How to Sell Products Online

You need to know how to sell products online if selling on the Internet is how you want to make money online. In order to sell physical goods online you will need your own online store. Here are three options to achieve that:  

• Building your own store from scratch. 
• Get a free online store ready to load with goods to sell  
• Buy a complete online store loaded with thousands of items ready to sell 

1) Building Your Own Store 

To build your own online store you must start with a website. If you don't have one yet, see Building a Website to learn how you can get one. 

Then you need a shopping cart where you list and promote the products you are going to sell, and where the customers can make their purchase and do the payment online. To be able to take payment online you also need a merchant account and an online payment system. 

Note: If you have only a few items to sell, you can use PayPal as payment system on an ordinary website, which is very simple and easy to set up. Learn about PayPal here. 

However, if you have a higher number of items to sell, you would consider to use a shopping cart for your web store. In addition to the shopping cart itself you then will need a merchant account and payment gateway to allow your customers to make payment with their credit card.  

This is a rather complicated matter, but fortunately there are companies that provide solutions to this technical side of the business. 

Shopping Cart 

A widely used and very good and popular free shopping cart is osCommerce, which can be downloaded from their website free of cost. 

There are lots of other (paid) shopping carts - see a list of shopping carts (provided by PayPal). 

Payment System 

Then you will need a system to take payment. FreeAuthNet.com offers an affordable integrated merchant account & payment gateway solution. This will allow you to set up a credit card payment system on your web store. 

CoffeeCup.com has also come up with a very nice and easy shopping cart creator that you'll find here: CoffeeCup Shoppingcart. They have integrated PayPal as payment solution, which makes it very simple to set up, and easy to learn how to sell products online. 

1ShoppingCart  is another all-in one-solution that takes care of both the shopping cart and the merchant account and the payment gateway. In addition, this company provides you with a website, marketing tools, training and more. Then of course they also charge more for their services. 

2) Get a Free Online Store 

It is really possible to get a complete online store with all functionalities, a payment system included, ready for you to load with your own stuff and start selling immediately - even for free! If you choose this option, you avoid all the work and hassle when doing everything yourself. 

The free store is financed by ads however, so with this option your web store will be cluttered with somebody else's ads (see such a free store). Unfortunately the no-ads version costs $29 - $45 per month (two versions with different features). The company providing this ready made store is named 1FreeCart.
 

3) Ready Made Store Loaded With Thousands of Items 

A completely turnkey payment-enabled online store - loaded with thousands of items - may be the answer to your question on how to sell products online. There are several companies offering such stores; the one we recommend is DropshipBusiness.com.

Beside selling from your own website (provided by them), they also have features making it easy to sell on auction sites like eBay and Amazon. Different plans at different pricing ranging from $49.99 to $199.99 are available.  

With an online store from DropshipBusiness you will employ the Dropshipping concept, which allows you to sell products with no prior buying and storing them. DropshipDesign stock them for you and will ship the products you sell to the addresses you specify.

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Selling on eBay and other auction sites can be a way of making money online if you don't own a website or an online store. You just list whatever you have to sell (physical goods only) on their site and eBay puts the money into your account (charging a little fee) when someone buys your stuff. You'll have to sign up for an account with them first - it's free and easy.  

These methods are the answer to 'how to sell products online' - concerning physical goods; when it comes to digital downloadable stuff, please see
Sell Digital Products Online. 

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