I'm going to assume you already have products to sell, now your just looking for a good program that will help you sell your amazing products.
- Start by browsing for available domain names. A good website to do this is GoDaddy.com
- Hosting or not, some online store platforms require paid hosting but there are some pretty good free open source shopping cart programs built specifically for ecommerce. Paid hosting is priced based on how many products you have. The more products usually the more you pay. Most online shopping carts like SimpleShoppingCart.com have fairly large plans or even unlimited plans. For example a 100 products would run you about $20 per month.
- Template Design, your store should have a unique look. For example if your building your site with BigCommerce you'll have about 100 free templates to choose from. If you're good with graphic design you can modify the already built themes to fit with your industry or hire are design company like MadWire Web Design to create one for you. The cost starts at about $1,000 for a generic template.
- Custom coding. If your products require special attention such as shipping cost calculator you may pay $500 or more for customized options.
- Get PayPal if you don't have it already, Google Checkout is also a great tool that allows customers to pay with almost any credit card. These methods have low processing fees around 2-3% and are very secure methods of payment. Credit card processing is a must with online stores. If you've ever bought something off Amazon, eBay or other online stores the process of checking out was probably very simple. The same should be said about your new online store. Professionalism goes along way. If someone trusts your site, they will buy from you even if it's possible they could buy it somewhere else for cheaper, your site looks like a million bucks.
- Now once you're store is setup and you've worked out all the bugs with shipping, payment processing, and uploaded all of your products. The next step is to promote them using every available outlet. Think about your target market. Facebook is not for everyone. Maybe your customers are more likely to buy from you by browsing search engine results. If that's the cast use Google Adwords to promote your products with pay per click or PPC ads. You set your own budget and Google provides paid leads. A great way to boost traffic and increase sales.
- Also, once you gather customer emails use a website like MailChimp.com to keep in contact and every 2 weeks or 30 days send your customers a thank you email with a discount coupon code or a notification of a new and exciting product that just came out. DemandForce.com is another company that does much of this for you if you can afford their services.
- Finally, you've done everything but the most important thing. Optimize your site with the right keywords. Just like how you found this post I put all the right keywords so you would find this page. You should do the same with your products, categories and company pages. Each page should have a meta title, meta keywords, meta description and alt tags for all the images. Title tags are important as well if you want something to popup when people scroll over an image.
This should get you started! We hope you enjoyed this simple online store cheat sheet let us know what you thought by leaving a comment. Also if you notice any misspellings or typos let me know so I can get them fixed, Thanks and GOOD LUCK!
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