Vynn wrote:Hi all.. do any of u know how to start a online shop.. Like what should i do? Who should i look for? How much will it cost? etc etc.. Thankz
Hi, setting an online business is easy nowadays, but making it success requires a lot of hard work and time.
1. If you have already thought of what you going to sell, first you have to do is think of a website address. Try to think of a name that is as short as possible and as descriptive as possible.
2. After knowing what website address you going to use, you need choose a reliable hosting company, talking about reliable mean their monthly server uptime, stability and the most important is how good is their support. I can recommend you a few which are resellerzoom.com, piwebhosting.com. Been using these 2 hosting company for a year, Price is affordable and great so far.
3. Web design, hire someone who can design a professional website for you. If you can do it yourself by all means. Or you can buy templates from templatemonster.com. Whether you want a sophisticated database driven website or just a simple displaying website is up to what you going to put up there.
- Do you want to have customer profile store in your database? Transaction history etc.. If yes, you need some programming for your website, I'll recommend PHP, a very fast and easy to use programming. Widely use now for professional websites.
4. Choose a merchant, a payment processor. How do you want your customers to pay for your products? Accept credit cards? A few to recommend...
a. Paypal.com :
Pros: Is free to sign up and use the service, customers can pay by credit cards, check or by paypal itself. Bank wire fee is very low and fast. Support shopping cart.
Cons: Support is under average, many charge backs occurrences.
b. E-gold.com :
Pros: Is free to sign up and use the service. Low rates. Support shopping cart.
Cons: Customers can only pay by e-gold and withdrawal you need to use another e-currency exchange.
c. 2checkout.com :
Pros: stable Company since 1999. Need one time setup fee of $49. Acceptable rates. Support shopping cart.
Cons: Only payout on 1st and 16th of the month.
5. After you have set up everything on your website and really to launch to the world... here comes the challenge.... ADVERTISE.
- How are you going to advertise your website??? There are trillion of websites in the net how people are going to notice you?????????
- How much are you willing to fork out for advertising???? If you are a pro in Search engine optimize, than congrat to you else you need to do extra hard in advertising.
ALWAYS REMEMBER ONE THING, you want to have a successful online business you need to keep advertising... You need to get a lot of unique hits per day for your site... NO UNIQUE HIT PER DAY = NO POTIENTIAL CUSTOMER.
For example out of 100 unique visitors visit your website you get 1 of them to buy your products. So 1000 unique visitors will get you from 1-10 customers and you do the math after that... SO HITS HITS HITS are very important for an online business.
Word of mouth is very powerful for online business too, make sure you have good business ethic and service. You can see results in a very fast time.
Hope it helps and good luck for you online business.