Starting an online store
By glblguy
I’m often asked what I do for living. My answer? “I’m an IT manager and internet entrepreneur.” IT manager doesn’t sound too exciting, but internet entrepreneur always grabs people’s attention. I used to answer the question with “blogger” instead of internet entrepreneur, but people really don’t understand what “blogger” means and my internet activities have expanded beyond just blogging. I now run a few different blogs and currently have 3 different online stores.
I’m a huge advocate of not only reducing expenses and living on less than I earn, but also of supplementing income. Personally I prefer the more passive income route as after working an 8-10 hour day in a fairly stressful IT environment, I just don’t feel like coming home only to turn around and head out to another side job. I also would rather work for myself doing what I like to do.
I know many of you are also looking for ways to not only reduce your expenses, but increase your income as well. I thought I would share some information on starting an online store quickly and easily. Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve shipping, managing product inventory or anything like that. Surprised? Let me explain.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a term very common on the internet and refers to people who market and advertise a companies products in turn for a share of the revenue the company receives through sales. Numerous companies have affiliate programs and they provide a great way to earn some extra income. For example both Amazon.com and eBay have affiliate programs.
To begin affiliate marketing, you first register as an affiliate, and then use the companies affiliate interface to create special links to the companies site and/or products. Some companies like Amazon.com and eBay provide their own affiliate programs. Others work through affiliate marketing companies like Commission Junction or Linkshare. When visitors to your site click on your affiliate links, they are directed to the companies web-site or usually a product page on the companies website. If the visitor purchases the product or service, than you as the affiliate marketer earn a percentage of the sale.
The amount you earn is determined by the company and often scales upward when you make more sales (i.e. the more visitors that buy, the higher percentage of the sale you receive). For example, eBay starts at 50% and goes up to 70%.
Creating an online store
As I mentioned, creating an online store isn’t hard, but It will take you a bit of time. Personally I find it fun, especially once you start to make a few sales! The following sections will take you step by step through the process of getting a new store up and running.
Find your niche
The first step in starting a new store is determining the niche your store will fill. Finding a niche can be tricky as you have to find the right balance between a niche that currently has too many competitors and a niche that is too narrow and just doesn’t appeal to the majority.
For example, starting an online sports equipment store probably isn’t a good idea as there are just too many large competitors out there. You’ll want to find something more specific in that same niche. On the other hand, having a store that sells only specific types of tennis balls may be too specific. The right balance may be something like tennis rackets or tennis balls only. There really is no science or success formula I can provide and to be honest it takes some trial and error.
I like to find products that are fairly high priced, but not too high, with a niche isn’t currently filled by too many competitors. Generally, I look for products that sell for more than $100.00 each. The other most important part of finding a niche is making sure it’s something that you are interested in and know a great deal about. Knowing about what you sell will allow you to write related articles to supplement and promote your product offerings. This will help establish authority for your site and draw in search engine traffic.
Register a Domain name
Once you determine your niche, the next step is registering a domain name. A domain name is the HTTP address of your site (for example www.gatherlittlebylittle.com). For an online store, the domain name should consist of keywords specific to what you are selling. Keywords are the specific words people will use to find your site, particularly from search engines.
For example, continuing with our tennis equipment example, creating a store called “Gibbles Store” wouldn’t drive much traffic or at least not traffic looking for tennis equipment. It also doesn’t contain many of the keywords that search engine users would enter into a search engine to find the site. Instead using a name like “Discount tennis rackets” or “Discount tennis balls” would do far better. Let’s go with “Discount Tennis Rackets” so the URL we want would be www.discounttennisrackets.com.
To reserve that domain name, you’ll need to use a domain name registrar. Personally, I use NameCheap. When you register your domain name, try to get a .com extension. If you can’t, it’s not a big deal, but it certainly is preferred. In addition to reserving the .com extension, grab .net and .org at the same time to avoid others from grabbing these and potentially redirecting some of your intended traffic.
One lesson I’ve learned is to keep all of your domain names at one site. Many hosting companies offer free domain registration. While this seems like a good deal, in the long term it’s far easier to keep them in the same place. As you establish multiple sites it’s nice to be able to go one place to manage and see all of your registrations. Additionally, you may want to switch hosting companies down the road and having your domain name registration tied with your hosting providing can make things difficult when moving.
Sign-up with a hosting company
Once you have your domain name or names registered, you’ll next want to sign up with a hosting company to actually house and run your website. There are many options and people are as loyal to their hosting companies as they are to their sports teams! As a result, you’ll get lots of different recommendations depending on who you ask.
I have all of my sites hosted at Dreamhost Media Temple (Read why here). They certainly aren’t perfect, but overall provide great service for the money. If you sign-up, use discount code “Gibble” and get $50.00 off any plan.
Once your hosting plan is established, you’ll need to add your various domain names. One of the great things about Dreamhost Media Temple is that you can host an unlimited number of websites on your hosting plan at no extra cost.
Media Temple plans start at $50 and go up depending on your needs. If that’s a little step for you, my next recommendation would be Lunar pages. They are currently have plans for $4.95 per month and my experience with them has been outstanding for the price.
If you need assistance setting up a site or hosting, contact me over at Empty Cabin Media, and I’ll be more than glad to assist.
Use WordPress, Build a Niche Store or both
There are two options I’ve used to create my various online stores. I am sure there are many other options, but these are the two I’ve found that work for me: WordPress and/or Build a Niche Store.
WordPress
I’ll start with WordPress. WordPress is a very powerful content management system and also the top most used blogging software. Gather Little by Little runs on WordPress. WordPress can be extended and modified significantly through the use of themes and plugins. Themes allow you to change the look and feel of a wordpress site and plugins allow you extend the functionality of WordPress by installing often free plugins.
WordPress is a flexible platform that will not only allow you to market and sell affiliate products but even sell your own products if you so desire. A couple of theme creators and plugin developers have created specialized plugins designed for making WordPress into an online store platform.
The most attractive feature of WordPress is that it’s free. Now as you know, few things in this world are truly free, so while WordPress doesn’t require any money it does require some extra work. But I find the rewards and flexibility well worth it.
Build a Niche Store
Build a Niche Store or BANS for short is a platform that you can install to your hosted server to make eBay affiliate websites. BANs provides a very simple way to get an eBay affiliate store up and running quickly. It supports customized themes and other advertising beyond just eBay affiliates.
The major downside with Build a Niche Store is that it costs $97 dollars. The benefits though are that you can install it on unlimited sites and it provides you with free upgrades for life. So the $97 is a one time upfront cost. The big benefit is that BANs makes setting up an online store trivial.
From my experience and the experience of others BANs does rather quickly pay for itself.
WordPress and Build a Niche Store
While I personally haven’t gone this route yet, I have been following The Niche Store Builder who seems to think this is the best option.
I can definitely see how the two greatly complement each other. I will most likely use this approach for any future stores I build.
Get your store up and running
Once you’ve decided which of the 3 options you would like to use, you’ll need to install and get your store set-up. Since the majority of my affiliate stores are WordPress, that is the option I’ll focus on in this article. If there is enough interest on how to install a Build a Niche Store site, I’ll be more than glad to write that up in a future article.
Installing WordPress
Most hosting companies, including Media Temple now offer something called one-click installs. One-click installs make the process of installing popular web software to your server incredibly simple.
For information on setting up and maintaining WordPress, please visit the WordPress site. There is lots of helpful information. If you aren’t comfortable installing WordPress, contact me at Empty Cabin Media. I can do it for you.
Making WordPress into a affiliate store
At this point, all of the basics are in place, now we just need to get your site product enabled.
All of the default themes that come installed with WordPress are designed for blogging. To make your WordPress site more online store friendly, you’ll need to use a specialized theme. There are a number of themes available both free and and for a fee. I’ve become very fond of iThemes eCommerce Themes. Ecommerce themes are very professional and come with great documentation and how to videos. The themes do run $49.00, but I recovered that investment pretty quickly. The themes really are worth the money spent.
Another awesome theme I am using for all of my new sites is Thesis. Thesis is highly customizable and comes with some outstanding out of the box features. Highly recommended and I prefer it over and above the iThemes themes. Gather Little by Little will be running on Thesis shortly.
Once the theme is installed, I would recommend customizing it some by including a logo for your site. Try to give it a professional and clean appearance. Once that’s complete, begin adding pages for the products you’ll be marketing. Pages should provide basic product information about the product and maybe even a mini-review.
I place affiliate links directly in the product pages, and then add a section at the very bottom called “Buy now” that provides links to both Amazon.com and eBay.com products for sale.
For Amazon.com, I use the Amazon Simple Admin plugin. This is a great plugin that easily adds Amazon.com product links to your pages and site. For eBay, I use the TWP Auctions script. Note this is not a WordPress plugin, but an easy to install php script. In order to run the script you will need to install the Exec-PHP plugin which allows you to add PHP code to your articles and display eBay items.
I’m sure there are probably many other (and maybe even easier) options available, but the above are the basic extensions I use.
What’s next
At this point your store is up and running and very soon you’ll begin receiving some traffic from Google, especially if you’ve practiced some basic Search Engine Optimization techniques. Hopefully you’ll receive your first affiliate commission too.
Don’t be fooled though, the work isn’t over. You need to continually look for new product opportunities and tweak your product set based on what is working and what isn’t. You’ll also want to market your site and get it visible. Getting the site up and running is easy, making it successful is a job by itself. But we’ll get into that another time.
Have you considered starting an online store? Do you already have one? Share your experience, stories and even recommendations for other options. Add a comment!
Photo by: eschipul
July 30th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Thanks for the mention in your post! Its actually a very good read as well… and you cover the topic very thoroughly.
The hardest part of everything is taking all of your hard work and converting that into a steady, passive income!
BANS is really a great platform to do that and using the WP method, completely forgetting BANS is even there, is what my current theme of posts revolves around.
Build the content – traffic will come. If you target the right crowd with the right content, the visitors will turn into passive affiliate income.
Thanks again,
Mark
July 31st, 2008 at 9:07 am
This was a great read, and on a topic that has interested me for some time. Thanks for putting this together–I’ve bookmarked it to refer back to when I get some spare time to move towards building niche sites.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:41 am
Great article! I will definitely bookmark this and use as a reference later on. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.
July 31st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Great post! I have wanted to have an online store for a long time. Now I can actually start doing something about it.
Thanks!!
August 1st, 2008 at 12:12 am
Thanks for the info – I have this on my todo list [as another internet entrepreneur who also works in IT :) ] and this info is very helpful for clarifying the process. Posted to del.icio.us for future reference.
August 2nd, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Nice post!
I never really thought about a online store. The is post certainly has peaked my interest. Keep us up to date on how things go with you.
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Wow! This is really thorough. Looks a lot like work, too!
FYI– Linked with this in today’s round-up post at FaM. :-)
August 4th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Great post. I was searching for the ithemes store themes, but couldn’t remember who put them out and find your post. Really excellent information.
Blessings,
George
August 5th, 2008 at 8:04 am
I love your blog…really. Did you already hear about water on mars? :)
August 6th, 2008 at 5:16 am
great post — i’ve just subscribed to your feed and bookmarked this page. i’m a little confused by the ecommerce themes site, though. seems they only have one theme, and you don’t get to see what it looks like before you buy it. wtf? and lol.
thanks for all the good info.
August 6th, 2008 at 5:30 am
@Jackie – Thanks Jackie and glad to have you as a subscriber!
If you visit http://ecommercethemes.com/ just click on “live demo” to see the theme.
They do only have one theme right now, as it’s pretty new. They have more coming.
August 10th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
This is a great post. Will prove to be useful when I update and take my site to the next level. Thanks!
August 11th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Great read. I’m still getting my feet wet as an internet entrepreneur. This seems like a great idea to me. It has a few really good things going for it:
1. Low upfront costs
2. Low operating costs
3. Low technical ability involved
Thanks for the article!
-HIB
August 24th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Good to see someone getting some use out of TWP Auctions :) Thanks for the link!
August 26th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Great writeup. I do have a question about one of the sections you mentioned.
“For eBay, I use the TWP Auctions script. Note this is not a WordPress plugin, but an easy to install php script. In order to run the script you will need to install the Exec-PHP plugin which allows you to add PHP code to your articles and display eBay items.”
Did you or anyone have success doing this using Dreamhost? I am stuck at that point and cannot continue. the Exec-PHP plugin works as designed but cannot drop the code with my EPN information and have it display my content. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
This is a good article and an absolute no brainer. There are practically no startup costs whatsoever. Recently my wife quit her job to stay at home with the kids and we started an online store to make up for her the lost income. If you have the time stop on by!
September 21st, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Now everyone can create passive income even at home. You can make your own website and then earn money from that. Real Estate is albo good way to making money. Just slow down with your day job and concentrate on your small business. Even 100$/month passive income is better than nothing at the beginning.
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Great post! Thanks for the info. I just had my first niche idea the other day and registered the domain for it. I hope to be able to get it up and running soon!
September 25th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Thanks for this post! It details the steps and thought required when starting an online business…we’ve been wondering about this for a while now… cheers!
September 25th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Great informative post. I’ve been looking into creating a passive income business and this post is definitely a great starting point. Thanks!
October 1st, 2008 at 8:48 am
This is about the best, most complete post I’ve ever seen on building online stores. Great job! Love the details!!!
October 18th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Hey, great post! First time here and I can’t wait to read more from you. I have also subscribed to your feed as well.
October 20th, 2008 at 11:45 am
hi! i have questions on what does it mean to keep all the domain names on one site? also, if i want to have multiple sites, is that mean if i have a niche on selling books on line, then my three sites will be something like lovebooks.com, booking.com and readearly.com? if so, why do people want to have three or more websites instead of just one? can you please give examples? thanks so much.
October 20th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
@Justine – What I mean is that one website would manage all of your domain names. You want multiple websites with niches to attract people in looking for niche products. Be careful how you name your sites though, as you want them to contain the keywords that people might be searching for.
For example, if you sell sports books use sportsbooks.com, or better yet create niche sits for things like footballbooks.com or nflbooks.com, soccerbooks.com. See what I mean?
October 20th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
so let me understand it correctly. let’s say i use domainname.com , so i should keep all of my three domain names on this domainname.com website? i should not register the domain names with the hosting website such as dreamhost even though you can register the domain for free. another words, just register all the domain names on domainname.com. please tell me i got this one right. i have never register the domain names before, so i am not familiar with the websites. thanks again.
May 18th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Hi, Great information, I have trying to figure out
how to get all of this accomplished and you have made
it very easy to understand. THANKS!
August 18th, 2010 at 11:10 am
Some great and honest tips here.
September 28th, 2010 at 1:07 am
Hi Glblguy,
Great psudo step by step guide to setting up an online store!
Maybe I missed it but conversions weren’t mentioned in your list.
How are you leading your visitors to perform the actions you want them to take?
(I can see it how you’re doing it in your content… which is a very useful way to do it…)
But you don’t mention it in the blog post… any recommendations for conversions using the online strategies you mentioned in this post?
Sincerely,
Jay
October 25th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
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October 29th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Hm.. making money without a job has always really been so difficult; most of the time I purchase some ebooks and make money from those. although they get extremely expensive! Trying to make money without any sort of job experience is even harder. A lot of stuff are so ineffective, despite that this post actually helped me out. Thanks A lot! :)
November 5th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
I’m just building a short post to express I liked your article and enjoyed reading it. I’ve bookmarked your internet site so i can be notified of latest content. Thanks
November 9th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Very nice article. My one addition would be to emphasize that if you have an idea for selling downloadable files, go with it. That’s because unlike selling “real” products online, selling downloadable files requires no investment in stocking and shipping products, 100% of the selling price is profit (since you’re simply selling a copy of an electronic file), and your site can be set up to be fully automated (no work on your part for a sale). There are several hosts that can make this type of site possible. The one I’ve found that I like is MadBeeTech at http://www.madbeetech.com. They’re a web host specializing in setting up sites that sell downloadable files. Fully automated, and just five dollars per month.
November 21st, 2010 at 12:21 am
Good informative post. I will definitely follow these tips. Thank you for sharing this. Please keep it up.
March 11th, 2011 at 10:30 pm
Saw this post and thought i would throw my hat into the ring so to speak. My team are about a week away from creating the “holy grail” of wordpress ecommerce a fully functional and secure osCommerce plug in for WP.
Yes it is a monster task, but thankfully i have a genius running the team and we are 80% with no issues to date.
We are also looking for beta testers..you can sign up at http://www.wponlinestore.com
Cheers
Garf
June 17th, 2011 at 8:08 am
Question: what is the best way to market your online store. The best one stop shop company I’ve found is ZamZuu. The site is free with over 700 affiliate stores, the travel industry and featured stores like cell phones, energy, coffee… 30% of commission on everything sold on the site. Free sites at http://www.frugalsteward.com. It saves me on the household expense plan just using it myself. In this economy, every little bit helps. What is the best way to share this blessing with others?
April 10th, 2012 at 4:21 pm
IM ONLY 11 YEARS OLD BUT I DO AMAZING CAKES AND CUPCAKES IM TRYING TO SAVE MONEY BUT I DON’T GET ALLOWANCE (I DON’T KNOW WHY BUT I DO EVERYTHING IM SUPPOSED TO DO)I REALLY NEED A JOB CAN YOU PLEASE HELP
June 6th, 2012 at 8:37 pm
how would you get media temple to host your website
June 27th, 2012 at 2:52 am
Im 12 and i would like to do this but im a bit lost can you help me with it step by step
Thx cullen
January 3rd, 2013 at 8:03 pm
hey i am 13 years old and looking for a job can some one please help me i will be very greatfull