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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Online Selling Start-up Guidelines

Thinking about starting an online business? With the rise in e-commerce today, it is but natural for individuals and organizations to go with the flow and start selling online. Some people have always wanted to but never got around to setting up their businesses because of factors such as a lack of e-commerce knowledge while some just got too scared to make the move.

While there are risks involved in starting an online business, it is comparatively lower than that of a “physical” store. With an online business, you will not have to worry about putting up a structure- an office, a store, etc. Inventory can be kept at home. Another thing is, with an online store you will not need hire someone to handle customer service stuff. You can do this all by yourself, unless the business has expanded already. Additionally, with an online business, you will make your products and services available 24/7, all year round. You also get the benefit of work flexibility, meaning you can work from home, from your hotel room, from the bathroom even! The list of advantages is really long but these are the major ones.

To get started, here are the simple things you need to understand.

• Know your niche. It is important to be sure of what products you will be selling and which market to tap. Although the internet is a hub of different kinds of buyers, you may want to make your target clear.

• Get a domain name. When you choose a domain name, make sure it is understandable, short and simple. Make sure it highlights the can of business you are selling and do not make it sound ambiguous.

• Get a website. Make sure the layout looks professional. Your website is a representative of your business so if it looks bad, it will affect customers’ impression and will likely push them away.

• Sign up for a merchant account and payment processor. You want to offer payment flexibility to your customers so you should get a merchant account. It would be such a waste to have many customers driven away because your store does not allow card payments.

• Establish social networking. Go out and tell the world of your business. Talk to people. Join social networks and establish connections. You have to let people know who you are. While having a website will allow people to know you, there is still a big market potential somewhere else. Make sure you do what you can to market your product.

Selling online is really a great way to earn money- with low overhead cost and quick returns on investment. Since more and more people are choosing to buy over the internet instead of having to go the mall or department store, you can be sure that you will reap some profits for your business if you do things right. As long as you follow the simple guidelines and really work hard to improve your business, then nothing could go wrong. Good luck!

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How to Source the Right Product

If you hear nothing else that is written here, please here one thing. Finding the right product to sell online is the single most important part of starting a business online. A bad product from a good product can be there difference of millions of dollars in your bank account. Below, I have listed some of the most important factors in finding the right product.

The product must be somewhat difficult to find

It is absolutely imperative that you find a good balance here. When people first ask me the question, “Why isn’t my product selling?” I ask all of them the same question. “Are you selling toilet paper?” Most of them come back with a puzzled look on their face or simply answer the question and say “No, I’m selling rubber bands.”

Do you see the problem here? Anyone can probably drive within 5 miles of their home and find toilet paper for near nothing in price. Unless it is like ultra-sensitive with designs on it, toilet paper will not sell online. No one cares to buy it and then pay for the shipping costs, or have the patience to wait for the duration of having it shipped. Rubber bands are in the same category at toilet paper.

You must find a product that people can not go directly down the street and buy. This defeats the purpose of buying products online and you will find it very difficult to compete with local markets on a wide variety of products.

The product must be in demand

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the requirement for demand. Another question I am frequently asking is, “Does your product solve a problem?” Often times I hear the word, “No”.

You have to find products that people want and need. I do not care how well you market purple ceramic frogs with pink polka dots on them, there is such a small market and demand, you will certainly find it difficult to market. Almost no one would want to put a two foot tall pink and purple ceramic frog in their living room. Nor do people really need that product.

Instead, your product must serve a purpose as well and solve a problem of some kind. Think of your most needed products in the world. We can even go back to toilet paper. People need toilet paper. There was a need for it. Find products along those lines.

Factor in Shipping Costs

The one downside of working online is that everything is shipped. The benefit is that there are no taxes online unless you are buying from someone in the same state. Therefore, the taxes and shipping costs kind of balance out if you are selling the right product.

At the same time, a lot of extremely heavy and large products simply do not sell well online. When you are selling a product such as this, you may have to charge a hundred or more dollars for an item that sometimes only costs forty or fifty dollars. This is a huge problem when trying to sell things online and compete. You should always keep this in mind when thinking of products to sell.

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Start Selling Online with the Shopping Cart

The Shopping Cart Software

You want to shop for a week’s supply at Walmart and as you enter the store, you notice that all the shopping carts are gone. How would you feel? Of course, you’d feel like not shopping at all and switch to other stores where shopping carts are available. The same applies for online shoppers who wanted to make a more organized and one-way shopping, most especially if they’d purchase multiple items. A customer would always want it the easy way out and one way of letting them shop the easy way is through online shopping carts.

Shopping cart softwares have improved a lot as years passed and as e-commerce boomed to overcome a lot of tangible business out in the business world. Having an Online Shopping Cart Software is important and will reap you a lot of benefits both in short term and in the long run. Through a shopping cart, you would be able to cater the best shopping experience to your online customers like they’re in a virtual shopping mall picking up what they want and stashing it inside the cart for the cashier to bill them out.

Free vs Paid Shopping Carts

There are a lot of shopping cart softwares available; most of them are pay-to-use while some few are for free. Free shopping cart softwares may be very tempting to avail of because they are absolutely free of charge. Take note, however, that these free shopping cart softwares may be a good option while starting a business, when the customers are not that overwhelming yet. But try to anticipate when your business made it into the main stream. Surely, the free shopping cart software won’t be able to handle the demands of multiple customers in the long run. As compared with paid shopping carts, free carts are less stable and have less customer support available for technical difficulties.

Multi-Tasking Carts

There are available shopping cart softwares which come in a package making them more versatile than ever. Shopping cart packages allow for the users to perform multiple tasks at once.

Suggestive carts- Aside from the usual shopping cart where all the items to be purchased are stored temporarily, current carts also generate information about the customer’s history of previous purchases and offers them similar products which could catch their interests- this is through the power of cookies which collect previous information of users and dig them up for future use.

Search Tool- Search tool is also integrated in some shopping carts so shoppers won’t need to scour over the list of items. They can also sort these items out so that they can compare the prices, and all other essential information.

Cross Selling- Some carts can also be designed to do cross-selling such that there would be Hot Listed Items on a part of the cart which could raise the interest of a customer.

Computations of Fees- One important feature of a shopping cart is to make the job of the online seller easier so that before it reaches the Internet Merchant Account service, everything is already ironed out and ready for billing. Computation of taxes, shipping costs, discount rates and all other necessary calculations can be done by a shopping cart and this helps a lot in making the transaction smoother and more convenient.

Reporting- A shopping carts task doesn’t just end once the customer leaves the site and billed out by the IMA. The cart should also display reports to the online seller about the hottest items on the list, the overall sale for a certain time, the information about the traffic, the type of customers and all essential information necessary to improve the store.

Customizability of Design

The flexibility of the shopping carts is important so that it could be well adapted and customized according to the design or layout of the online store for which it is designed to work. By this feature, you can easily change the look of your store if it starts out to feel dull and monotonous. You should also see to it that the interface is user-friendly so that those persons with no idea about HTML or web designing can easily tweak the design up. There are also some shopping cart software providers who can customize the carts for you- all you need is to give them a logo of your store or tell them how you want those shopping carts to look like.

Shopping carts are very vital in the functioning of an ecommerce website. It gives heaps of benefits for both the seller and the customer. For this reason, be very careful and strategic in choosing the right shopping cart for your store. Just bear in mind those tips and points which should be looked into and surely, you’ll get the best shopping cart service suited for your business.

Learn how you can increase your Internet business with ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.