How to Create a Website to Sell Things

As ecommerce continues to grow, making a website to sell things can be a way to earn extra money, replace a full-time job or improve sales at your bricks-and-mortar shop.
With a well-made website, you'll be able to see at a glance what is selling and where your customers are coming from, making it easier for you to stay competitive and expand your online business sustainably over time.

Instructions

Make a Website to Sell Things

1. Purchase and register a domain name for your website. When choosing your domain name, think of the top search terms people will use most often to find the kinds of things you're selling. For example, vintageaprons.com is a more search-engine friendly URL than maryscreations.com, as many more people will likely search based on what they want to buy (vintage aprons) than the name of a cottage industry (Mary's Creations).

2. Buy a web hosting package, preferably one that comes with a site builder or online tutorials. If you will be building the website to sell things yourself with little or no previous experience, a site builder will be essential. You can start with a basic web hosting package and increase your allotted bandwidth as needed.

3. Create a main page for the website, either using a site builder or with a website template in an html editor, such as Dreamweaver. This should be the introduction to your products, a place to showcase new items and the portal to your online catalog.

4. Make the main category pages for your website to sell things, with links to the products in each category. Item pages should include pictures, prices and good descriptions of each item for sale.

5. Integrate your site with an ecommerce shopping cart system, which you can buy separately or often is included as an option with your website hosting package. You'll need to generate the code for "add to cart buttons" with the correct price for each item. Set the options such that buyers can change the quantity when making a purchase.

6. Set up a payment system in conjunction with the shopping cart system. Once buyers click the checkout button, they will be taken to your payment processor. PayPal and Google Checkout are both popular options and can be coded to allow credit card payments as well as echecks and account balance payments.

7. Create some content pages to attract search engine traffic to your site. One of the ways to do this is to add a blog to your website and write daily or weekly posts about topics related to your products. Each title should include popular search terms relevant to the post and will thus draw search engine traffic to your site.

8. Test your website to sell things and the payment system to make sure it works correctly and notifies you of successful sales so that you can send items to the buyers in a timely fashion.

Tips & Warnings

• Link to your website from other blogs, websites, content articles and online social sites to improve your page rank and drive traffic to your online store.

Resources

• HostGator website hosting and site builder
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 HTML editor