How To Create An Online Store

From the Editor of The Hot Sauce Collector and the founding author of the WikiHow article, How To Start An Online Store.

So, you want to create an online store and start selling and marketing products to customers using the web, but you don't want to get bamboozled by an internet pyramid scheme or a shady affiliate marketing program. How do you get started in a thoughtful way with an online store?

1) Focus on your passions -- choosing a theme for your store that you are passionate about will greatly increase your chances of success. Your passion will provide you with the experience set and knowledge basis to open a store with credibility and a value proposition for your customers. By starting a store around an opportunity that you are passionate about, you are basically reallocating time for productive purposes that you would have already spent pursuing your hobby or interest.

2) Pick a market niche or theme for your story and be disciplined about adhering to this theme. By focusing on a particular product niche, your store will have better product coverage and the opportunity to outcompete larger stores that are forced to be broader in their nature. Your primary competitive advantage will come from an ability to cover a product theme with greater depth, clarity, and passion than the competition.

3) Choose an underlying infrastructure for your web store. One free and easy way to get started is to setup a Zlio Store. Using Zlio, you can get a store up and running relatively quickly with inventory, ordering processing, and shipping/handling being handled by Amazon and Buy.com. Another alternative is to setup a Yahoo Store Front, which will allow you to build your own physical inventory but will also require more work.

4) Build your product inventory by adding great products to your web store. A thoughtful approach to product placement and product categories will help you to convert shoppers to customers. Remember that several studies have shown that products placed near the top of the page tend to be the best sellers. Anything that you can do to add value to the shopping experience will help -- try wrapping content around your site like product reviews.

5) Develop a promotion strategy for your store. Customers can buy from anyone, why should they buy from you? This is not field of dreams! Developing a store and walking away will not be sufficient to put you business in a successful way. In many ways, the life of online store entrepreneur is a struggle to gain relevancy. Submit your site to Google for indexing. Relevant content will increase your chances of turning up in search results.

6) Track and manage your web store. Getting some analytic capabilities in place will allow you to track the number of users and pageviews that your site generates. Wouldn't you like to know how people are finding your site? Sign up for Google analytics, its free.

Feel free to check out the more detailed version of this article at WikiHow for additional information and references.

There is a Netscape news summary of the article here.