You have a brilliant business idea and you want to implement it, but you also have a full-time job and are afraid of taking the full plunge into an uncertain enterprise without first knowing how it will pan out. Thankfully, you can start your e-commerce store as you intend while still keeping your full-time job, and here is how:

Outsource

The beauty of having a full-time job is that you can employ the wages you earn from the main job to fund your online store. If for instance, your time is more precious than the cost of outsourcing a process, then the most prudent to do is to outsource. Instead of shipping every order yourself, you can put the responsibility in another company to do it for you.

You might face bottlenecks with your bookkeeping and accounting if you start an online store as a side hustle. You can outsource such tasks. This will not just save your precious time but also ensure the tasks are done professionally.

If you can hire someone to do it better or even faster, then do it.

Automation

Thanks to the proliferation of fantastic tools and apps on the internet, it is now possible to automate many important aspects of your enterprise, thus, saving plenty of time – and money. Certainly, you’ll be using social media to reach a wide range of customers, and to help you in that regard, there are wonderful tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer that permit you to schedule your Facebook page posts and Tweets ahead of time.

You can also automate email marketing by setting up an autoresponder series of emails which go to the mail box of guests who subscribe to a service or email list. That implies you won’t have to email your newsletter and articles to your email lists manually, but you’ll only schedule a series of emails with great content to go to the mail boxes of your clients.

Work Smart and Efficiently

You can save huge chunks of precious time if you adequately plan and come up with an efficient process of doing some of your everyday stuff. For example, you can significantly reduce the number of minutes you spend checking and replying customer emails each week by conjuring up a frequently asked questions page on your online store so as to answer the questions of many of your clients and, thus, reducing the avalanche of incoming inquiries. After some time, the upfront time investment will obviously yield benefits to you and your online store.

Another trick to make yourself more efficient is to schedule everything. For an ever busy person who is often on a time crunch, scheduling business activities helps to keep you accountable as well as reminding you what you should do every evening and during the free time. Thankfully, there is a number of revolutionary free tools online such as Google Calendar that can help you to that end.

Patience! Patience!

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Therefore, when you are building something magnificent, it will take a considerable amount of time- and you have to work at it with grit and determination. Since you do not have the luxury of time to work on your online store idea the entire day thanks to your main job, you’ll have to work on the business in small chunks, making slow but steady progress.

Therefore, don’t try to build the online store in a single day, rather, break down the construction and design of the site into a few days (or weeks) to ensure you aren’t rushed or under pressure while doing it.

But it all begins with confidence you can do it! Believe you can do it, and you definitely will.