Set Up Your Own Online Store

Do you have your own products that you would love to sell online but you don't know how?  What you need is to have your own mall, stocked with your own products and services, that you design, that you set the price and sell to everyone you can online.  Right?  I bet you thought this was hard...and you'd be wrong.  You can Create your own online store in minutes!


This is too Easy
There are a number of online store sites that provide everything you need...including the mechanics of how to accept payment.  All you do is follow the numbers by filling in a "setup" form:  

1. Pick a store look from some great looking templates, modify them, or design your own from scratch.
2. Stock your store with products and services (upload images)
3. Set the pricing and pricing options.
4. Setup your means of accepting payment (PayPal or another Merchant account if you want to accept credit cards).  PayPal alone works just fine, but the more ways to accept payment the better.
5. Save the site, and . . .
6. Sell, sell, sell. 

What the Sites Provide for You

There are many great features that you don't think about, until you wish it was provided.  At minimum, the provider should include features like:

1. Management and Reporting of everything form sales to visitors
2. Invoice to pdf ability with CSV export capability as well.
3. It should provide shipment tracking and email notification
4. Allow recurring customers to register their account and for you to be able to track the top buyers.
5. SEO tools, Google product submissions, email marketing tools and Twitter updates
6. You should be able to offer clients discounts
7. For those that don't feel comfortable designing a website, it should provide professional looking templates for easy drag and drop edits.  For those that are professional designers, they should offer them the ability to customize as needed.
8. Adding or subtracting products should be simple.  You should also be able to offer product options such as size, color and more as well as control over inventory options.
9. You have to be able to offer multiple secure payment options and not have these "optional" merchant accounts suck all the profit out...or make the added cost so high your product becomes too expensive.
10. You also need to be able to make shipping and handling as easy, and as cost effective as you can.

...and the Cost?

I bet you think this costs allot?  Not really.  There are many prices out there and ways of pricing from the different providers.  Some have no setup fees, or up to a couple thousand dollars.  Some have monthly charges from $15 up to $300, or none at all.  Some take a percentage of the sales while others don't have any extra fees.  Which setup is best for you really depends on the pricing of your products as well as the volume you do.  Most of the programs, actually all the ones I looked into, give you the option of either upgrading or downgrading at any time.  So if you estimated high or low, or if your volume or pricing structure changes over time, you can adjust your "Plan" as it best fits you at the time.


Compete with the Big Stores Now
It has never been easier to sell your products and service online...just like the "big stores" do, without paying big money for the privilege. Now you can sell your crafts, or your books & videos, how about your clothes or even your real estate properties.  I have friends that invest in real estate and they love this as a way of cataloging there properties for sale and/or rent.


You now look just like a much bigger business, even if you are running it out of your own home.  


You say you don't have enough products yet to make this work?  
Add products form others on your store, take the orders and get a commission from them, place the orders for delivery when you get them, and have the other product "suppliers" drop ship them for you.  This way, you don't handle the product, but you look like you do.


No more excuses.
Well, you can't say it can't be done anymore.  All the tools you need to sell your products and services online are at your fingertips and the cost is so little it can be easily justified.  What's stopping you now?

Why are we online?

There are really only two reasons for people to go online:

1. To get information in order to make a decision, or...
2. To buy something

When you can go to one site to do both, you usually have a site that has many visitors.  How you get those visitors there is another discussion for another time...or another blog.  Learning how to do this is critical to the life of these sites.

The great part of an actual online shopping mall, already set up, is you can do both at the same time.  The online mall allows you to gain information about what you are looking to buy much like going to a "brick and mortar" mall, but you don't need to deal with:

• Traffic
• Lines
• Parking
• Carrying bags
• Carrying children
• Weather
• Store hours
• Product availability (color. size, etc...)
• ...and more.

I found that once I got over the idea of buying everything (well almost everything) online, I can't imagine doing it any other way.  No traffic. lines, parking, "snow", racing to get to the store before it closes only to find out that my size/color is out of stock",...need I go on?

What to Look For

Some malls charge a membership fee, which is totally unnecessary since you should be shopping at an online mall that is free to join.  In fact, the one I belong to is:

1. free to join
2. has NO minimums or maximums
3. I get cash back on everything I buy
4. I get daily deals
5. I shop at all the same stores I used to walk into
6. I can still use any other coupons like I would if I didn't go through the mall but went directly to these stores .
7. Shop at over 600 stores

After doing this for a month I'll never go back.  Now, if for any reason I wanted to still go to the mall, I can...but I'll still buy online.

Worried about fit and color?  My wife just orders two sizes and returns the one that doesn't fit.  Most stores offer free return shipping, and there are so many stores to choose from she just orders from the store that does offer free return shipping.  Some stores even have models that show you what the clothes look like on...from head to toe.  In fact, I have a business partner whose wife visits one store to see what the shoes look like on the runway model, then orders the same shoe she likes from the store that gives her the best prices.

Something for Everyone

I do all my business shopping through the mall too.  Office supplies, computers and electronics, financial, communication (cell phone deals are the best by far) and much more.

A friend of mine is a music teacher and she orders all her music items from sheet music to instruments and supplies this way...with big discounts.  There is a great site where you can listen to recorded sheet music and download it...cheap.

Hobbies, health and beauty, travel, anything you can think of is there...and did I mention it was free to join?

Affiliate programs. How to make money from team work.

Affiliate programs have been around for quite a while.  When they started, they were kind of clumsy and hard to organize.  Companies would start and stop, which would mean the person putting those links on their sites had allot of potential work involved keeping things up to date.  Now, they are much more streamlined and mainstream.  If you knew what to look for, you would find that unless you typed in the exact url for a company, you were using an affiliate link to reach it...and someone, not you, was making a commission on what amounted to a referral.  I've been using affiliate programs for years, and I can tell you they can be very good income streams and today, they can involve allot less work than they used to.  They are truly a great example of a win/win/win situation.  The buyer gets an easy link to a product or service to buy what they want/need, the website that placed the link gets a commission just for making the link to the product or service available to the buyer, and the store gets a sale from what amounts to free advertising...since they don't pay for placing the link, only after a sale has been made.  Is it any wonder that almost any store you can think of uses affiliate programs to advertise?


How & Why Affiliate Marketing works
Affiliate Marketing doesn't have to be "in your face".  In fact, it works much better if it isn't.  Just write a blog or web page, and insert the link in the form of text or ad on that same page on the product or service you discussed on that page.  Just that simple.  The reader enjoys the post, wants to follow through with more info (you can get links to book stores), or is ready to buy that product.  You just provided them the means to do so...and will get paid for it.


How do affiliate programs work, and why are they so popular?  Affiliate programs are a combination of companies advertising on a client's site for free, and the client getting paid for everything that a visitor to that site buys from the companies that advertise on the client's site.  The way the companies advertise is by providing coded links that access the company's website that the client puts on their website.  Since the upfront marketing cost to do this for the company is next to nothing (they only pay the directory that manages the links), and the traditional advertising costs don't exist, the companies will pay commissions to the client that brings buyers to the company site by means of these coded links.  The coding is an embedded code in the link that tells the company whose website the lead/sale came from and who to pay the commission.  It costs nothing for the client to put the link on their site.  How cool is this.


It is truly a passive income source
The client doesn't deal with the buyer, or returns, or complaints, or anything other than cashing the check.


Their are many examples of this, and almost any company you can think of has a program set up to do this.  All you need is a site, that doesn't have any illegal activity on it, or anything else that the companies would not want to be associated with, and you can usually put a link on your site for that company.


Commissions vary on the company, some are very low, and some are very high.  One of the best examples of this are the online shopping malls.  They are nothing more than a large directory of affiliate programs all on one site.  IF you own the mall, you get the commissions from every sale made using the links provided on that mall site.  The best example of this is Aisle19.  This is an example of Affiliate links on steroids.  You can join as a member for free, there are no membership fees of any kind.  No maximums or minimums, and they give cash back on all purchases.  If you own the mall you get all the benefits of the membership, but you also get a commission on everything that you and others buy from your mall.  To own your own mall, there is a very small monthly charge, that you should be able to easily offset by the savings and commissions you get each month.  Think about the income potential...especially during seasonal buying periods.


How and where to use them
You can use these links on your website, or in email, or in eBooks or articles.  The possibilities are endless.  A great place to use them is on your blog.  Post a new article, and have a link to a product or service that you get a commission from right on the same page...and all of this cost you nothing to provide.  You'll need to learn how to use Social Media, like FaceBook, blogs, LinkedIn, eZines, writing articles and more to attract readers to your sites/blogs, but it doesn't get any easier than that.