How to Start a Web Page to Sell From

E-Commerce means selling from a web site.

The Internet represents a huge marketplace of potential customers for your business. Those websites that sell products directly have the advantage of reaching a much larger audience than locally based stores or businesses. Setting up a website to sell your products can be a simple process or it can be complicated, depending on the number and type of products you offer. Digital products are the easiest to deliver online. Physical products require more complicated systems for accepting payments and managing inventory and delivery.

Instructions

Site Basics

1. Buy a domain name. There are hundreds of domain name registrars to choose from. A few of the more popular include NameCheap.com, GoDaddy.com and DomainName.com. Choose a name that includes keywords your customers are likely to use when searching for your products.

2. Get Web hosting. A few popular Web hosting companies include HostGator.com, BlueHost.com and HostMonster.com. You can usually get hosting for only a few dollars per month, and less if you are willing to prepay for several months or a year.

3. Create your website and sales process. Your sales copy, product offer and pricing will be the most significant factors in the conversion rate of your website. Much of your sales process will be determined by your product offerings. If you have hundreds of products, you will likely use an online catalog model that allows customers to search through your offerings for the products they want and add the products to their shopping carts. If you are selling a single ebook for immediate download, you may have a single sales page with an order button.

Payment Processing

1. Open an account with ClickBank.com if you are selling a small number of digitally delivered products. ClickBank is a popular payment processor for downloadable products. They do not process payments for physical products, so use them only if your customers will be given immediate access to a download link for a purchase. ClickBank charges a one-time set-up fee and then bills a portion of each payment processed.

2. Open an account with PayPal if you are offering a small number of physical or digital products. PayPal is owned by eBay and is a popular choice for online payment processing. Setting up payment processing is a bit more complicated with PayPal than ClickBank, but PayPal offers more payment configurations. It can be integrated with many shopping cart applications and will process payments for the sale of physical products. Their most basic option is free to set up, and charges a percentage of each payment processed.

3. Get a merchant account and payment gateway if you have a large store selling a wide variety of physical products. This option is the most complicated and expensive to implement. You will need to integrate your merchant account with a shopping cart application and a payment gateway. Each of these services can be expensive and will require significant technical expertise to configure.

Fulfillment

1. Create download pages for digital products. Digital products are the easiest to produce and deliver. Therefore, they tend to have much higher profit margins than physical products. Once payment has been processed, simply redirect your customer to your download page so they can get their product.

2. Contract with a fulfillment house or a drop-shipper to warehouse and ship your physical products. Physical products also require some form of inventory control that is usually integrated into a shopping cart application. This adds another layer of complexity to the configuration process.

3. Integrate ad tracking into your marketing. Accurately tracking which advertising efforts produce sales is necessary to effectively manage your business.

References

• AllBusiness.com: Set Up Your E-Commerce Site to Sell