Getting the ball rolling

Before setting up your online retail store you’ll need an office to run your business from. Ensure you have enough space to handle plenty of orders. Since you’ll be online for much of your work day, a powerful computer and a high speed internet connection (such as website hosting )is essential. Although your store is likely to be automated you’ll still be spending plenty of time on the phone, invest in a headset and consider a VOIP (Voice Over IP) service such as Vonage if you live in the U.S.

There are numerous online retail options to consider. Take many investigation into each and choose the one that best suits your budget,business goals and skill set.

On a shoestring with skills

If you are a web ( website hosting )developer or designer and are familiar with XHTML, CSS and PHP you might consider building your own website and using an open source shopping cart program such as osCommerce or its offshoots Zen Cart and CRE Loaded. This is the shoe-string and difficult journey has negative aspects, find the forum in the operating system for e-commerce website and decide if you’re ready for the challenge.

On a shoestring without skills

If however you are like the rest of us, without programming skills you’ll need to take a different route. Employing a web developer to build you a complete store can be not cheap—but it is not necessary. You are supposed to think about purchasing a ready made store like those found at e-commerce templates. These stores are basic moulding board websites with a shopping cart already build in. If you have basically understand the html,you can customize it site by yourself,alternatively hire a freelancer from a service like Elance to do it for you. Using this method you could start an online retail store for less than $500 (USD), including a domain name and website hosting.

Not on a shoestring

If start-up capital isn’t a problem life is certainly much easier. Doing research for selecting the software using a site such as Shopping Reviews. Once you’ve purchased a cart program hire a web design firm to develop a front end for your store and integrate it into the cart. This method can usually work out cheaper than employing a development company to build an complete ecommerce site.