Thanks Cyclopyze for sharing this in DigitalPoint. I just thought of sharing this with my friends as this article is very helpful to all of us. Thanks again for creating this great peace of information.
1.) - Budget Overview
--------------------------------------------
Many people think that building your own web store is a very complex and expensive project. They put this project in the hands of professionall web designers. While this way has many benefits, it happens to be a quite expensive project.
Well, as with anything, there's a better, more available way to go about this. Not only is this way easy to reproduce even for people who have just started doing internet marketing, but it's also much cheaper. The whole setup shouldn't cost you more than $100 and hence the title.
The bill will look something like this:
2.) - Domain Name
--------------------------------------------
It doesn't really matter where you get your domain from, however, I would highly recommend Namecheap. The reason is that I never had a single problem with them, they don't have any hidden fees and their site is easy to use.
You can go with any name that you like, preferably something that is brandeable. Think of names like eBay and Amazon. Also, if you have no intention of being a locally based shop, make sure to get a .com. If you in fact are locally based then you would most likely want to get your country code top-level domain. (.us / .in / .de / .au ...)
--------------------------------------------
3.) - Hosting
--------------------------------------------
While you could get your hosting right there at Namecheap, I'd recommend Hostgator with their "Business" package.
This SSL certificate (short for secure socket layer) will add a 128-bit encryption to all traffic between the server and a visitor on your site. This is especially important when you have a web store which requires users to input their credit card / payment details at some point. You don't want those kind of things to go through un-encrypted connection since someone could easily hack and steal those sensitive information which is really bad for both your business and the customers.
Normally you don't get those on regular shared (cheap) hosting and would need to buy a virtual private server to host your site (to get your own dedicated IP which is required for all SSL certificates) + the actual SSL certificate. That alone could cost you 3-4 times more on a monthly basis. However, Hostgator has it all nicely bundled up in a single package. While the cheaper "Baby" Hostgator plan does also have an SSL included, it's only a shared SSL.
Read what Hostgator says about this:
SSL aside, "Business" Hostgator package includes
However, I strongly recommend that you go with a paid theme. These tend to have more features, a more unique, modern look and support that will handle any problem you have in a short time period. With free themes, you don't get any kind of support and sometimes there are stupid restrictions built in to the theme so you would buy the paid version.
And while you could argue that this is the most expensive part of this method, it also happens to be one of the most important parts. A theme is what gives your site a professional modern look, makes your site look thrustworthy and makes visitors comfortable enough to buy something there.
Also, while you could just go and search this forum or another site for a cracked theme, I would recommend against it. People who actually pack those themes often times insert code in files that you don't want on your site.
If you don't believe me, just google "why you shouldn't download free wordpress themes"
--------------------------------------------
6.) - What To Sell?
--------------------------------------------
So what can you do when you don't have your own products...
1) Buy wholesale products
There are many ways to get your hands on cheap products if you buy them in bulk. The easiest way to go about this is to google the name of whatever product you want to sell and add "wholesale".
2) Sell products through a dropshipping suppliers.
Selling something through a dropshipper has many benefits. You don't have to pay for an item until someone actually makes a purchase on your site. You don't have to worry about shipping, all you have to do is send your supplier the details of the purchase and he will take care of shipping so you never actually see the item being purchased.
If you don't know any dropshipping suppliers, a simple google search is a good start. Just make sure that you do some research on your suppliers by at least looking at his reviews.
Also,you can start with a fresh short list of suppliers I recently compiled which you can download for free. (There's a link at the end of this post.)
3) Become an Amazon Affiliate
Being an Amazon Affiliate is one of the easiest way to start your online store. Basically, you pull a bunch of different products to your site from Amazon and make it look like any other ecommerce site. Then, when a visitor clicks on the product, he actually clicked your own unique URL that redirects him to a page on Amazon for that particular product. If he decides to buy the product (or anything else on Amazon for that matter), you will get up to 10% of the purchase.
What's even better, this doesn't require any kind of e-commerce plugin because all you're doing is serving product info. That info and pictures then lead to Amazon which takes care of the actual payment. This means that your site will be more lightweight and load faster.
While
you can build this kind of online store with Magento, it's much easier
to do it with Wordpress. The reason behind this is you have to do it all
by hand. Trying to populate your site with 100s of different products
from Amazon by hand is really slow and painful. Wordpress takes care of
this with it's many 3rd party plugins that are availabe.
For instance, there is a plugin called "WpZonBuilder" that lets you search amazon products by ID or keyword and then just add them with a few clicks as fully featured products with price, multiple images and full description straight from amazon. It costs $99 but it's a must if you don't wish to kill yourself pulling every product to your site one by one, especially if you never used Amazon's affiliate program before.
What's best about this method is that you can quite easily build multiple cheap e-commerce sites for different products / niches. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities but that's material for a different tutorial later down the road.
​--------------------------------------------
7.) - Final Words
--------------------------------------------
And that's about it. None of this is hard to do even if you're a complete newbie. Everything you need is on the internet, you don't have to pay for any silly products, pay for some hyped-up membership site or join a "secret" mailing list. Only 3 things that you need is this forum, google and youtube.
I hope you found this tutorial useful and that it will help you in starting a wonderful new venture. If you have any questions, feel free to post them as a replay, don't send me PMs, I'd rather answer them here so it might other people who have the same question as you do.
Table of contents:
- Budget Overview
- Domain Name
- Hosting
- Ecommerce Content Managment System
- Choosing A Theme
- What To Sell?
- Final Words
1.) - Budget Overview
--------------------------------------------
Many people think that building your own web store is a very complex and expensive project. They put this project in the hands of professionall web designers. While this way has many benefits, it happens to be a quite expensive project.
I've seen people charge more than $7500 for custom e-commerce sites, what the hell?
Well, as with anything, there's a better, more available way to go about this. Not only is this way easy to reproduce even for people who have just started doing internet marketing, but it's also much cheaper. The whole setup shouldn't cost you more than $100 and hence the title.
The bill will look something like this:
- You need a domain name for your site: $10 on Namecheap
- You need stable & secure hosting: $15 / month on Hostgator
- You need to decide on the content managment system, depending on what you're trying to do, this can be either Wordpress or Magento: FREE
- You need a quality theme for those: $35 - $80 on Themeforest
- (I know what you well-read people are thinking, you know how to get themes for "free" but I'll give you something to think about down this post)
- ​You need a good logo for your site: $5 on Fiverr
- Also, you will obviously need something to sell. Even if you don't have any products of your own, you are still covered. But more on that later.
2.) - Domain Name
--------------------------------------------
It doesn't really matter where you get your domain from, however, I would highly recommend Namecheap. The reason is that I never had a single problem with them, they don't have any hidden fees and their site is easy to use.
You can go with any name that you like, preferably something that is brandeable. Think of names like eBay and Amazon. Also, if you have no intention of being a locally based shop, make sure to get a .com. If you in fact are locally based then you would most likely want to get your country code top-level domain. (.us / .in / .de / .au ...)
--------------------------------------------
3.) - Hosting
--------------------------------------------
While you could get your hosting right there at Namecheap, I'd recommend Hostgator with their "Business" package.
With this "Business" package, your site will get it's own IP address and private SSL certificate.
This SSL certificate (short for secure socket layer) will add a 128-bit encryption to all traffic between the server and a visitor on your site. This is especially important when you have a web store which requires users to input their credit card / payment details at some point. You don't want those kind of things to go through un-encrypted connection since someone could easily hack and steal those sensitive information which is really bad for both your business and the customers.
Normally you don't get those on regular shared (cheap) hosting and would need to buy a virtual private server to host your site (to get your own dedicated IP which is required for all SSL certificates) + the actual SSL certificate. That alone could cost you 3-4 times more on a monthly basis. However, Hostgator has it all nicely bundled up in a single package. While the cheaper "Baby" Hostgator plan does also have an SSL included, it's only a shared SSL.
Read what Hostgator says about this:
- Unlimited domains and emails
- cPanel with a simple installer for both Wordpress and Magento
- $100 adwords coupon if you're from US. (Mind you, it's the one where you gotta spend $25 first to use it.)
This hosting costs only $15 / month but you can these coupons to bring the cost down a bit:
JohnGrginov1- To pay only $5 for the first month - (if you decide to pay month after month)
JohnGrginov2 - To get a 25% discount on your entire bill - (if you want to pay for 3 / 6 / 12 months of hosting immediately)
Just note that I get affiliate commission for everyone who uses those.
--------------------------------------------
4.) - Ecommerce Content Managment System
--------------------------------------------
So now it's time to choose a CMS to power our web shop and we have 2 obvious choices: Magento & Wordpress
Even
tho there are many other platforms available, these 2 have the largest
community and thus it's easier to get support and find tutorials.
While
Magento is a specialized e-commerce script, Wordpress is a more general
content management system. It's mainly used for blogs but can very
easily be designed to work as a fully featured e-commerce site due to
it's many 3rd party plugins and different themes.
The choice between the two is pretty simple:
Magento
is the best option if you are selling your own products or working with
a dropshipping supplier. It's more optimized for e-commerce than
Wordpress and it can handle large amounts of different products easily.
On
the other hand, Wordpress would be better option if you plan on selling
products from Amazon as their affiliate (which I'll be discussing
later) and / or if you plan to run a blog in addition to the web shop.
While Magento does have a blog extension it's no match for Wordpress in
this area which after all is what Wordpress is all about. However, WP
can get quite slow once you start adding large amounts of products.
Also, you will need an e-commerce plugin such as
WooCommerce for Wordpress. It's a free plugin that will give your
Wordpress site e-commerce functionality, ability to add different
products and integrate payment systems. There are other options but I've
had experience with this one and it seems to handle everything quite
well. You will also find loads of themes that are optimized to work
smoothly with WooCommerce.
Note
however that some themes might not work properly with this kind of
plugins, your best bet is to try a find a theme that explicitly states
it's compatible with WooCommerce. This is another reason why I recommend
this plugin as there are loads of themes that are compatible with it.
--------------------------------------------
5.) - Choosing A Theme
--------------------------------------------
Speaking of themes, both Magento and Wordpress have a sizeable selection of free themes you can use.
However, I strongly recommend that you go with a paid theme. These tend to have more features, a more unique, modern look and support that will handle any problem you have in a short time period. With free themes, you don't get any kind of support and sometimes there are stupid restrictions built in to the theme so you would buy the paid version.
And while you could argue that this is the most expensive part of this method, it also happens to be one of the most important parts. A theme is what gives your site a professional modern look, makes your site look thrustworthy and makes visitors comfortable enough to buy something there.
Sure you could
have the most loyal customer base that LOVES your products and would buy
from you even if you built the ugliest website ever.
But the thing is...they would buy MUCH MUCH MORE if your site looked awesome.
Also, while you could just go and search this forum or another site for a cracked theme, I would recommend against it. People who actually pack those themes often times insert code in files that you don't want on your site.
If you don't believe me, just google "why you shouldn't download free wordpress themes"
--------------------------------------------
6.) - What To Sell?
--------------------------------------------
So what can you do when you don't have your own products...
1) Buy wholesale products
There are many ways to get your hands on cheap products if you buy them in bulk. The easiest way to go about this is to google the name of whatever product you want to sell and add "wholesale".
2) Sell products through a dropshipping suppliers.
Selling something through a dropshipper has many benefits. You don't have to pay for an item until someone actually makes a purchase on your site. You don't have to worry about shipping, all you have to do is send your supplier the details of the purchase and he will take care of shipping so you never actually see the item being purchased.
If you don't know any dropshipping suppliers, a simple google search is a good start. Just make sure that you do some research on your suppliers by at least looking at his reviews.
Also,you can start with a fresh short list of suppliers I recently compiled which you can download for free. (There's a link at the end of this post.)
If you can't find any reviews or you see people complaining about things like quality or delivery time, FIND ANOTHER SUPPLIER
3) Become an Amazon Affiliate
Being an Amazon Affiliate is one of the easiest way to start your online store. Basically, you pull a bunch of different products to your site from Amazon and make it look like any other ecommerce site. Then, when a visitor clicks on the product, he actually clicked your own unique URL that redirects him to a page on Amazon for that particular product. If he decides to buy the product (or anything else on Amazon for that matter), you will get up to 10% of the purchase.
What's even better, this doesn't require any kind of e-commerce plugin because all you're doing is serving product info. That info and pictures then lead to Amazon which takes care of the actual payment. This means that your site will be more lightweight and load faster.
Note that you
will need to put a disclaimer on your site stating that you're
displaying products from Amazon and that you are being compensated for
any purchase a visitor makes. It's best to put that in your footer in a
smaller font.
If you don't do this, you could very well be banned by Amazon so don't skip this part unless you know what you are doing.
For instance, there is a plugin called "WpZonBuilder" that lets you search amazon products by ID or keyword and then just add them with a few clicks as fully featured products with price, multiple images and full description straight from amazon. It costs $99 but it's a must if you don't wish to kill yourself pulling every product to your site one by one, especially if you never used Amazon's affiliate program before.
What's best about this method is that you can quite easily build multiple cheap e-commerce sites for different products / niches. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities but that's material for a different tutorial later down the road.
​--------------------------------------------
7.) - Final Words
--------------------------------------------
And that's about it. None of this is hard to do even if you're a complete newbie. Everything you need is on the internet, you don't have to pay for any silly products, pay for some hyped-up membership site or join a "secret" mailing list. Only 3 things that you need is this forum, google and youtube.
Or let me put it this way:
50% OF KNOWLEDGE YOU NEED CAN BE FOUND ON THE INTERNET
*** ABSOLUTELY 100% FREE ***,
THE OTHER 50% CAN ONLY COME FROM PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE.
Nothing can replace practical experience! I know
you would like that spending hours and hours reading about different
methods and generally reading stuff on this forum turns you in to an
expert, but it just doesn't work that way. Practice, practice, practice!
I mean, no money will come to you if you don't work for it.
And what better way to work for it then to start using knowledge from this tutorial in your own project right now.
I hope you found this tutorial useful and that it will help you in starting a wonderful new venture. If you have any questions, feel free to post them as a replay, don't send me PMs, I'd rather answer them here so it might other people who have the same question as you do.
