Online Hemp Store — How to Enter the CBD Business

Hemp and CBD business is now one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The demand for hemp-based products is currently higher than the supply. So there are lots of opportunities for new businesses, both online and offline. One of them is opening an online hemp store using a supplier to drop-ship CBD or selling your own products. In this article we outlined some things you need to know prior to opening your cbd business to avoid commonly made mistakes.

Find a niche for your Online Hemp Store.

This is one of the crucial factors of your success. Before even thinking of naming your online hemp store or anything else, think of your target audience: who are they, what exact products would they buy, which problems do you solve for them, what is the location of your audience and all related questions.

After answering these questions, you would have a much clearer understanding of your business and the problems it’s solving for others. It will help you to save money, time and have less competitors in your field.

As for example, you can open a store that sells hemp-based products only for pets or for pain relief, a specific niche would be much better than “selling everything for everyone”.

Figure out the best platform to build a site with.

There’s a lot of platforms you can use for selling hemp products online. But all of them are different and some have crucial disadvantages that might get in your way.

As an example, Shopify is heavily advertised, but at the same time, they don’t have a native payment gateway that supports hemp sales, there are a lot of plugins and extensions you need to pay for additionally and the platform itself is paid, when you stop paying for the platform, you don’t own your website.

So we recommend either doing lots of research by yourself prior to choosing a platform or going with a solution that is specifically developed for online hemp stores and has all the features you’ll need out of the box.

Understand the legal aspects.

Make sure that it’s legal to sell CBD products in your area and that you meet all the requirements your local and federal government has for hemp and cbd stores.

In some cases, your supplier might help you with all the legal issues, share all the policies you need and lab tests as well, but in other cases you’ll need to do this on your own. So we recommend to check all your legal obligations either by yourself or using a lawyer.

Figure out your starting budget.

Understanding your budget will help you to choose the best approach for your business. For example, if you don’t have much money at the start, it might worth choosing a drop-shipping model instead of wholesale.

It will also help to understand which marketing strategy to go with for your online hemp store, because some of the medias require a lot of investments and others just require your time. Hiring a full-time professional for marketing purposes also wouldn’t be cheap, so instead of doing this on a low budget you’ll need to take care of this by yourself.

Consult a professional.

It’s always helpful to contact people who already have a vast amount of experience in this industry and already solved the problems you are about to face. So we recommend to reach out to professionals who would answer your questions and propose you the best approach so sttarting an online hemp store. At Digital Octane, we offer free 30-min consultations, which help clients who are only starting their businesses to choose the best platform, payment processor and answer all commonly asked questions.