Starting an online store

[magicman]

I want to open up an online magic shop.

What is needed to open up an online store?

What are the steps needed to do so?

Any type of help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Patrysha]

First, will you be carrying an inventory (buying wholesale and then reselling) or doing dropshipping (selling the products through your site but having suppliers deal with the actual inventory/shipping/handling)or affiliate marketing (where you send them to another site to do the buying but you get a cut of each sale)?


There are different ways to approach each of these and different angles you'll want to think about.

Or maybe you want to do a combined approach which will have idiosyncrasies of it's own.

At minimum you will need a domain and hosting. What you need from there will depend on what angle you plan to take.

[magicman]

I will likely be stocking most of it.

[Dan Furman]

You can start w/ a Yahoo store or Ebay. Go to Yahoo or Ebay and start looking around (this is where I would start - list a few items on ebay and go from there. See if you really like storing/shipping items from home. Years ago, I found out I didn't.)

If you want a stand-alone, like Patrysha said, hosting / domain / website, etc.

[magicman]

I have the website resources, but what about the business end?

[dwiads]

Ebay can be a good way to test drive your product. You will see if your customer like it or not. Then if you already have good reputation on Ebay, you can start open Ebay store.

If Ebay is not enough for you. Start find some hosting to create your own E-commerce site. Then find E-commerce script (hopefully free). There are a lot of quality free e-commerce scripts.

Note this. Be careful when promote your site in Ebay because Ebay do not allow you to make transaction outside Ebay. You can start promote your site if there is a bid winner. But when the auction still ongoing. Don't start promoting.

[huggytree]

i also vote for Ebay also

hire a web designer for your website and he should be able to set you up on Ebay

[Patrysha]

Has to be a "he" huh, huggytree?

Ebay is a great start for testing and ongoing marketing, but you won't want to stay there with customers after the first sale because it will cut into your margins with their fees over the long haul.

Magicman, what do you mean by the business end? You're going to need a bookeeping system, a shipping/receiving plan, relationships with suppliers, know who your competition is, who your target market is, a marketing/promotions plan, a pricing system, a customer service plan...

There are lots of little decisions to be made...like who are you going to use as a payment processor (could be as easy as Paypal or you could go for a merchant account) who you are going to use for shipping? How you are going to package and send orders?

You may want to check out Home Business Resources and Business Coaching from Michelle Waters (http://michellewatersonline.com) - though she is going a different direction now, her information on Product Selling Online is solid and there's a lot of information there on everything from taking pictures that sell to SEO for product sales.

[magicman]

What I mean is taxes and legal paperwork.

I already do my own webdesign, so the website is not a problem. I have paypal and I use that to process credit cards for my magic show deposits.

[vangogh]

magicman I think you get locked into worrying too much about the taxes and legal paperwork. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't know about them, but in all honestly most people who are making money online just put up the site and started selling.

When selling online you're required to charge taxes in the state where you maintain a physical presence So you probably will need to add sales tax for New York residents. I'm not sure if selling at flea markets in New Jersey will constitute a physical presence in that state, but it probably does.

As far as legal paperwork I don't think there's anything you have to do to sell online. There are things that would make sense to do like registering your trade name and forming a business entity (which could simply be a sole proprietor), but you don't need to fill out any paperwork to start selling online.


I already do my own webdesign, so the website is not a problem.

Just want to point out that many people can design and develop a website. A small minority of those people can do it successfully. I'm not suggesting you can't build a good site, but do understand that just being able to get the site working isn't enough. There are many people who build their own sites and then wonder why no one ever buys anything through the site.

[Dan Furman]

Has to be a "he" huh, huggytree?


You will be pleased to know as a writer, I always use he/she in this context (his/hers, etc.)

Unless we're talking about NFL players or something :)

[magicman]

What do I need to do for taxes?

[Paper Shredder Clay]

I do not know what you decided on how you will construct your Web site, but you do need to think about the shopping aspect, are you going to handle the billing information or will you use a party like PayPal? If your site will actually have the billing, financial processing, then you need to be aware of such laws such as FACTA and be sure you are using SSL to protect people's credit/debit card information.