Creating Ecommerce Stores

Many small business owners have, or are considering setting up an online store to sell their products and/or services.

This page will try to explain how much it costs to do this, and will suggest a cheaper alternative.

Here are the things that you will need to create a website for your small business.

1) WYSIWYG - This allows you to create a website by just pointing, clicking and typing. It makes it so that you don't have to learn any scripting languages, or other computer geek things (like HTML).

You would probably buy either Dreamweaver which costs $300, or FrontPage, which costs $400.

2) Web Hosting - Next you will need to find someplace to store your website on, so that it is accesible by other people. You will need to find a web host to do this.

Web hosting will probably cost you between $5 and $20 per month.

3) Shopping Cart - The next thing that you will need is a shopping cart service, such as Vcart.com. The shopping cart service will probably cost you around $100 per year. If you use Vcart.com it will cost you $300 per year.

4) Domain Name - Now you need to purchase a domain name. You will need to go to a domain registrar such as Godaddy, and purchase one. These cost on average $10 per year.

5) Promotion - After your site is set up, you need to get it promoted. Assuming that you know very little about website promotion, you will want to hire an SEO consulting firm. You will probably pay at least $1000 for this. Now you will want someone to submit your website to directories. You should spend about $100, doing this, and should repurchase the service about three times a year. Finally you will want to do PPC advertising. In order to do this, and find good keywords to use, you will want to buy a product called WordTracker. This software costs $300 per year.

In order to do all of this, you will have to spend at least $700 per year, and an additional $1000 or so just to get started.

There is however a cheaper AND better alternative. It is called SBI It is essentially all of these things wrapped into one easy to use, convenient service.

If you are interested in creating a website for your small business, I highly recommend that you use SBI.