Start selling online by setting up a shopping cart on your website or externally.
Depending on the business model you choose, you might want to consider adding a shopping cart to your website. The process of adding a shopping cart to your website can be very easy or very hard depending on the level of integration that you require and what kinds of products you are going to sell.
First you must determine:
1. Will you host the store externally on a third party website, or internally on your own server or hosted server.
There are several companies that let you create a store on their websites that you can link to. When someone buys a product you earn a commission.
Other stores and shopping carts online will let you store your downloads on their site for a fee. If you don't have your own domain then this could be a good short term option for getting started. It would also be good for people who are not interested in maintaining a server and shopping cart installations.
You could also have your own website and install commercial shopping cart and store software. This would give you the advantage of having technical support in most cases, but costs could get quite high once you include web hosting.
The other option which would be best for the long term with your own products, would be to have your own website and install free shopping cart and store software. This would be best because A. you'd be able to customize the look of the site B. Your only monthly fees would be hosting costs. As you sell more products, your cost/product will be cheaper.
2. Will you be selling your own products, affiliate products, or both?
Some shopping and store systems will be designed as a full store and others have the option of being used in 'catalog' mode. Typically affiliate product sales are completed on the manufacturer's site, so there is no need to actually go beyond having a 'clickable catalog' which sends the customer to the merchant site to complete the purchase. If you are selling your own products, you'll need to have a complete system for shipping, taxes, etc.
3. Will you be selling digital downloads, tangible goods, or a combination of the two?
Not all shopping cart and store software is designed to allow digital products. Most seem to have been designed for tangible, physical goods. Digital stores don't need to have 'items in stock' or shipping information. Recently there has been more interest in digital product stores however they seem to be only beta versions and have very limited cataloging functions. Most online stores that include a digital download option limit you to only one download per product listing or have multiple downloads with all of them available to the purchaser. I hope that we will see more flexible programs in the future.
4. Are you willing to pay for this service or software, or does your lack of budget require a free version?
You can pay between hundreds of dollars and a few dollars to set up your e-store. If you already have web hosting set up then you could use free shopping cart and store software then set it up yourself. If you do it yourself, expect to spend many hours. Try to avoid editing the basic code since you'll lose your changes when you upgrade to the next version. If possible, choose premade templates with your own logo then change the template colors to match or go well with your logo. Experiment with the system for at least a few days to make sure everything works properly before linking it to your main site. Make sample purchases and try different options.
5. Do you require 100% integration into a CMS, Content Management System, or are links or IFRAME pages adequate?
There are modules for integrating certain shopping cart and store programs into a website so that it will share the look and feel and registered users. This makes the whole process simpler. Even if you cannot integrate your shopping cart, you can at least try to use the same page layout and colors across your website.
6. Will you require technical support, or are you willing to do a little coding and forum/tutorial research?
If you need hand-holding support then go with commercial software. You have to spend much more, but in the end you'll have your store set up and ready instead of wasting days or weeks trying to figure out how to install and configure it all.
An alternative is to find someone who is already familiar with setting up stores and shopping cart software and negotiating payment for him or her to do the installation and configuration of a free program for you.
7. Do you require more than one download per product listing (for digital products)?
I have so far tried Wp-ecommerce (for Wordpress), VirtueMart 1.1beta (for Joomla), and Zen Cart. The only one that has allowed me to set downloads linked to attributes was Zen Cart. Wp-ecommerce only allows one download per product listing. I even offered to pay for the modification, but the owner is not interested. VirtueMart 1.1 allows multiple downloads however you can't let the visitor select a file. Instead the buyer has access to all of the downloads listed for that product, so if you were hoping to sell digital photographs at different resolutions and prices, these two applications won't work unless you want each size for each product show up as separate products which looks very bad and will cause you extra work because if you decide to add another version you have to add more products! I bet you could waste many hours doing that.
After several hours of looking reading and guessing I finally tried Zen Cart. Zen Cart is related to OsCommerce so it is possible that OsCommerce also has this feature. Zen Cart is an independent free shopping cart store that you can install on your own server, but it doesn't have Wordpress or Joomla integration. I was able to set up a shopping cart with one product and multiple download options. It worked. I, as a shopper, was able to specify the product download I wanted and the correct price appeared and the download link worked. It also sent my business e-mail address a message to let me know of the 'sale'.
8. Do you require special payment option modules, or is PayPal good enough?
You'll have to check each program to see which methods of payments may be processed.
In this category of CrucialBusiness, Shopping cart and stores, I/we will be adding information from our and my own experience, books and e-books that you can read to learn more, and information about opensource as well as paid shopping cart and store products and services to get started. You could also read the more general category, sales, which most shopping cart and stores articles will be cross-posted. If you have experience with Shopping cart and store creation for online business, please contact us via the contact form on this site and you can be a guest writer/blogger (including an about the author with a link to your own site).
As you read more about this topic, keep in mind your answers to the questions in this post and good luck!
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