I have been interested for awhile in setting up an e-commerce site. Not for the money, but rather because I think itwould be exciting to run such a site. I have never sold an actual product which requires shipping and what not. This post pretty much marks the beginning of my journey in building an E-Commerce site. I hope this information will be helpful to all of you doing or having already done the same.
Research
Whenever I start anything I always start researching everything I don’t fully understand. For this project specifically I was unclear on the following areas: payment processing, merchant software, where to find a product, etc…
Merchant Software
I started with the payment processing and merchant software. This was probably the easiest to find. My host lists a variety of tools by third party publishers. After doing a little research and talking to the Hostmonster community a I decided to go with a product called osCommerce. For one, it is free. This makes it easy to start with this product and if it doesn’t work, I can always find another. I feel that you should always be able to find a free alternative to paying for something.
Drop Shipping
The next step I am currently working on is finding a product to sell. At first this was very difficult for me because I had no idea how the whole product process works. Again after a little research I came across more information.
At this point I have decided I would find a Drop Shipping process so that I don’t have to spend a lot of time dealing with the product. Drop Shipping is basically shipping something from the publisher or warehouse, as opposed to me shipping it to the customer. I chose this primarily because I just want to build the business and not the product. However, finding a reliable Drop Shipping Directory is a somewhat time consuming. Here is a very useful article I read on the subject- 4HB – Are Drop Ship Directories Really Worth The Money? Here Is A Guide…
Be careful when looking for a directory because you might run across these type sites. Drop Shipping Reviews You first notice that Doba is “1st place”. Upon further inspection, you notice that this is a site created by Doba. So it is basically a sales site. I tend to keep away from these type sites. Yes, they may be a good company. But I would rather read user reviews to make my decision.
As of now I am trying to find a good Drop Shipping Directory to utilize. Once I do more thorough research on each company I will post my results.