subject: How to Use a Free Web Store to Start Your Business [print this page] How to Use a Free Web Store to Start Your Business
Hundreds of scam and spam pages on the internet clam that they can help you get out of that financial rut. There really is no fast and easy way to make money online just by buying some sort of kit. If you truly want to have a sustainable income-earner online, spend time build store and grow it.
eCommerce stores can earn you money even while you sleep or while you're away on vacation. But note that you need to spend a significant amount of time building it, filling it with inventory and marketing the store.
Anyone can do this. These days, with the internet being flooded by offers of free web store and dropshippers, it can even be done without capital. So first thing first, let's focus on getting your web store up and running.
There are two ways to go about it. Hire a developer that specializes in eCommerce stores and have one custom built for you. While this is ideal for branding, it can be costly. The other way is to get a ready-made template and here's where free web stores come in. Do a quick search on the web for one and figure out why it is being offered for free. Is it part of a full ecommerce package? Do they use the template for link building? Are there ads on your template? Once you discover what those things are, judge whether you're okay with have it on your site before you start to work with that particular template.
Next, you need to decide on what to sell online and you need to find a supplier for this. I would suggest going with dropshippers for your supply chain management. As with free web stores, dropshippers can get you started on selling online without spending a dime.
The process works by having you get connected with the dropshipper and giving you access to their virtual catalogue. You can then select the products you want to sell online and feed this into your own store such that you can start selling immediately without any products actually being on-hand. Unlike the traditional version of supply chain management, you don't have to ship the products to you, keep it in your warehouse and spend time doing inventory keeping. There's no upfront cost for purchasing products that might not even be bought by your potential customers. With dropshippers, once the order comes in, you need to process it as a retailer then send in the product to your supplier. They, in turn, will send the product you paid for directly to your end-customer.
Last but not the least, you need to spend time driving traffic to your free web store. Use search engine optimization techniques to make it rank for keywords that you are targeting. Do link building so that you have other websites pointing to your own - this can improve both your rankings and your direct traffic. You might also want to explore paid advertising options to have even more people to your website to make a purchase.
