Some may argue there’s no need to create a full website for a reselling business. However, no one can deny a website’s importance to modern marketing.

In fact, the online shopping experience has become a primary metric customers use to grade brands nowadays. Therefore, if your reselling business brand has no digital outlet, you’re already behind without realising it. 

But this blog isn’t about why you should have a reselling website; instead, we’ll be exploring how to create one. Here, we’ll discuss the critical points to consider as you set up a website for your reselling business. 

Basic Design Considerations for a Reselling Website

Imagine walking into a store and everything is out of place. The interior needs proper lighting, empty shelves, and the inventories are all over.

To make matters worse, you can’t find the cashier or the manager.  

The scenario above is common with many ecommerce stores. For example, some websites have terrible product categorisation, their on-page buttons are in inappropriate positions, and customers can’t easily find what they want.

You must get it right from the basics when you set out to create a website for your reselling business. You must have the proper structure, design and layout to make the shopping experience more pleasant for customers. 

Below are some essential steps towards achieving that.

Define the Ecommerce Business Model that Suits Your Business

You’re pivoting from a strictly brick-and-mortar business model to one that includes a digital storefront. That’s great, but things work a little differently with online shops. 

So, to start with, you must identify what works best for you. The easiest way to do that is first answering the first question — is your current business model adaptable for an online storefront? 

If the answer is yes, great! If not, you need a model that’ll work for the digital storefront without negatively affecting your physical store.

To better understand your business model, look at your reselling business needs and the market you serve. Resellers often operate in three primary frameworks.

• Business to Customer (B2C): Here, you primarily deal with final consumers. This is the commonest model for resellers as they mostly take their commodities to local markets.

• Business to Business (B2B): This approach defines wholesalers and distributors. Here, you’re primarily selling the commodities to other resellers.

• Customer to Customer (C2C): It involves a mediator connecting two parties (a buyer and a seller). With this model, you’ll portray yourself as one who resells commodities (even without actually doing it). Then when you get a buyer, you connect them to actual resellers. 

A primary advantage to creating a website for your reselling business is it gives you more flexibility than a walk-in store. You can explore any of the following reselling approaches with an online storefront. Your choice here will determine the optimal website design for your reselling business.

• Dropshipping: Dropshipping is a form of B2C reselling business where you move goods directly from a supplier to the customer. You don’t need inventory or warehousing as you’ll hold no commodity.

• Wholesaling: This is the typical retailing approach. It’s the one you’re probably operating with your physical store. Here, you’ll buy goods in bulk from a retailer and resell them in smaller units to your customers.

• Subscriptions: This model involves regularly delivering commodities such as groceries to loyal customers who prioritise convenience.  

Each reselling business model will require a different website setup to maximise its opportunities. You’re dealing with different classes of customers. Therefore, you must structure the storefront to cater for them.

Select an Ecommerce Platform

Once you’ve established your business model and the perfect website structure for it, you can proceed to select a platform on which to build the website. Typically, there are three main platforms you can create a reselling website on. 

Software as a Service

Developers design SaaS platforms to enable business owners to create and customise easy web solutions for their businesses. A SaaS platform allows you to easily create a website for your reselling business without writing a single line of code. 

Essentially, it’ll let you build an entire website from scratch simply by dragging and dropping elements on a canvas. You can also input text, images and links with simple drag-and-drop functionalities. 

For a reselling business, the easiest option is to create the website on SaaS platforms. That’s why most ecommerce setups use Shopify and Wix. They’re highly convenient, and you can create a whole webpage in under an hour using templates. 

Shopify, in particular, is highly user-friendly and includes a robust, all-inclusive system. It also has options for direct-to-customer selling, multi-channel marketing and drop shipping.

The commonest examples of SaaS platforms for ecommerce businesses are Shopify, Wix and Squarespace.

Open Source

This is more of a web development method than a platform. It primarily involves coding an entire website from scratch. Needless to say, it’s more technical, time-consuming and can be expensive.

But of course, you don’t have to do it yourself; you can save time and effort by employing a developer to help you. The main advantage of this option is its flexibility and no limit to the customisation options.

Headless Commerce

This option is pretty much the same as SaaS. The only difference is it gives you the flexibility to change your hosting platform as you like. That’s because the backend is separate from the front end here. 

However, it has a significant drawback in that it’s challenging to figure out, especially for people without prior experience in web development. An excellent example is BigCommerce.

Pick a Template and Create 

After deciding which ecommerce framework you intend to use, you can proceed to create your reselling website on it. If you have the technical knowledge or creativity to design a unique website, you don’t need a template.

However, if you’re among the majority who don’t, then pick a template that looks closely like what you want to create and work with. 

Remember that different templates will feature varying colours, styles and layouts. Hence, you must carefully go through all your options and choose the one that best represents your brand image. 

You’re creating a virtual store, and you must lay it out, so your customers enjoy spending time on it.

A common strategy involves browsing competitor websites and taking ideas from how they set up their storefronts. Then, you can create a unique adaptation of their website structure for your reselling venture. Of course, you should use a distinct style to add uniqueness to your setup. 

Overall, your website should include the following;

Homepage and Landing Page: 

The homepage represents the reception part of your store. This is where the customers will first land when they randomly venture onto your website. You have to create it to be the most welcoming part of the website for your reselling business. 

The only exception is when they click a link that takes them directly to a different page on your website. 

The landing page can be the same as your homepage, or you can create a special section with enticing visitor offers. 

Categories Page

You can imagine the categories page as the main area of the shop where you have the products on the shelves and arranged into aisles. You must structure it so customers can easily browse through and find what they need. 

Furthermore, since the categories page is essentially the inventory store and items showcase, you must make it enjoyable. Therefore, you should use exceptional product images and consistent descriptions to portray your products.

Additionally, if you offer a broad product range, you can separate them into sections using varying colour themes or imagery. Plus, you should provide a feature allowing users to filter out specific product options by pricing, rating or new arrivals.

Shopping Cart and Checkout Pages

A shopper in a physical store will walk around with a cart to put their selections as they browse through different aisles. You should create a similar feature for your reselling website. It’ll enable shoppers to pick multiple items from different sections and check them out at once.

The Checkout page is where the buyers go to finalise the purchase. But many customers tend to quit and abandon their carts before or when they reach this stage. 

Statistics indicate that 69.99% of customers abandoned their carts, most at checkout points. So, you must include a well-optimised checkout section. It must consist of elements that’ll encourage customers to finalise the purchase.

About Us

You’re probably using your website’s brand name as the domain name. But that’s not enough to tell shoppers about who you’re or the values you provide. 

That’s why you need an About Us page. It’s a dedicated space for all the relevant information about the business for customers to learn more about you.

Contact Information or Customer Support Option

A business that ignores customers’ feedback won’t survive in this age. Now more than ever, customers prioritise their experience on your site and may want to tell you about it. More interestingly, they might get angry and stop doing business with you if they cannot reach you. 

Hence, you must provide an easy avenue for customers to get across to you every time. You can do that by either providing contact information or a dedicated customer service page on your website.

Navigation Menu and Search Bar

A website without a navigation menu is like a house with no designated doorways. Accessing the rooms is difficult when you can’t find the doors. 

When customers visit your website and can’t find a page containing all the necessary links, they’ll take the only door they can see, which leads out. Hence you need a navigation pane that includes links to all the other pages on your website.

Furthermore, you can make things easier for customers with a search bar. That way, they won’t have to browse the length and breadth of your product categories to find what they need. 

A customer is more likely to choose a reselling website that enables easy navigation over yours. Therefore, a search system is a must-have for your reselling business website. Search menus make it easy for customers to find what they need by typing a few words in the bar. 

Legal Information Pages

The UK constitutions and Data Protection Act mandate all web owners to provide Privacy Policy and T & C in clear terms for their visitors. It helps if you create dedicated pages to contain all this essential information. 

That way, customers can quickly go there whenever they need to peruse the policies and terms of your operations as a business. 

Tips to Create a Customer-Centric Website for Reselling Business

Now you know what to include on a website for reselling. However, as we mentioned earlier, those are the must-have features for a reselling business website. 

Let’s explore additional things you can do to make your reselling website a successful investment.

Take a Mobile-First Approach

Developers always encourage a mobile-first approach to web design, especially for people using the open-source option, i.e. coding it from scratch. 

That means you’ll first create the reselling website using dimensions suitable for mobile users and then scale it up for desktop users. 

The reason is a higher percentage of people now use their phones to access the internet. Data from Statista shows that 63% of buyers in the UK shop from their phones. Essentially, users must be able to view your website conveniently from any device. 

You should create a reselling website with the following metrics to achieve that.

• Make text easier to read on smaller screens.
• Make navigational features adjust positions based on the device size and orientation.
• There should always be enough space around links for easy clicking.

Use a Simple Design

You’re creating a website for your reselling business, not to impress visitors with your creativity. So you want to stick with functionality over needless aesthetics. 

You may also agree that minimalist websites often look more appealing than unnecessarily complex ones. So, try to keep things simple.  

Keeping things simple means cutting out unnecessary design elements or features. Your best bet is a Nordic theme with plenty of white space. But of course, you should do that with consideration for your products too. If you sell items with colourful features, you may want to replicate the effect on your website.

More importantly, make the essential buttons, links and images easy to find. Also, remove anything that may be distracting as you prioritise functionality.

Use Quality Imagery

One of the biggest priorities for online shoppers is authenticating a product before purchasing it. The easiest way is by scrutinising images you have on the page. 

The closest interaction viewers will have with your products before purchasing them is through the pictures and descriptions you provide. Therefore, it serves your best interest to upload the best images possible.

• If possible, you should use a video which shows more perspective for the product. More importantly, ensure the images or videos are top-quality. 
• All forms of blurriness or pixelation may make the customers think your products are cheap.
• If you can’t use videos, create albums that include images from several angles of the product. So, customers will have a three-dimensional view of the item they intend to purchase. 
• You can also use lifestyle images featuring other people using the products to make more convincing points.

However, you should refrain from using photoshopped images, as customers may lose interest if they find out photos aren’t original. Quality product photography should get you good enough pictures so you can avoid resorting to augmenting the images.

Optimise for Quick Load Time

53% of shoppers may leave if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load. Most customers don’t like to wait, and since they have other alternatives, they won’t condone delays. 

If your website is lagging, your ecommerce profitability will follow suit. 

Hence, you should create and optimise your reselling website such that it takes as little time as possible to load. The easiest way to do that is by using lightweight elements. 

For example, instead of uploading a 100MB video, put up a 30MB photo album that includes images of different angles of the product. Lighter elements will enable the pages to load faster.

Additionally, your website load time will also affect your Google search rankings. So, prioritise quick-loading pages. You may need to sacrifice some elements for it, but it’s better than customers leaving your pages due to slow loading.

Add Customers and Product Reviews

Customer reviews go a long way in ecommerce businesses. What previous buyers have to say about your product will influence new buyers’ opinions of you. 

An excellent way to encourage new visitors to your site to purchase from you is to display excellent reviews from previous shoppers.

Additionally, many people google search product reviews for items they want to buy. Hence, creating a page where you have reviews for such products is an excellent way to attract shoppers to your site. 

Therefore, it’s a good strategy to write exhaustive reviews of your product and put them on your blog or product review page. 

This way, when shoppers search for such products, your website has a good chance of showing up on the SERPs. Additionally, you can claim ownership of the information before third-party review websites. 

Add Shipping Options

An important consideration when reselling online is you’ll often determine how the item will get to the buyer. Operating an ecommerce storefront means you’ll be in charge of packaging and getting the goods down to the buyers unless they choose otherwise. 

People often ignore this point when discussing what to include on a website for reselling. But as a buyer, you’ll agree that most times, you’ll love to know which shipping company is bringing your products down for you after placing an order. 

Hence, it’ll be wise to mention the shipping options you use on your website. That’ll give shoppers an idea of how their items will get to them and who’s in charge of the package in transit. It also helps if you have multiple options, which allows shoppers to pick how you should ship their goods.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t take much to create a functional website for your reselling business if you know how.  If you want limitless flexibility, your best bet is to code the website from scratch, and you can employ a developer for that.

If you want a quick, easy and less expensive website, use SaaS platforms like Shopify, Wix or Squarespace. If you desire backend flexibility, Bigcommerce is your best bet. 

But regardless of the platform, you choose to create your reselling business website on, ensure to apply the tips we provide above. 

Or join Crept Chief Notify’s redefined reselling platform for hands-on tips on creating your website and all things reselling. Use our system to be the first to know what to buy, and when to sell it to maximise your profits.