This method of making online is an option when you currently have a supply of products which you get wholesale from a supplier in your country or you are importing the products in from another coutnry. I have thought about importing items in from China when I used to travel there for work 4 times a year for my last employer 4 years ago, but the economics didn’t quite make good sense to me.
For me it was just too much logistics, and hence I didn’t want to persue it as a business I would want to do. However, if you already have products and want to sell them online what you need to get your products available for sale to the internet public is a shopping cart website. An example of a shopping cart solution is one like the 1and1 eShop Business Shopping Cart. It offers the retail business owner a shopping cart website which has 50mb of space, and a maximum of 50 item catalog, over 30 templates to use for design, e-mail and a whole bunch more for $9.99 USD a month. Another service I looked into was MonsterCommerce.com, but there solution caters to much larger retailer and their prices are much more expensive starting at $49.95 a month, with a $49 set-up fee. But it really all comes down to what you are looking for.
Once, you get your shopping cart website up and running the next thing you would have to do is get customers to your shopping cart site, and make them purchase your products. In order to do this you may have to use search marketing solutions such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing and here is where it can get expensive if not done right.
Search marketing from Google and Yahoo is essentially placing text ads, on the search results page after an internet user has made a search for a particular keyword. So for instance if I went to Yahoo.com and did a search on “motorcycle helmet”, then click on the “Web Search” button what I would see on the top, right side and bottom of the page are text ads. For Google it is very similar. See screen captures below.
As a shopping cart website owner you will pay for those text ads on a keywork per click basis. What this means is for keyword “motorcycle helmet” there may be a big demand for it, so the cost for one click might cost 85 cents. Each time an internet user clicks on one of your text ads on the search result pages it will cost you 85 cents whether they buy something or leave your shopping cart website in 2 seconds without buying anything. So you see that if 1000 web visitors leave your website without buying a product, that could end up costing you $850 in marketing expense. Fortunately, both Google and Yahoo search marketing allow you to set daily budgets so you don’t blow the bank account.
Another part of running a shopping cart website is the payment gateway. A payment gateway is the method or system you will use by which to collect payments for goods or services from your online customers. Many shopping cart solutions can incorporate PayPal, however some require you to have your own credit card merchant account. PayPal is probably by far the best way to send invoices, or collect payment straight from a button on your shopping cart website.
The above has been just a brief overview of E-Commerce with shopping cart websites, and how to bring customers to the website. I hope it has helped.
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