Hello,

I have been reading some of the blogs out there on ebay blogs.  From my experience of being an ecommerce consultant since 1996 I see that there is a big trend for ebay sellers to start their own online store and take advantage of the client base and traffic that ebay has helped them develop.

I take calls from clients everyday that want to start their own store but have no idea where to begin.  I want to help de-mistify that process a bit. 

There are really 4 major components that are needed when opening an online store. 

The first is the website itself.  Of course to get the website up and running you need to first find a good domain name.  I always try to find a domain name with your biggest volume keyword in it.  For instance I sell shopping carts and my website address is http://www.shoppingcartgurus.com .  You see that my biggest keyword shopping cart is first in my domain name.  Once you have selected the domain name for your site you need to find a good web host.  There are so many web hosts out there that it is hard to recommend just one.  We partner with many web host companies so I will not get specific.  The best thing to do when shopping is read the forums for the web host.  You can get a really good feel from the customers in the forums.

So now you have your domain name and your webhost.  It is now time for you to design your website.  There are many different web development tools and programs out there.  I personally use DreamWeaver and I would say that probably about 80% of my shopping cart clients use Microsoft FrontPage.  Any tool is fine as long as you are comfortable with it.  There are quite a few web builder programs that are supplied by your hosting companies.  These programs are nice and simple to use but I have found that as a store progresses in complexity the client usually runs into limitations with these sorts of programs.

Now the website portion of your plan is taking shape it is time to start working on adding a shopping cart.  A shopping cart is the portion of the website that actually takes the order, calculates the total cost including shipping and sales tax.  There are many types of shopping carts out there.  A few of the most popular programs like oscommerce and zen cart are open source (free).  Over the years I have spoke with many clients that are very happy with how these open source carts work (usually programmers).  I have also spoke with alot of merchants who can't figure out how to make them work or they just don't work for their site design. The shopping cart portion of your website is a very important decision as it will shape many decisions you make in the future for you site.  The shopping cart that we offer can be simply added to any website no matter what web development tool was used to build it or where you host it.  You don't need to know any HTML to use our cart.  Again you can have a look at the cart here:  http://www.shoppingcartgurus.com .

Once the website is complete and it has a shopping cart feature working then you need to determine how to accept payment.  Basically you need a merchant account and a payment gateway system (the last parts to an ecommerce site).  There are many merchant account providers out there.  As most of you know PayPal has entered this arena with the new PayPal Website Payments Pro and also the Verisign products that they offer.  Google is also offering "Google Checkout" for payments.  My advise to clients on this is to give your customers every way to pay possible.  I usually set a client up to accept PayPal Standard Payments, Google Checkout  and then a merchant account and payment gateway system so the the customer can enter the card direct and not use PayPal or Google.  That way you give your customer a variety of different ways to pay and they can choose the one that is most comfortable for them.

This is a really general explanation of setting up an ecommerce site.  I will continue to blog about this and get into some more specific things that can be done and delve into internet marketing in future posts.

Until then.

Korey

Hello,

This first Blog is to introduce you to myself and what I do to help web businesses.  My name is Korey and I am an ecommerce consultant.  I offer services that help people do ecommerce on the internet.  I setup Content Management Systems that are fully ecommerce enabled.

You can take a look at my website here:  http://www.shoppingcartgurus.com 

Korey