How to Start Selling Online

The thought of selling online is always exciting for most entrepreneurs. How awesome would it be just to have a supplemental income that would pay for a new car, send your family on vacation, or pay some of your bills? Let me first say that this is very well possible and is done by thousands of people across the nation. They did not do it without hard work though. If you want to begin selling online, you should refer to the small three step process below.

Step 1: Determine what you will be selling

This may sound like a silly step, but it is often overlooked and it is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. There are hundreds of people that fail simply because they did not do proper market research. I understand their thinking, I have been there! They thought, “Hey, nearly everyone on the internet has a computer, so they will probably all buy computers or computer related products.” Sure, this is the case, the problem is that a few companies do the vast majority of the selling. There are literally hundreds of other computer component companies that are struggling to get by. In reality, finding a product to sell online is not just about finding a product that will sell online, but a market that is not too overcrowded where you can not compete.

Step 2: You Must Have a Website Developed

Assuming that you are not a web developer yourself, you should have your website professionally developed. Sure, there are a lot of books out there which promise that you can develop a website in under 24 hours worth of reading. Generally though, you have much higher expectations for your own website in how it should work and look. And so will your customers! Your website should be easy to read, manage, and the products should be easily purchased. This is a good recipe for a successful business. The problem is that it does require some upfront funding, but it is money that is spent very wisely if you have high hopes for your new ecommerce business.

Step 3: Marking Your Products or Service

Please, if there is one thing I can tell you and one thing that you will remember from this page, it is that you should expect to have to market your products or service. The unfortunate part about selling products online is that the internet is not always crawling with people who randomly go out and find new websites. Google and the search engines are not just going to assume that your website is a great place to buy the products you are selling. There is an art to bringing traffic to a website, and without that, you will never be gaining traffic that you could convert into sales. The unsuccessful businesses on the internet are not failing just because they have a terrible owner or are neglecting to respond to emails, it is because they do not have anyone visiting their website in most cases. Keep in mind this and do your research on how to market your products and services when you open your doors. Unlike brick and mortar companies, you will likely not have a flood of customers coming to your site without some effort into website marketing.

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How to Sell Online

Step 1: Find what you want to sell

The first thing you want to do is find out what you will be selling. Until you do this, you probably can not do anything else. As well, this may seem like a small step to some, but this is probably the biggest decision you can make when getting into ecommerce business. There are a wide variety of products that will not sell online for various reasons. Perhaps the market is too crowded, perhaps it would be too expensive to ship to online customers so they can get far better pricing at local retailers, or maybe it is not a product that people are going to look for. This is just a few things that could keep a product for selling. You need to be realistic with yourself and determine whether your product that you have in mind is a product that you would consider buying.

Step 2: Become a legal entity
This could really be something you do before step one or simultaneously, but I placed it here because most people will drop the idea of selling online before they ever complete their product research. So to save you money, I would encourage you to take your time with the research and really evaluate whether you want to sell online or not before making the leap to invest in becoming a legal entity. Generally, this can be done by simply retrieving a DBA from your state. If you are unsure of exactly where to go or how to do it, you might use a service such as legalzoom.com to obtain a sales tax ID. This sales tax ID is what allows you to work with real wholesalers for wholesale pricing. If they are not asking for a sales tax ID, then they probably are not truly a wholesaler. This is a good way to sort the bad ones from the good ones.

Step 3: Begin the development of your website

There are numerous ways to go about this, but below I have some smaller individual steps that might help you if you are unsure the route to go.

1. Obtain a domain name (example: something.com)

2. Evaluate other websites you like so you know what direction you want to go

3. Either find shopping cart software that you like, or find a developer to develop what you have in mind.

4. Ensure that your website is easy to manage before you have your website go live.
The presence and clarity of your website is going to be very important. You are a small business, but the great thing about being online is that you certainly do not have to portray yourself as such. Some of the most successful online websites today started out as one or maybe two people and grew, many still are that way. You would not know it because their website looks professional and it is easy to use. I would encourage you to read more about what makes a good website, or rely on a professional to give you advice. A good way to find out what you are looking for is to look at other websites and determine what you do and do not like about them. Make sure the developer(s) are aware of these to ensure you get exactly what you want.

Step 4: Market your website
This is going to be a key on whether you succeed or not. The life of internet websites is not a “build it and they will come” model. When your website is released, no one knows who you are. Even the search engines will be skeptical about sending traffic your way at first. You probably will not be at the top of Google if someone searches for the product you are selling. Marketing is the only way to change this and there are several avenues you can take. You can advertise on other websites that are related to yours. For example, if you are selling telephones for people who are hard of hearing, you might advertise your telephones on a website that deals with a loss of hearing in someway or another.

If you are marketing your website properly, you should be well on your way to several sales online and a successful business. Good luck!

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