How to Open a Free eCommerce Store
Selling items online usually requires you to open an e-commerce store. An e-commerce store includes a system for uploading products, managing your inventory and giving customers a way to pay for multiple items. Many expensive software and shopping cart programs exist, but you can also find free ways to set up your e-commerce store.
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Sign up for a free Vendio Store. Vendio gives you a non-ad-supported e-commerce platform and hosts it on the Vendio domain, although you can use your existing domain or purchase a new one. You can sell an unlimited number of products. The Vendio platform includes customizable, predesigned website template pages and a shopping-cart editor where you manage your inventory. The secure, encrypted shopping cart system consists of an inventory management section, single checkout page, common shipping options like USPS and FedEx, and payment processor integrations with PayPal, Authorize.net and Google Checkout. Vendio offers search engine optimization plug-ins and automatically exports your product feeds to Google Product Search. When orders are placed, you can use Vendio's contact management system to automate invoicing and email correspondence with customers.
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Open an Etsy shop if you want to sell handmade items, vintage items or crafting supplies. Other than crafting supplies, Etsy does not allow the sale of commercial, mass-produced products. With an Etsy shop, you can customize your shop name, upload a banner or logo for your store and create different sections for each of your product categories, including a featured-items section. For marketing, you can create free coupon codes to offer special discounts or sales and integrate your Facebook account with the "My Etsy" Facebook application. Etsy only integrates its e-commerce stores with PayPal, though you can also accept money orders and personal checks. The products you sell get listed in the wider Etsy marketplace so that buyers can find what you're selling by entering a site-wide search.
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Create and integrate a Google Checkout store gadget with your existing website or with a free Blogger or Google Sites website. To use Google's store gadget, you must first register as a merchant with Google Checkout. After you do so, you can manage your inventory list with a Google Docs spreadsheet. You can upload images and set title, description, price and other characteristics for each product. Google gives you HTML code that you can paste into the HTML portion of your website, which displays your inventory in an e-commerce, shop format. Customers can add individual products to their shopping cart and pay with a credit card via Google Checkout.
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