnish and NGINX cache modules can be installed on Apache and NGINX web servers. For shared hosting, a cache module will be installed by your host. For VPS and Dedicated servers, you need to install the cache module.
Use A Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy is an intermediate proxy server that handles all client requests as if it is the main server.
Whenever a client request happens, the reverse proxy server serves the content without bothering the main server.
The main difference between the forward and reverse proxy is that, in the case of the forward proxy, the proxy needs to be there at the client level. But in the case of reverse proxy, it sits on the server level.
NGINX reverse proxy is very popular and can be installed on Apache and NGINX. So for those who are looking for a reverse proxy module, NGINX reverse proxy is a very good option.
Enable GZIP compression
More than 90% of websites show content in a compressed format. If data is not compressed, it will take more time for a website to load which is annoying for many visitors.
You can enable GZIP compression by using a WordPress plugin but the same can be done by changing some settings at the server level.
To enable GZIP compression without any plugin, You can add the following code in your .htaccess file. Please make sure that you add this code after the existing derivatives.
Also, you need to ensure that the mod_filter is active in your server, otherwise, you will get an HTTP 500 error.
# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
# Remove browser bugs (only needed for ancient browsers)
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent
Optimize Images
If you are using Apache or NGINX, then you can use the Page Speed module to optimize images at the server level. However, you can always optimize images by using WordPress plugins.
Page speed modules compress images and thus improve website loading time. Ideally, it can reduce image size by up to 50% by removing no visible image information and applying high-efficiency compression methods.
It also supports offering new image formats like WEP. If you allow the page speed module to change your HTML and CSS code then it reduces image size more and loads your website faster.
You can read this article to more about how to optimize images in Apache
Use HTTP/ 2 Or HTTP/3 protocol
HTTP/ 2 or HTTP version 2 protocol can load your website much faster than HTTP/1. At present, only about 10 million websites use the HTTP/2 protocol. But these numbers are increasing and if you want to increase your website loading speed then you should use the HTTP/2 protocol.
If you are using shared hosting then you might see a straightforward setting to enable HTTP/2. In VPS or dedicated servers, you have to install the module manually depending on your server type.
You can also enable HTTP/2 in Cloudflare CDN without doing anything at the server level.
If you want to use HTTP/3 or Quic.cloud then you need to use Lite Speed server as they have the support for HTTP/3 protocol.
Use SSL
SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are a must for websites. Google does not entertain any website without an SSL certificate.
SSL helps in blocking non-secure content and thus increases the website speed. Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificate is offered by almost all web hosts.
For VPS and dedicated servers, you need to install the SSL certificate manually.
Minify Codes
There are many server modules available that can minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML codes to optimize websites.
Unnecessary codes are a big burden for speed. Minifying codes help in removing those extra codes and loading your website fast.
Apart from minifying codes at the server level, you can also minify codes using cache plugins like WP Rocket.
Optimize PHP setting
Shared hosting does not allow for PHP setting changes. If you use a VPS or dedicated server then you can apply the below PHP setting to get the best out of your server.
memory_limit = 128M
max_execution_time=300;
max_input_time=-1
upload_max_filesize=25M;
post_max_size=20M;
max_input_vars=10000
suhosin.get.max_vars = 10000;
suhosin.post.max_vars = 10000;
Leveraging Cloudways CDN for Faster Load Times
A CDN ( Content Delivery Network) helps you by offering seamless speed for your website across the globe. CDN uses a bunch of servers in various cities of the world. Those servers copy your website content.
So whenever a visitor visits your website, the content gets delivered from the nearest server. That is why every visitor will get almost the same speed when you are on a CDN.
Cloudflare is one of the best CDNs for WordPress. Cloudways offers a Cloudflare enterprise plan as an optional offering. I highly recommend choosing to enhance the website’s speed and security.
Using Caching Solutions and Performance Monitoring Tools
Cloudways offers the Breeze cache plugin which is a free cache plugin for Cloudways users. Breeze seamlessly integrates with the Varnish cache to enhance your website speed to the next level.
Apart from caching, Breeze also optimizes codes and databases and loads Google Fonts from your web directory to improve the website speed. There are plenty of other features offered by Breeza that may not be the topic of discussion here.
AI For Predictive Website Optimization
Choosing the Right AI Tools for Website Performance Optimization
When selecting AI tools for website performance optimization, businesses should consider factors such as data analysis capabilities, scalability, and integration with existing systems. It’s essential to choose AI tools that align with the specific optimization goals and user experience enhancements.
Integrating AI into Existing Website Optimization Strategies
Integrating AI into existing website optimization strategies involves aligning AI-driven insights with ongoing optimization efforts. This may include A/B testing AI-generated recommendations, implementing dynamic content delivery, and continuously refining user experience based on AI-driven insights.
Overcoming Challenges in Implementing AI for Website Performance Optimization
While the benefits of AI for website performance optimization are substantial, businesses may face challenges such as data privacy concerns, algorithm biases, and technical implementation complexities. Overcoming these challenges requires a thoughtful approach, including transparent data usage policies and ongoing algorithm monitoring.
SEO Strategies for Ecommerce Stores
On-Page SEO: Best Practices for Product Pages
Here are some of the on-page SEO practices that you should follow if you want your e-commerce store to stay tall in the crowd.
- Product Titles
- Product Description
- Meta Description
- ALT Attribute
- Breadcrumbs
- Categories And Tags
- Structured Data
Technical SEO: Ensuring Crawlability and Indexing
You need to ensure that all your products and indexable and search engines can crawl those easily. You need to create a sitemap and submit it to search engines so that search engine crawlers know what to crawl and what not.
You can use Rank Math to create an XML sitemap and submit it to the search engine. You can also customize the sitemap based on your needs.
You can use structure data markup or schema markup which is a way to add machine-readable information to a website that helps search engines understand and process content
AI-Powered SEO Tools and Techniques
In the current landscape, a plethora of AI-powered SEO tools are available to marketers, each offering unique features and functionalities designed to streamline and elevate the optimization process. From cognitive content generation platforms to advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools, the options are diverse and cater to various aspects of SEO.
AI-Driven Marketing Strategies
Setting Up Google Analytics and Search Console
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console is very essential for your site to appear in search results. The below videos show the details procedure.
Here is the video that shows how to set up Google Search Console and submit your website.
Personalized Email Marketing with AI
Artificial intelligence can help you hone your email strategy to craft the perfect message for every customer. You can spend less and convert more, which is a universal dream for all email marketers.
Here are some of the stuff that AI can do in email marketing
Personalized Emails
AI can populate automated emails with recommended items uniquely picked for each customer based on their personal preferences.
Reward Program
AI can monitor items that your customers favorited or added to their cart and alert them via email when items are almost gone, back in stock, or on sale.
Customer Connet
AI can monitor items that your customers favorited or added to their cart and alert them via email when items are almost gone, back in stock, or on sale.
Dynamic Email
AI can determine the best email frequency based on your customer’s level of engagement and automate the cadence of your email campaigns for each recipient.
Social Media Integration and AI-Powered Marketing
AI enables e-commerce businesses to create customized marketing campaigns based on customer preferences and behavior. By analyzing data from various touchpoints, AI can identify the most effective marketing strategies and deliver personalized content to engage customers and drive sales.
Chatbots and AI for Customer Engagement
AI-powered chatbots are being used to handle customer inquiries and provide real-time support. These chatbots can understand natural language, resolve common customer issues, and escalate complex queries to human agents when necessary, improving the overall customer service experience.
Managing Your Store with Cloudways
Using the Cloudways Dashboard for Store Management
Cloudways dashboard provides a plethora of information to manage your e-commerce store. There is a separate dashboard for the server-level settings. Following activities you can perform on the Cloudways application level dashboard.
- Create a staging environment
- Monitor and change different application parameters
- Launch security scanners and bot protection settings
- Manage domains
- Cron job management
- Install SSL certificates
- Backup and restore
- Application setting
- Migrations tools
- CDN and Safeupdate
Monitoring Server Performance and Usage
On the Cloudways dashboard, you can get in-detail performance and usage data for your application.
You need to navigate to Cloudways Application Dashboard-> Monitor->Select the option to see the analytics data.
Automating Backups and Restorations
Cloudways has three backup options. Please note that Cloudways backup is not free. they charge $.50 for each GB of data backup
- Scheduled Server Backup
- On-Demand Server Backup
- Application Backup
Scheduled Server Backup
Cloudways does a server backup automatically with a frequency of one day. However, you are free to change the frequency. The scheduled backup option is available for the whole server.
On-Demand Server Backup
If you want, you can also do the on-demand backup of your server that can be downloaded to your local drive.
For the on-demand backup, you need to turn on the local backup option.
Application Backup
Similar to On-Demand Server Backup, you can also take on-demand application backup and restore it very easily when you need it.
AI for Automated Customer Support
AI-powered chatbots are being used to handle customer inquiries and provide real-time support. These chatbots can understand natural language, resolve common customer issues, and escalate complex queries to human agents when necessary, improving the overall customer service experience.
Scaling Your E-commerce Business
Planning for Traffic Spikes and High-Volume Sales
You never know when your store needs additional resources. That time you can not simply change the host with better resources. Because switching web hosts for e-commerce stores is not an easy job.
That is why we should use Cloudways Autonomous feature that scales the resources based on your needs and goes back to normal when the traffic stabilizes. You only need to pay extra for the additional resources that your website has consumed for that specific period.
Using Cloudways Vertical Scaling Features
Cloudways Autonomous is a great feature for instant scaling. It goes back to normal state when the traffic goes back to normal. How about permanent scaling?
If you feel that your website traffic may increase soon, you should always opt for vertical scaling that increases the resources for your web hosting plan without switching to a new host.
Cloudways offers vertical scaling without any noticeable downtime. You can always change your resources whenever you want.
Conclusion: Building a Successful E-commerce Store with WordPress, Cloudways, and AI
eCommerce is the future of doing business smartly. And your decision should be smart enough to sustain the changes.
Building a WooCoomerce store hosted on Cloudways could be the best decision for your online business as you can always expand or scale your online business without switching your hosting provider.
With the overgrowing impact of AI, it is always preferable to start with the best in the market. Cloudways and WordPress are the best resources to start your eCommerce journey.
WORDPRESS
WP Engine sues WordPress co-creator Mullenweg and Automattic, alleging abuse of power
Web hosting provider WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic, and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. The lawsuit comes after nearly two weeks of tussling between Mullenweg, who is also CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine over trademark infringement and contributions to the open-source WordPress project.
WP Engine accused Automattic and Mullenweg of not keeping their promises to run WordPress open-source projects without any constraints and giving developers the freedom to build, run, modify and redistribute the software.
“Matt Mullenweg’s conduct over the last ten days has exposed significant conflicts of interest and governance issues that, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy that trust. WP Engine has no choice but to pursue these claims to protect its people, agency partners, customers, and the broader WordPress community,” the company said.
The case document, filed in a court in California, also accused Mullenweg of having a “long history of
obfuscating the true facts” about his control of WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org
The story so far
Mullenweg had criticized WP Engine for infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. He called them the “Cancer of WordPress” and also called out WP Engine’s private equity partner, Silver Lake, for not caring about the open-source community.
Later, WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter, asking Mullenweg and Automattic to withdraw these comments. Automattic then sent its own cease-and-desist, accusing WP Engine of infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Notably, Mullenweg banned WP Engine on September 25 from accessing WordPress.org resources, including plug-ins and themes, and preventing WP Engine customers from updating them. Two days later, Mullenweg provided a temporary reprieve and unblocked WP Engine until October 1.
On Wednesday, Automattic published a proposed seven-year term sheet that it had sent to WP Engine on September 20, asking the hosting company to pay 8% of its gross revenues per month as a royalty fee for using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Alternatively, WP Engine was given the option to commit 8% by deploying employees to contribute to WordPress’s core features and functionalities, or a combination of both people hours and money.
WP Engine didn’t accept these terms, which included a probation on forking plugins and extensions from Automattic and WooCommerce.
You can contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal: @ivan.42
WORDPRESS
Automattic demanded web host pay $32M annually for using WordPress trademark
“WPE’s nominative uses of those marks to refer to the open-source software platform and plugin used for its clients’ websites are fair uses under settled trademark law, and they are consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines and the practices of nearly all businesses in this space,” the lawsuit said.
Mullenweg told Ars that “we had numerous meetings with WPE over the past 20 months, including a previous term sheet that was delivered in July. The term sheet was meant to be simple, and if they had agreed to negotiate it we could have, but they refused to even take a call with me, so we called their bluff.” Automattic also published a timeline of meetings and calls between the two companies going back to 2023.
Mullenweg also said, “Automattic had the commercial rights to the WordPress trademark and could sub-license, hence why the payment should go to Automattic for commercial use of the trademark. Also the term sheet covered the WooCommerce trademark, which they also abuse, and is 100 percent owned by Automattic.”
Automattic alleged “widespread unlicensed use”
Exhibit A in the lawsuit includes a letter to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner from a trademark lawyer representing Automattic and a subsidiary, WooCommerce, which makes a plugin for WordPress.
“As you know, our Client owns all intellectual property rights globally in and to the world-famous WOOCOMMERCE and WOO trademarks; and the exclusive commercial rights from the WordPress Foundation to use, enforce, and sublicense the world-famous WORDPRESS trademark, among others, and all other associated intellectual property rights,” the letter said.
The letter alleged that “your blatant and widespread unlicensed use of our Client’s trademarks has infringed our Client’s rights and confused consumers into believing, falsely, that WP Engine is authorized, endorsed, or sponsored by, or otherwise affiliated or associated with, our Client.” It also alleged that “WP Engine’s entire business model is predicated on using our Client’s trademarks… to mislead consumers into believing there is an association between WP Engine and Automattic.”
WORDPRESS
5 Most Profitable Online Businesses You Can Start Today for Free!
In today’s digitalized world, starting a business doesn’t always mean you have to have a good chunk of money and years of experience in the field. Yeah, it’s good if you have them, but even without them, you can start a business and make money. Not just a few hundred dollars; some businesses can even make you a millionaire if you invest your time and available resources into them.
You need to have the right approach and the proper set of skills to make that happen. And you can learn such skills for free on the internet. So, all you need is the willingness to put in the work and effort it needs.
In this post, you’ll see 5 most profitable online business ideas that you can start today for free. You don’t need anyone to help you with these businesses when you’re starting out; you can do it all alone, and you can manage these businesses from the comfort of your home.
Even if you don’t know a single thing about these businesses, you can learn them for free on YouTube, Udemy, and the Interent. There’s more than enough free resources out there about these topics to take you from 0-10 real quick.
So, sit down and grab your popcorns, because this article might be the only thing you need to launch your first online business, today itself!
Please note: This post contains affiliate links to products I use, trust, and recommend. If you choose to purchase a helpful product using these links, I may receive a small commission for referring you – at no extra cost to you. These funds help me keep this blog up and running.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable and easy-to-start businesses out there. In affiliate marketing, you need to promote someone else’s product in order to make money. The person who promotes the product in exchange for some commission is called an affiliate.
When you sign up to be an affiliate of any program, you’ll get a unique link to promote the products called an affiliate link. You need to use your affiliate link to send customers to the seller’s page. That link tracks the amount of sales you generate to determine the money you make.
You don’t need to create, package, or ship the products yourself. The seller who is selling the product will do these all. All you need to do is, refer customers to the seller. And when the customer referred by you through your affiliate link makes a purchase, you get a small percentage of the sale amount as a reward. That’s it. That’s what affiliate marketing is!
Through affiliate marketing, you can promote both physical and digital products.
You don’t always have to sell products to earn affiliate commission. Sometimes, you get commission to make people download something. That can be an app, software, or browser extension. Sometimes, you get commissions to make people sign up for particular websites or services. Sometimes, you get commission to generate leads for businesses and agencies, etc. All these things need to be done through your affiliate link in order for you to make a commission.
How to Get Started?
1. Choose your Niche
You need to choose a niche to start affiliate marketing. You can’t promote everything from workout gear to making money online courses yourself! So, choosing a niche is very important to succeed in affiliate marketing. Some popular niches for affiliate marketing are: health & fitness, finance, home & kitchen, technology, relationships, etc.
2. Find the Product
After choosing a niche, you need to find a product to promote. If you decide to get into the health and fitness niche, then you can promote workout plans, weight loss supplements, keto meal plans, hair loss products, and so much more. So, decide what you want to promote and find a good product for it.
3. Build a Platform
Now, you’ve decided your niche, and your product is ready to promote, so all you need is a platform to promote it. You can promote affiliate products either through a blog or through social media. You can write articles on your blog or grow your social media accounts to share your affiliate links.
Here are some popular affiliate marketing platforms you can join.
The affiliate marketing industry is worth nearly $17 billion. So, you can start your affiliate marketing journey today to get a small chunk of that seventeen billion dollars for yourself!
2. Selling Digital Products
Selling digital products is another great way to make a hefty amount of money online. Digital products are a great way to share your knowledge and creativity with the world while making some money.
Digital products are products that are created and sold online. They don’t exist in the real world, except for printables. Printables are graphics that are created digitally but needs to be printed out in the real world to be used.
From ebooks to online courses and printables to music, there’s a wide variety of products that you can create and sell.
Here are some digital products that you can create and sell easily.
If you’re wondering which digital product sells the best and which one you should sell, consider this analysis done among 96,000 creators by influencers.club. According to the analysis, online courses were the most sold digital products, with 35.7% of the entire digital products sold, followed by ebooks (7.3%) and cookbooks (3.8%).
Here are a few more:
Check out 16 Best Digital Products to Sell in 2024
How to Get Started?
1. Choose Your Niche
The first step to building a profitable digital product business is to choose a niche that you’re interested in and have a demand in the market. You can select a niche based on your expertise, passion or to profit from an untapped market opportunity. Make sure that there are enough people willing to pay for your products so that you can make a good amount of money selling them.
2. Create Your Product
After choosing a niche to get into, you need to create a solid product to sell. In order to get constant sales, your product needs to be highly valuable. Either it needs to solve your customer’s problem or it needs to add significant value to their life. Make sure that your product is up-to-date, functional, and user-friendly.
3. Set up a Platform to Sell
Now that you have decided your niche and your product is ready to sell, all you need is a platform to host and sell your products. You can either sell digital products through your own website or through platforms like Etsy, Gumroad, Teachable, etc.
You can sell ebooks, printables, planners, digital arts, wallpapers, templates, etc. through Etsy and Gumroad. And to sell online courses, you can use platforms like Teachable or Udemy.
You can use graphic design tools like Canva and Adobe Illustrator to create printables, stickers, templates, wallpapers, etc. And you can write your ebook on Google Docs or Notepad and save it as a pdf to sell it.
4. Price Your Products
After your product is ready and you’ve decided a platform to sell, you need to set a price to sell your products.
Pricing is a really crucial part. You can’t price it too high or too low. If you price it too high, very few people are likely to buy it, and if you price it too low, you won’t make enough profit.
So, while pricing your product, evaluate the product yourself and do your market research to analyze your competitors pricing to determine your own product’s pricing.
You can promote your digital products by creating video/image content, writing blog posts, email marketing, paid ads, SEO, and through social media marketing.
Digital products can be a great way to make money online passively without needing much work and attention. So, this might be something you would love to get into! The best part is, there is no limit on how much money you can make. Ana from TheSheApproach has made over $55,000 selling ebooks alone through her small blog.
3. Print on Demand
Print on Demand, or POD, is gaining immense popularity in recent times due to its business model. Print on demand business has less to no startup cost, which makes it easier for anyone to get into it.
In Print on Demand business, you create designs to print on mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, caps, pants, etc. After your design is ready, you find a print-on-demand supplier to print and sell your products.
Unlike other type of businesses, in POD, the products are not produced first and listed for sale later. Instead, the products are promoted first and only produced or printed when a customer places an order.
In POD, your job is to create designs and market your products. Your POD supplier will do everything else, from printing, packaging, and delivering the product. They will even handle the returns if they have to.
How to Get Started?
1. Choose a Niche
First of all, choose a niche you want to start your business in. Choose a niche that has huge demand in the market and something you’re interested in. For example, if you’re interested in sports, you can create designs related to sports, print them, and sell them.
2. Create Your Designs
After you’ve chosen your niche, you need to create designs to print on products. Good designs attract more eyeballs and generate more sales compared to plain, low-quality designs. So, put your maximum effort into creating good designs. Your designs might be the only differentiator between success and failure of your POD business.
3. Choose a Print on Demand Supplier
After your design is ready, you need to find a good and trustworthy POD supplier to print and supply your products. Choose a supplier that uses high-quality materials to create products, has less fees, low shipping time, good customer support, and large area coverage. These things are crucial for your business’s success.
Here are some popular print-on-demand suppliers:
4. Set up Your Store
Now that your product is ready to sell, you need to find a platform to sell it. You can sell your POD products on Etsy, WooCommerce, or eBay, or setup a Shopify store to sell them. Your store must be clean and colorful to convert more visitors into customers.
5. Price Your Products
After your store is setup, you need to price your product. Make sure to check your competitors prices before pricing your own products. You can’t sell your products for significantly more than what your competitor is selling for. If you do so, you won’t get as many sales as you would have with a lower price point.
You can market your Print on Demand products mainly through social media and paid ads. You can start and grow a social media account to promote your POD products for free.
The print-on-demand market is worth more than $7.24B in 2024 and is projected to reach $43.4B by 2030 with a growth rate of staggering 26.8%. So, this might be the chance to dip your toes into the world of ecommerce with print on demand.
4. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is one of the hottest and most popular online business right now. It has made thousands of teenagers and 20-year-olds millionaires, and its craze is not going down anytime soon.
Dropshipping is a business model where you find a product, advertise it, and generate sales, but someone else produces, packages, and ships them for you.
You buy products for less price from retailers or even manufacturers and sell them for a higher price through your own store. For example, if I find a cool watch on Alibaba.com that I can buy for $7 a piece, then I will create my own store to advertise that product and sell it for $20, $30, or even more. That is how you make money with dropshipping.
In dropshipping, you don’t have to worry about producing product, packaging, shipping, or keeping a product inventory because whenever an order comes in, you forward that order and customer’s details to your supplier, and then your supplier will produce, package, and deliver the product to your customer. There are several tools and softwares to automate this entire process. Here you’re basically a middleman reselling the products.
How to Get Started?
1. Find a Product
To start a dropshipping business, first you need to find a product that solves a specific problem of your customers. Sometimes the product can be a fashionable or decorative item like a watch. The product has to have a high potential to sell. In the world of dropshipping, a product that solves a problem and has a high potential to sell is called a winning product.
2. Find a Supplier
After finding a good product to sell, you need to find a supplier who can supply you the same product for a cheaper price. A supplier can be the making or breaking point of your business because your job is to promote the product and bring customers. Everything except that is done by your supplier, so if you find a good supplier, you won’t have or have very few problems in your business, and vice versa.
So, before choosing your supplier, check their product quality, delivery time, packaging style, and customer service. A good supplier must have high-quality products, low delivery time, good packaging quality, and good customer support.
AliExpress is the go-to platform to find suppliers and products at a cheaper price, for dropshipping.
3. Build Your Store
After you’ve found a good product and a reliable supplier, you need to build a store to market your products. You can create your store on platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, GetResponse, and Wix or sell them directly on Amazon or eBay. The design of your store must be clean, simple, and colorful to get more sales.
4. Market Your Store
After your store is setup and ready to sell, you need to advertise it, to bring customers to it. To advertise your store, you can use social media, paid ads, content marketing, SEO, and more.
Most dropshippers advertise their store through either Facebook or TikTok ads and through content marketing by creating viral pieces of content for TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts.
That’s it! That’s how you can start your own dropshipping business and profit from the $250B dropshipping industry.
5. Dropservicing
Now you know what dropshipping is, but have you ever heard about dropservicing? Huh? Dropshipping deals with selling physical products, but dropservicing is all about selling services.
Dropservicing, also known as service arbitrage, is a business model where you sell services to clients. But instead of doing the work yourself, you outsource the work to a third-party service provider, either a freelancer or an agency. In dropservicing, you’re basically a middleman, just like in dropshipping, who acts as a service seller in front of clients to make money without doing any work yourself.
Whatever remains after paying your service provider from the amount your client paid is your profit. For example, if you find a client who is ready to pay you $1000 to edit a video for him. Then you find a freelancer or a video editing agency who can edit the same video for $400, then you can keep the remaining $600 with yourself. The more you charge your client and the less you pay your service provider, the more money you make. Didn’t understand? Read it again, you’ll get it!
How to Get Started?
1. Choose a Niche
To start a dropservicing business, you must be good at some kind of skill or a particular niche. That can be web designing, video editing, graphic designing, content writing, etc. Even though you’re not the one doing the work, you need to have proper knowledge and skill in the field to convince your client that you’re capable enough and a perfect fit for the work.
2. Find Your Service Provider
After you’ve decided your niche, you need a service provider to do the required tasks for you. While choosing a service provider, you need to make sure that they are good at what they do; otherwise, you’ll end up with a low-quality output that may not satisfy your clients and may not fulfill their requirements. You can find service providers on platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, etc., or on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
3. Setup a Platform
After you’ve decided your niche and found the service providers, you need to market your services in order to get clients. To do so, either you can create your own website, create a profile on freelancing platforms, or promote your services through social media.
While setting up a platform, you need to add your portfolio, past works, pricing, client testimonials, and contact information. Don’t worry if you don’t have any of these! You can add your service provider’s portfolio and client testimonials as yours while setting up your platform.
4. Set Your Prices
Before you launch your dropservicing business, you need to set a price for your services. While setting up pricing your services, find out how much your service provider is charging for the service you’re going to sell, and set your prices accordingly. For example, if your service provider charges $400 to edit a video, you can set your video editing price at $600, $700, or more.
You can promote your dropservicing business through content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, cold outreach, paid advertising, and freelance platforms.
Cold outreach is a process where you reach out to or contact someone via email who doesn’t have any connection with your business. The email is meant to aware them about your product or service and provide them with an offer.
Best Platforms to Start Your Business
If you’re thinking of starting a blog to get into affiliate marketing, then I would highly suggest you create your blog on either Wix or WordPress. These two are the best blog builders out there.
And if you’d like to create your own website to promote your digital products, dropshipping/dropservicing business, and print-on-demand products, then I would suggest you use GetResponse’s simple drag-and-drop website builder. It’s very easy to use and completely free to create and manage a website for lifetime. Getresponse also has its own email marketing tool, so, if you want, you can even start email marketing with it for completely free!
Tips to succeed:
1. Stay Consistent: You won’t see results overnight, so you need to be consistent to get results and make money.
2. Learn, Learn, Learn: Whatever business you get into, learn about it as much as you can. Learning will help you gather more knowledge about the topic, which ultimately helps you to get better results and earn more.
3. Be Patient: Many people give up too early because they are really, really impatient. Remember, great things take time, and if it were so easy and fast, then everyone would have done it.
4. Provide Value: If you want to make money, then you need to provide something that is equally valuable to your customers. So, make sure your main motive is to provide value along with making money.
So, these were the 5 most profitable online business ideas that you can start today for free. Let me quickly recap them for you. 1. Affiliate marketing 2. Selling digital products 3. Print on Demand (POD) 4. Dropshipping 5. Dropservicing. Make sure to give them a try if you’re thinking of starting an online business. And tell me in the comments, which one of these businesses would you start if you have to?