The purpose of this page is to teach or at least assist those interested in starting their own ecommerce business.  If you are looking to work from home or would like to sell a few things online outside of Ebay, etc., I’ve condensed my research into a few steps for your assistance.  Just because you open an ecommerce site does not mean instant revenue.  You have to work at it, research your field of sales, and see what the competition is doing.  That is really the hard part of running an ecommerce site.  The easy part really is setting up the site and getting it going.  Ebay is a good way to gain a reputation and you can bring traffic to your site with a good Ebay reputation, but be sure not to put any direct links to your site in your listings as this is a policy violation.  With that being said, I’ll give you the steps that I encountered in building my site. 

1.      Select a field that you are interested so that you can maintain interest in running a website.

2.      Try Ebay or other avenues of web sales for a bit and see if you want to branch out to have your own site.

3.      Obtain a vendors license from your particular state if required.  In Ohio, you have to have a delivery vendor’s license, which costs $25 to obtain a tax ID and vendor’s license.  A delivery vendor’s license means that you do not have a store front and people will not come to your residence to obtain merchandise.

4.      Once you have your vendor’s license you can now buy wholesale!  This is not only for your field, but anywhere where you establish an account.  You usually have to supply a copy of your vendor’s license and credit card information so be very thorough in finding your wholesalers.

5.      Try to find wholesalers who drop ship.  Drop-shipping is useful because you don’t have to buy the merchandise.  You sell it first and then buy it from the wholesaler and have them ship it to the purchaser.  Be sure that they have ample inventory so you don’t sell something you can’t get.

6.      Buying wholesale allows you to pre-order things such as sports cards which are now being printed according to demand only.  This ensures that you get the product first at a locked in price and if it is factory sold out, you may be one of the lucky ones with the product.

7.      Buy some good user friendly HTML website software.  I use Ewisoft on this website because it allows you to use HTML code, or you can use the visual editor to type, cut and paste, insert links, and add your items that you want to sell.  The best part is that it comes with a shopping cart and is compatible with Paypal so you can start accepting payment right away.

8.      Find a hosting service and domain name.  There are some free ones out there or maybe with your ISP but I went with Go Daddy so that I could have dedicated email addresses, bandwidth, and plenty of space.  The support team for Go Daddy is very helpful in getting you set up as well.  Be sure to buy an SSL certificate for your domain that you choose.  The certificates let your customers know that your site is safe and secure.

9.      Your hosting service will provide you your FTP IP addresses, etc. so that you can import them into your web-building software so that you can publish your site template.  Domain providers can help you build a site as well but it costs money and that is why I went with my own software.  It’s a one time investment and I can make all of my changes as necessary.

10.  Be sure to place your Ebay store in your home page as I have done so that people can maneuver in and out of your site to bring traffic.

11.  Learn about shipping.  Anything over 13 oz. is going to be priority mail.  Don’t do things like send a 2 ounce item in a flat rate box for over $10 when you could have sent it First Class mail for $1.17.  If you are going to have high volume, and account with the USPS, UPS, or FedEx is probably your best bet.

12.  Taxes.  Oh yes.  You have to pay them.  The really cool part is that you DO NOT pay sales tax on business to business purchases.  You only pay sales tax on your sales!  In Ohio, if you claim under $200 in sales taxes, you only have to file twice a year.  This may not sound like very much, but most of your sales will probably be out of state unless you are really selling a high volume so the purchaser will have to file use tax.

13.  Keep all of your receipts.  This is so you can use them for deductions and have record of sales.  You’d be surprised how much you can write off with tax deductions.  Any road trips, supplies, computer items, etc. can be used and the result is a lower taxable income if you incur a loss.

14.  You have to continue to study your industry and competition to see what to do and not to do.

15.  Start small.  Don’t commit to too many orders or buy a 10 year subscription for your website.  Just take it as it comes and you will become better at managing your business.

16.  Finally, try things such as Google Adsense or Adwords to bring traffic to your site.  These are ways to make money for free or to pay to have your traffic boosted.

I’ve tried to summarize my findings as best as I can and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me via email on my home page.

If you are a sports card collector or dealer, ask me how to get into dealernet if you don’t know what it is, I think you’ll like it!!!