My First Online Store Away From eBay
- Details
- Written by Cai Thomas
I started off by going through the plethora of free shopping carts that are available online. I was told by everyone that any real business either develops their own or pays a developer to do it for them. No one in their right minds uses one of these £9.99 a month shopping carts.
I opted for the largest of them all, the open source Oscommerce. Oscommerce is a great free shopping cart if you don't mind installing a few add'ons downloadable free from their website, or you are au fait with some basic html or php. Even if you aren't, you can normally work out what goes where.
To make it appealing it is imperative you get yourself a custom look to the site, I went for one of the reasonable priced templates from TemplateMonster that I then modified and had a logo created for.
The next step was to upload as many products, detailed descriptions, images, PDFs and other product related information as possible. This gives the customer no reason whatsoever no to buy from you except for price. Your price will depending on how much margin you are able to get from your suppliers.
With no marketing budget to speak of I set about getting as much "free" marketing as I could. I submitted the site to 100's of directories, product feeds such as Froogle (which is invaluable - Now called Google Product Search) and I even submitted the best sellers to eBay, with a link leading to my website so customers could buy the accessories.
This specific example got me 4 or 5 sales a week and allowed me to turnover £32,000 in the first year (I won't give away too many figures, but the profit was good but below 30%, meaning I got through university without a student loan for the first 2 years).
I would suggest anyone who is looking to start a shop online to go down this route unless they have a large starting budget and a equally large marketing budget.
My final point is description, put as much description about your products as you can, this is invaluable for SEO, most of my sales were from people directly typing in what they wanted on Google and finding me on the first page at a reasonable price.