Earning cash online seems to be the fastest way to earn some extra money. eCommerce can even become your career if you are willing to follow the steps necessary to run a successful online store.
The first step is to think about what you would like to offer your customers. Will you be carrying a large variety of products? Will your products serve a specific niche? The amount of start-up money you'll need for your eCommerce site depends on this. You'll never manage to make a profit selling items on your eCommerce site if you pay too much for them in the first place.
The next step is to select a domain name for your eCommerce business. You should ensure that the name that you choose is short, so that it will be easy for your customers to remember. This way, the name will be easy to remember and to pass on to other people.
Attracting and retaining valuable, paying customers is crucial and is covered in the next step. Your website needs to be user friendly and professional looking. Potential customers need it to lead them through the buying process , not confuse them. Remember that potential buyers will not trust a website that looks like it was quickly thrown together - this makes professional design vital.
In order to get paid for your products, your web page also needs a shopping cart mechanism. This gives your customers the ability to pay you through PayPal, Authorize.net, 2checkout, etc. Your own needs will set what kinds of payments you want to accept. In order to use authorize.net, 2Checkout or others like them, you need to obtain, probably from your bank, what's called a "merchant account" and will enable you to accept credit cards online. You don't have to set up a merchant account for PayPal, but it will cost a little more for the service. In order to use a service such as Authorize.net, you will need your hosting company to provide a secure server, which includes a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate. 2Checkout maintains a secure server of their own for handling payments.
There are all sorts of shopping cart systems for online stores available, some of them open source and some of them commercial software. The primary benefit of using open source software is that the best of them have a helpful community to support you, and the systems are all tried and tested. The online shopping cart systems of osCommerce and ZenCart are a great starting point. - 20767
The first step is to think about what you would like to offer your customers. Will you be carrying a large variety of products? Will your products serve a specific niche? The amount of start-up money you'll need for your eCommerce site depends on this. You'll never manage to make a profit selling items on your eCommerce site if you pay too much for them in the first place.
The next step is to select a domain name for your eCommerce business. You should ensure that the name that you choose is short, so that it will be easy for your customers to remember. This way, the name will be easy to remember and to pass on to other people.
Attracting and retaining valuable, paying customers is crucial and is covered in the next step. Your website needs to be user friendly and professional looking. Potential customers need it to lead them through the buying process , not confuse them. Remember that potential buyers will not trust a website that looks like it was quickly thrown together - this makes professional design vital.
In order to get paid for your products, your web page also needs a shopping cart mechanism. This gives your customers the ability to pay you through PayPal, Authorize.net, 2checkout, etc. Your own needs will set what kinds of payments you want to accept. In order to use authorize.net, 2Checkout or others like them, you need to obtain, probably from your bank, what's called a "merchant account" and will enable you to accept credit cards online. You don't have to set up a merchant account for PayPal, but it will cost a little more for the service. In order to use a service such as Authorize.net, you will need your hosting company to provide a secure server, which includes a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate. 2Checkout maintains a secure server of their own for handling payments.
There are all sorts of shopping cart systems for online stores available, some of them open source and some of them commercial software. The primary benefit of using open source software is that the best of them have a helpful community to support you, and the systems are all tried and tested. The online shopping cart systems of osCommerce and ZenCart are a great starting point. - 20767
About the Author:
Stephen Grisham, Jr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a Houston Website design and small business Web hosting company. They also provide domain registration, search engine optimization (SEO) and much more. Contact InfoServe Media for all your website hosting and development needs.
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