Create an online store step by step: Online store hosting, set-up tips, optimizing store performance, traffic driving marketing strategies, analyzing stores metrics - Check Back - Frequent Updates -

Ok so what is e-commerce? Buying and selling over the Internet right? Simply put its commerce over the Internet. Exchange of goods and money.

e-commerce is a cheap option for anyone to achieve financial freedom but not with out work. One of the best ways to get into e-commerce is to own your own online store. This a lot of work. What you would need to build an online store is:

1. A product -if you don't have one just goggle what you would want to sell with the word wholesale. You can find lots of wholesale catalogs for any thing that you would like to sell. Before you can order from a wholesale catalog you will need a sellers permit. You can find this information out by going to your city hall or goggle it.

2. A warehouse to store your product in this can be in a spare room or your garage.

2. A decent digital camera. For your product backdrop you can use a blue or green fabric.

3. A e-commerce web site that has a shopping cart. There are lots of ways of creating a shopping cart.

Or you could just outsource every part of your online business and move to the beach. Well if you can't do that yet give it time.

Most online store hosts will set you up with your domain name for free or try to sell it to you. So make sure to check if your host will offer any deals on your domain name.

Domain Buying Tip - When choosing a domain name for your online store always keep in mind the idea of relevance. Meaning your domain name should be related to what it is you are selling online. For example if I am selling organic t-shirts then my domain name might look like this www.SimplyOrganicT-Shirts.com. This will help your store to be listed in the appropriate traffic stream. Then you will receive good consumer traffic rather then random traffic that does not convert into sales.

24/7 Support is a must

Check what kind of support your host provides. Try to get 24/7 full support. This is important because no matter what questions come up. Time is money for your shop. Every minute your shop is not open traffic is being lost meaning lost money.

It's better to go with a experienced hosting company to create an online store this is because they will probable have better support. A good way to tell if the host is experienced is to see if they have a forum for users of their store builder.

Unlimited disk space is another option to check for. If you don't have unlimited disk space and reach your web site disk space limit, which is easy to do, you will pay for extra space. Paying for extra space will be much more expensive then starting of with unlimited disk space.

This is an option that will most likely be affected by which hosting plan you get. So if you are using a cheap plan or trial your disk space will be severally limited.

Don't pay by the bit for data transfer


Unlimited data transfer is a feature that you want for your online store. Because if your store gets a lot of traffic, all these people are transferring data from your stores host to their computers with multiple page request. This will run up a very high hosting bill. So make sure your hosting provider offers unlimited data transfer.

Depending on lots of factors designing your store could be the best part of the whole set up. So make sure you have access to the right tools.

Choosing a hosting provider with good site building tools and templates will make the job simple and fun. Make sure to check the examples that they give to see if the templates are up to date and fresh.

If you go with a more experienced business host they will have better tools and larger selection of templates for you to choose from. This is due to them having more time to work all the bugs out.

Support for third party tools gives you more options

Check and make sure that your business host not only supports third party tools, they should have a large selection for you to choose from.

Unless the hosting provider is brand new they should have some third party scripts for you to customize your online shop. If for some reason they do not offer this support then steer away form them because this can limit your future shop customization options.

This is a must, your business provider must either provide you with the tools to track shoppers or offer third party support on such tools.

Do not even bother building a shop if you cannot track your shoppers or collect other sensitive data on their activities.

The main reason for this is so you can see what is working and what is not working. Then you drop what is not working and focus more on what is making you sales. The only way to really optimize a store is to study its metrics and improve them. The only way to study the metrics is to have a way to track the metrics.

Free marketing opportunities

Thanks to competition between host providers they will offer you a list of goodies that if used right at the right time can help offset some of your beginning cost

Look for free Goggle, Yahoo, and Msn, advertising coupons. That most hosting providers offer as incentives to get you to sign up with them.

Don't use these immediately wait tell your store is completely set up and functioning then advertise with your free coupons which are usually valued at $50 & above

If you are looking to set up a free cart then Zen Cart is a good choice and really its not free you still have to pay for hosting. Zen cart is not a bad cart but it does have its limitations if your are not a web graphics designer.

Its really easy setup if you're hosting plan is with www.godadaddy.com
(Sign up with Linux hosting then open your account panel and on the top right corner you will see a metropolis text link with loads of free scripts that Godaddy.com will install for you because you use their hosting - about $6 a month).

I would only use Zen cart if I had some basic coding skills or knew someone that was a web master.

Use a blue or green cloth sheet as backdrop for product photos. This will give product images a professional feel.

Before you take any pictures look from all angles of your product for the best shot. Three to six unique pictures for each product should add enough views for the shopper.

Use a image editor such as Photoshop or if you have a Mac use this free editor called ImageWell that's pretty easy to use.

If you have concerns about protecting your images use a image editor to place a text watermark on your photos.

Another way to customize your store is to us a favicon. A favicon is the little logo that is show on your browser's tabs and in the address bar. It's easy to put any logo you want up. Turn your logo into a favicon for free at www.tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

Make sure all of your Meta tags keywords are relevant to your site. Like the tabs on folders what the label says is what the folder is. Search engines are not fond of to many keywords in any part of anything. For more information about how goggle interprets Meta tags take a look at www.googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Label all of your product images with keyword Meta tags. This will help give positive weight with the search engines.

Goggle will love you if you use one of their site maps go here www.google.com/webmasters/tools sign up with Goggles Webmaster tools try the site map. There other useful tools to help track your metrics.

Opt-in newsletter is a must. Try to get this going from the beginning. A well-developed targeted email list allows for repeated sales opportunities. I use www.aweber.com it cost monthly and you get what you pay for there. There are lots of different Opt-in tools and services even some that are free ones.

Increase your opt-in letter sign-ups using a statement such as - we respect your privacy - below you submit button. Hot link to the word privacy to a page that reassures the customers that your data collection has no ill intentions. And click there they go over the edge.

Setup rss on your site try www.feedburner.com this a simple way to propagate data feed to customers. It's really easy to set up and you can even customize the look and feel of your feed.

Content filled pages with a minimal of 450-1000 words stands a chance of ranking higher then your competition with no content. Search engines use key word density in part of their algorithm. To find out your stores keyword density a good free tool is www.keyworddensity.com


Want to check the search volume and competition for your keywords? Goggles free keyword tool is great for this www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal


Another choice that would work out perfectly would be to use Site Build. SBI is basically only a content web site builder. The part that is helpful is that it guides each page you write to optimal search engine optimization. This will help you reach higher in the search engine listings. There are no tricks to this. SBI sticks with a basic web page algorithm while using appropriate keyword density and placement of keywords.

Get your store listed in a affiliate catalog such as www.cj.com. Although this is a expensive option it is like turning on your stores afterburners. This is how it works your pay to get listed in the affiliate catalog then make lots banners and text links for your store offering discounts and coupons. The affiliate comes along and promotes your products for commissions. Now imagine a 100 or a 1000 professional Internet marketers pushing your product!

1. Add security logos to ensure security confidence.

2. Remind your customers about easy returns and flexible exchange policies.

3. Be aware of the fold of your page fold try to get all of the important links and buttons above the page fold.

4. Make sure every part of your site loads fast and smooth. Run test runs don't activate a store until it passes a green light test.

If your site is slow and choppy at any part of buying cycle - FIX IT before going live. Meaning if any one of your sites pages load slow or give frequent kick offs -FIX IT before going live. For example if you select a product to buy it and go all the way to payment and the payment page loads slowly then you need to speed this up its a block otherwise you will loose customers. If a site is slow and choppy at any part of buying cycle you will loose customers. This is often referred to as cart abandonment.

For example if you select a product to buy it and go all the way to payment and the payment page loads slowly then you need to speed this up its a block otherwise you will loose customers.

5. Put a e-mail a friend button on your site. This will help in propagating your store.

6. Always cross sell on every page of your store to increase your chances of broad conversion and over all conversion.

7. Make sure your store is easy to navigate. If customers have trouble navigating your site they will leave.

Thanks for stopping by I hope this information has helped you to create an online store. If it did please Rate my Lens!