Online Store

How to start your own online store using a couple different formats.

You don't have to have inventory. All that you have to do start your online store and then promote it.

You have many options for your own online store. In this tutorial we will show you what we have chosen to do and why we made each choice.

Online Store Option One

Most people who are just starting should set up a free online store just to get the feel of what it takes to start store online. But there is a more important reason to do it. You can make a small fortune with one if you promote it correctly.

The key to success is in promotion. That is what you have to really learn. Getting a store is easy, getting customers to that store is hard. But that is another subject. You can get good help with that at Smart Marketing .

You can see one of our free online stores at Catalog Store . We do quite well with that store. It converts at about 3.5% . For those of you new to the business, it means that for every 100 people who visit it, 3.5 buy something.

And remember, we do not have any inventory. All that we have to do is promote it.

Setting up a store like that is very easy. You do not have to be a computer tech to do this. Just go to Amazon and become an Associate. Then follow their instructions. If you would like a step by step, cookbook recipe, there is one in the Drop Ship Guide.

To Start Your Amazon Drop Shipping Store

Go to Amazon and become and Associate. Follow the instructions.

It is that simple. And it is free.

Now to get customers to your store, get this CD-ROM. Smart Marketing

As simple as it is, you will learn a lot more by following the steps in the Drop Ship Guide.

Online Store Option Two

If you use the Amazon system to sell, you are limited to products that they have in their system. If you want to sell something else, like Polish pottery or something else that you do not see in Amazon, then you will need a store with a shopping cart system.

Here is a link to the main money maker that we set up for one of our members. It is at Unique Gifts Online Store

That is a Yahoo Store. It might not look like it, but it sure is. It is pure Yahoo. It uses Yahoo web services and the Yahoo Small Business Store System and it uses Yahoo to get customers.

And it is cheap. We did not use a web design firm to set it up. Yahoo has an entire system set up for you to use.

We followed a cookbook recipe ourselves on that one. It took us about two weeks to get that one finished, online and into the Google and Yahoo search engines.

You can set that one up for drop shipping also.

What is the potential of a store like that. Look at this video. Yahoo Video

And the cookbook that we used, and we recommend it highly, can be found at Yahoo Store Profits .

Why did we choose Yahoo?

Our member wanted to use a free shopping cart system. The member did and put up a store. It was a disaster!

The system had many bugs.

In the end it required a programmer to get it to work properly.

It is difficult to add and maintain the product descriptions.

The order tracking system had bugs.

The customer ran up bills of over $3,500 in web design and technical fess

For our other Chamber members and the many people coming to us for help, we needed an example of a good store that would sell Polish product. So we volunteered our Chamber's expertise to do it right. We set up a Yahoo store.

With the Yahoo Store, the customer got:

A Free Domain Name
Web Hosting
A complete shopping cart system.
A well developed support system.

The costs: We charged the customer for the Yahoo Store Book. $149.00

A monthly payment of $39.95 for web hosting, email services and all the store services.

We did not charge for the work to set up the store. We wanted something that we could use as an example to show other people so that we could encourage them to sell Polish products.

If we set up that store, you can. We have no training. We are not computer techs. In short, we are hacks. We just followed the instructions in the book and used the Yahoo help service.

So now our Chamber member pays $39.95 per month to maintain the store. That is peanuts compared to the monthly profits.