Home Based Business

In order to sell goods online you 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.

Note: You can sell stuff online without your own store, like selling on auction sites like eBay. This option will be covered below. I recommend you have your own website, though.

Option 1: Building your own store from scratch

To build the store you must start with a web site. If you don't have one yet, click here to see how you can get one.

Then you need a shopping cart where you 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.

However, if you have only a few items to sell there is a very simple way to do it. First you make a description of each item on your site with pictures, prices and as much information as possible so visitors get to know exactly what you are offering. Provide information on shipping and return and refund policies as well.

To take payment you can use PayPal as payment system, it's very easy. First you have to sign up for an account with them (it's free). Then you just paste some "Buy Now" code provided by PayPal onto your sales page along with the information on each item that you sell. It might look like this:

Would you like to buy my old cell phone?  Only $1.99!   

If you now click on the "Buy Now" button you'll come to a PayPal page where you are asked to complete the payment (do not complete the payment, my cell phone is not for sale at that price!).

If the customer has a PayPal account it's very easy and fast to do the payment; if he doesn't have an account, it's fast and easy to get one, if he doesn't have or doesn't want a PayPal account he is given the option to use his credit card.

Using PayPal like described above is by far the easiest way to selling stuff and taking payment with your online store.

However if you have hundreds or thousands of items to sell, you would consider to implement a shopping cart in your 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.

The web hosting services we recommend (see below) provide you with a shopping cart. To get a merchant account & payment gateway all-in-one solution we recommend Authorize.net, a very good and reputable company in this field.

A widely used and very good free shopping cart is osCommerce, which easily can be downloaded from their site.

However, PayPal also has a shopping cart system that you should consider, check it out here.

There is also an all-in-one solution that takes care of both the shopping cart and the merchant account and the payment gateway which I can recommend: 1ShoppingCart. Of course they charge a little more for their services.

Recommended web hosting companies:

StartLogic is a very good and very affordable web hosting service with unlimited storage (disk space) and lots of features. Here you can have as many domains and email accounts as you like.

Ipower is also very good and very affordable with slightly different features and huge disk space (1.500 GB). Also with Ipower you can host unlimited domains and email accounts. Their support is excellent (I'm using their services myself).

VodaHost charges a little more for their service than the two others. They have lots of useful features, and they also have a very good offline site builder called BlueVoda (which you download and install on your computer).
 

Option 2: Get a free online store ready to load with goods

It is indeed possible to get a complete online store with all functionalities, taking payment included, ready for you to load with your own stuff - even for free! If you choose this option, you avoid all the work and hassle in option 1 and can start selling straight away.

The free store is financed by ads, so with this option your store will be cluttered with somebody else's ads (click here to see such a free store). Unfortunately the no ads version cost $29 - $45 per month (two versions with different features). The company providing this ready made store is called 1FreeCart; you can visit them here and sign up if you like.

Option 3: Buy a turnkey online store loaded with thousands of items ready to sell

With this option you can buy a completely ready made, payment-enabled online store - loaded with thousands of items! There are several companies offering such stores, and one of them is Shopster.com. Besides selling from your own website (provided by them), they also have features making it easy to sell on auction sites like eBay and Amazon.

Dropshipping is a very convenient way of selling goods online without having to buy and store the products you sell. Read about it here.

Selling on eBay is a way of doing business online without having your own site or store. You just list whatever you have to sell 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. Just click here to go to their site.