How Difficult Is It To Start An eCommerce Website?

I want to start selling products online. I already know about SEO, links, etc as I have several sites already and they make good money but I want to expand.

I have a niche product in mind that I want to sell. But I have questions:

1.) What do I need to get started in the ecommerce business?

2.) Do I need a wholesale license? or is it better to buy directly from a distributor?

3.) Will any ecommerce shopping script do?

4.) How exactly does the dropshipping process work - like from the point the user buys a product from your site until the time they receive it? Does an order get sent directly to the manufacturer/distributor?

Sorry, I know I asked a lot of questions. GREEN REP to anyone and everyone who answers!!

Thanks!

 

1. The most important thing is to have something that is actually going to sell. Do product research. As for the tech. stuff you need a domain, hosting account, a website and a very good knowledge of marketing.

2. You first have to source your distributors and view their own TOS.

3. Basically yes but you need to redesign the layout so it does not look like a standard cart. You need to make youself different from the crowd.

4. Basically, someone buys a product from you, you then buy the same product from the dropshipper and the dropshipper sends it directly to your customer. You then keep the profit. Dropshipping is a very big business but again you need to research your products first.

 

Wow, thanks for all the information. Green rep added!

 

I would suggest you take a look at these posts.

http://www.netbusinessblog.com/category/ecommerce/

 

e-commerce is a complicated process and extremely competitive these days. If you started just 5 years ago, you probably would have much better chance.
Anyways if you are in usa, some states need you pay tax for what you sell. In that case you need a business id. Some states you don't have to pay tax.

If can buy straight from distributor. You have to open an account for this. That may cost quite a bit.

Before you start check the market. If there isn't too many big competitors you can go ahead. Marketing is big thing for this, you got to spend lot on this.

Just a script won't do if you wanna do it for serious money. Find some experienced persons on this(pm me if you need help on that).

dropship isn't bad. check the purchase prices and how much others are selling. you have to make at least 50% profit. Ask them what will happen about returns. Returned products will cause you problem, unless you settle this thing with dropshippers.

 

From what I have done and learned, IMHO you need a few things that can help you out.

Depending on your locality especially in the US you need a license or at the very least a DBA or Doing Business As from your local clerks office. Many municipalities do not require licensing until your revenues top a certain minimum. Usually in the thousands. Some don't even have that requirement, for example the county next to mine has no business revenues in that manner.

The next thing you need is to have a way for payment processing that makes your customer feel very secure and that IS very secure. Mucho hot water if information gets pilfered from your process. Paypal is the easiest to get started with but you may want an actual merchant account for what you are doing with a secure gateway.

Then you will need a way to get the product as the others have said to the customer. Many dropship firms now will drop ship direct for you for a cut of the profit. Other companies will require you to buy up front and hold and ship yourself making you a baggage middleman.

Ideally you want the former and not the latter as it costs much less to perform, however, if you sell and they do not have in stock this may cause problems. You can weight that one yourself.

Finally as to the shopping cart and set up programming I'll finally give someone a plug for once. I use goldbar for all of that. The state of the art system they use will actually do everything imagine able and you just do the parts you want to do. It is literally the best I have seen for an incredible price. I recommend it to anyone who asks.

Any other problems I have with delivery they handle.

Hope this was helpful.

 

As far as software is concern, you can use oscommerce. It is opensource and free and already integrated with many payment gateways.

Licenses for your businesses will depend upon the country of you do the business in. It would be normal license as you were doing offline business.

 

Your biggest investment should be your website. Without a good looking and functional website it will be hard to make any sales. You also need at least some type of marketing budget.... even if it isn't much. A website that no one knows about won't generate sales. SEO will help, but it will take some time to reach the top of the search engines.

 

Thank you to ALL of you! Green Rep added for you all!

A few more questions as well:

1.) Are Overture & Adwords worth the effort & money?

2.) What's a good conversion ratio for traffic? Is 1 buyer per 500 visitors good?

3.) Does anyone have experience selling adult related products?

thanks

 

In my opinion it's not hard to get the software, install it or get sales.

It's building the software to suite you, to feel the way you want it and to look how you want it.

OSCommerce and Zen cart are two great free choices, with many addons!

 

Adwords/overture always pays off if used right.
I used to have a sex toy site. Very competitive.

 

I disagree with you with all respect. Your website is what will differentiate with other sites. A site out of the box is good for starters, but serious business need complete control over the site. You gonna need that in many situations with e-commerce.

 

If you want a great hosted e-commerce program with great support, you could go with MonsterCommerce, which is where I work. Although a little of my bias is showing, I'm confident that a hosted option with 24 hour-a-day support is a necessity for someone just starting out with shopping cart software.

As far as drop-shipping companies, I'd check into Doba and others like them.

 

Oscommerce is open-source, hence you have complete control to develop it how you like... =)

 

It definitely give you control doing limited modification. But not complete control. OSCommerce is a standardized solution for e-commerce sites, not industry specific. Thats why these people are using their own software:
amazon, ebay, shoes.com, bluefly.com, overstock.com, zappos.com..................list will be very long actually. They are successful in what they do. There are reasons they use their own system not OSCommerce - Control and security.

 

Are you really expecting million and billion dollar websites to use an open source software? They have enough money to pay programmers to build and maintain their websites. He asked about starting an eCommerce website, and I can assure you: Ebay's script now is a LOT fancier than it was when they started and weren't billionaires.

 

I think that between website CMS's, freelancing resources and all of that good stuff available - the biggest problem in entering a business like this is doing the actual packaging and shipping from your home. Just that alone is enough to keep me away from ever doing it!

 

Dglassman26, You said you had a niche product. If it is a single product or only a few products (less than 10), you might consider using a more simple solution to start. LIke, PayPal Merchant and buy now buttons. you can find an example of this method at sporecreations.com

as far as the other questions, there have been some good answers posted.

 

1) Test it: test different ads and different landing pages. Something will work out.

2) If it costs you 10 cents to get one visitor (or $50 to get 500 visitors), and if one makes you profit over $50 - then it's good (bearing in mind how much work is involved).

 

That wasn't the point. Point was on if you can have total control with OSCommerce. But you are right, starters should use out of box software at the beginning to see if they can put their foot in the market, then go for custom made software.