We’ve come a long way from wearing an oversize sign on our chest, bumping into each person on the streets in hopes that they will buy what your selling from the back of your van. Today even though online stores have not even hit puberty,they are less then 10yrs old, Cyber Monday, the day after Black Friday, made $1 billion in sales.
So where does that leave you and your dreams of someday having your own “Crazy Eddies” commercial? In the land of e-commerce which at first seems daunting with merchant accounts, inventory excel files and shipping fees. But your 1st stop should be your URL (the name of the store dot com). As when looking for the name of a street, the harder it is to spell, the harder it is to find. SO KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Next is the actual store where your customer will browser your product, select sizes and purchase it virtually. Eventually you’ll want a custom store that will put wings on your customer and take them to Mars. But in your humble beginnings, I suggest using a free shopping cart like Bigcartel. Here you won’t need to hire a programmer and can upload your own logo, customize colors and add 5 products for free!
This will get you rolling into your next phase, MARKETING your store. Very similar to wearing that oversize sign is the Google Shopping Cart, Ebay and Facebook Marketplace. Add your products to these “Virtual Malls” of over a thousand-something shoppers and have them all lead back to your store … again for free.
And finally, three small details that make a humongous impact – MERCHANT ACCOUNT (how people pay u), TAXES (how you pay uncle sam) and SHIPPING (how much and how long customers will wait to get their purchased item). For merchant account, Paypal is the way to go, they only take 3% of your purchase rather then a merchant account taking a monthly fee, yearly fee, the credit cards taking a percentage etc etc. The only downfall is that your customer will be redirected to the Paypal site when its time to enter the credit card #’s. For taxes, you are gonna have to Google it, taxes differ depending on where u live (USA). And for shipping, you should package your product and go to your nearest post office. They should be able to tell you how long and how much it will be to ship your product to various area in the USA, any intergalactic customer is out of luck.
All in all, what an e-commerce does to your business is: It gives you more time to better perfect your product, you can reach more people in less time and sell while you sleep and dream of that “Crazy Eddie” commercial.