How do you start an on-line store?

The question was posed, how do I start an online store? So I decided to respond, and I did with a short summary of how to start an online store. Well here is the redraft since there was a decent amount of interest.

When cogitating (“thinking”) about e-commerce you need to step back and ask yourself a few questions. These questions are:

1.       What type of product or service will I be providing to the consumer?

2.       What type of consumer am I targeting?

3.       Do I have the finances to stand behind the store during its first few months?

Once those questions are answered, a few things will be determined. If you are selling tangible (“Items you can touch”) or intangible (“digital goods”), this matters because the type of goods you are selling will determine the kind of back office software you need to drive your web store. Now you need to address what type of consumer you want to target, let’s say for example you are selling punk rock CDs, you will want to target the younger generation and have a trendy storefront or if you want to target expectant mothers you would have a “cute” storefront. Knowing what consumers you want help in the design and layout of your store but it also gives you a significant amount of targeted advertising chances, for example again, if you are selling punk rock CD’s you may want to advertise on Second life, AMP, or even a mainstream website.

Now that we know what product we will be providing to our targeted consumer group, we need to know if we have the money to sustain the losing months.  Don’t expect your store to be profitable out of the gate, to be listed and gain position on the search engines can take three months. So prepare to have the money to sustain those months, you can gauge how much you will need by adding your hosting cost, shopping platform cost (“Lots of free ones, I will suggest a few”), and your advertising budget.

Alright you have the gist of it now let’s talk about the meat and potatoes (“tofu and tomatoes, for you veggies”). When you shop online you use what is called a “shopping cart” that is the e-commerce backend software of the website. As noted there are several awesome and free alternatives to commercial carts. For tangible goods I recommend looking into and in this order: osCommerce, ZenCart and AgoraCart.  For intangible goods I recommend taking a look at EzyPal it is not free but it is not expensive either.

Once you have selected a cart that fits your needs, you are going to need hosting for the cart. I will warn you that webhost are a dime a dozen and a lot of them are fly by night take your money and disappear operations. So I recommend you use companies that are tried and true such as, GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost or Globat. Once you have selected the most feasible hosting plan for your cart you will also need a domain name for domain name registration I recommend GoDaddy.

Make sure the host you choose is running Linux with the latest version of PHP which is currently PHP5 as the carts mentioned require this.

Alright now that you have a domain, host and shopping cart it is time to get your store off the ground and on to the web itself. I will not go into much detail here and if you need help just join the fan club and send me a message I will be glad to help. The carts I mentioned are well documented and fairly easy to install.

Now that the store is on the web you will need to do a number of things to configure it the primary thing is to choose a payment processor, I recommend PayPal, 2CheckOut or if you have deep pockets Authorize.Net. Once your payment processor is selected you need to select how you’re going to ship your products, UPS, USPS, DHL or FedEx. All of this is explained in your shopping cart software documentation.

Now as your adding products to your store try not to be a large retail store right off the bat. Stick with a certain niche of products and run with it. If you go to large to fast you will burn out and the store won’t survive a month.

Alright so now you have your products. Now you need customers or at least potential customers to visit your shop and the best way to gain customers is through what is called organic traffic, this is traffic that comes from search engines and other referrers that does not cost you a penny. Other means of traffic include advertising be tight with your advertising budget I would not recommend paying more than 5 cents a click, and that is feasible if you have a good niche. Let’s say you have a screaming deal on laptops at that point I would post your product and the link to that product on social sites and craigslist this will increase your organic traffic and free traffic is good traffic.

The next thing you will need to do is make your store search engine friendly through the process of search engine optimization, for this I recommend EngineSeeker but feel free to dabble with other providers or ask an independent for help such as myself. Once your site starts gaining rank on its niche keywords than you will start see more and more organic traffic so you can cut back on the advertising.

I hope you have found this article useful, be sure to sign up for a hubpage membership and join my fan club as I will be posting free guides for how to generate revenue from home consistently. Between the Forex and my online strategies I am clearing $172,000.00 a year after taxes.

If you need further help or advice join the fan club and leave me some mail, I try to respond to all questions within 24 hours.