First, You Need To Decide What To Sell
If you are sufficient enough to already have a good source where you can get the products you want to sell at a wholesale or below wholesale price, then you have some work cut out for you! Make sure that your cost allows you to mark up at least 20% and still be considered competitive when compared to the price of your competition.
If you are clueless what to sell and where to buy products at wholesale prices or better, then I recommend checking out Alibaba.com which is a website that links up manufacturers from all over the world with distributors / resellers. This assures that you have some money to invest in inventory, as you will probably need to buy a certain amount of goods to stock locally in your area so you can ship them quickly. Most of these suppliers / factories have some kind of a minimum order, so you will want to find out what that is.
Perhaps you do not want to have inventory. Perhaps you do not have the money to purchase inventory. That's okay, because you can always drop ship, which is you choose a supplier who is in the same country as you, and you use them as a fulfillment center. Basically you get the orders, your customer's payment, then you pay your cost to the supplier, and they will ship out the product to your customer on your behalf without disclosing who they are to your customers. The down side is that you will have less profit, because the warehouse has to take a cut for stocking the products, packaging it, and shipping it for you.
Import your own stuff or have local warehouses / factories drop ship for you. The choice is entirely yours.
Have Pictures And Pricing Information Figured Out And Ready For All Products
Next you need to have digital pictures of the products you will be selling. You can either take you own pictures (assuming that you have some product samples), or you can ask the wholesaler or factory for website ready photographs. Make sure you resize them so that they are not too big for websites.
Also, you will want to have the pricing information for each of the products you will sell. It would be a good idea to research each one and use a spreadsheet to keep track of your costs, the retail / msrp prices, and your selling price. Spreadsheets like Excel is great because it allows you to quickly change them across the board if you need to. You will also be able to import this ready to go data into your shopping cart in the future, which can save you a lot of time compared to entering them in the online interface one by one.
Setup Your Store Using One of Two Methods
Now you are ready to setup your actual online store! Basically, there are two ways to go about it. You can either choose to use a ready-to-go system such as YahooStores, eBay Prostores, etc., which are subscription-based services where you pay a monthly fee to use, or you can choose to buy a software, and install it on a website you host somewhere else.
1. The monthly subscription service – These shopping cart services are almost turn key, just sign up, follow the step by step instructions, and you'll have a functional store in a matter of hours. That's the good thing about this type of site. The drawback is that there's a monthly fee to pay, and they usually also take a percentage of your sales as "transactions fees" which is on top of what your credit card company may charge for every transaction. Yahoo Stores is a good example of this type of subscription based all-in-one ecommerce system. Prostores (eBay's version) is also a good solution to get started.
2. The use your own software model – This is for the more experienced people who has at least built some websites before and are familiar with html, domain names, hosting, file transfers, etc. Some softwares are open source (Free) such as OS Commerce and Zen Cart, but I've found them to come with a bit of learning curve just to set up, and they do not look that great out of the box, and then may require some serious template tweaking before they are presentable for my taste. I personally use X-cart which is a reliably inexpensive shopping cart software (starts at around $ 200 for the full version) that is pretty powerful right out of the gate, and has a plethora of plug-ins and after-market codes to help you do just about anything you can think of. You would need to decide what features you want before selecting the right one for your business.The benefit of going this route is that you will not have to have a hefty monthly fee nor share your profit with the provider. The drawback is that there is an upfront cost (if you choose a non-open source software), and also you would have to piece everything together as getting a domain name, a hosting plan, a credit card or payment gateway service, SSL certificate (secure socket layer), and then tie everything together at the end.
Test Thoroughly
Whichever type of shopping cart you choose, you will need to test it well. Be sure to try test transactions out on the tow major browsers (IE and Firefox) and correct any bugs or things that do not look right. Keep tweaking so that you have a fully glitch-free store as well as one that looks professional!
Promote the site
Now that the site is setup to function, you will need to let others know so that people will come check out you site. The old adage "if you build it, they will come" is no longer true on the internet, as there is no such thing as foot traffic. If you create a site, nobody knows about it at first! You will need to study search optimization, pay per click (PPC), and various forms of advertising and promotion and decide what work is worth your time, and what you'd like to outsource. Remember, it's perfectly OK if you can not do something. Even building the site. You can always have someone else do it. Just make sure that you do know enough so no one can rip you off!
