Prostores - Review - Part 1

One Month Free Trial! ProStores - an eBay Company

It is time to introduce some of the websites with great interfaces which I have been promising to do from a long time. The first website I am introducing is the giant of all websites EBay's own Prostores. It is a wonderful ecommerce solution that offers a host of features and offers many services to its users. Read this "prostores review" to find out more about this amazing website.

Prostores is a complete package offering everything you need for building an e-commerce store. For a small set-up fee, you get a website creator, a shopping cart and hosting coupled with other necessary features such as design templates, e-mail tools, and SEO options. You also get free accounting software and FedEX shipping compatibility for your business thus making it easier for you to ship products. Check out Prostores now or read on to find out more about this wonderful web store and ecommerce solution.

As I've been telling you before about the common feature in all web-based interfaces, you don't have to do a lot of web designing yourself. All you have to do is select from a variety of templates or themes that are already present and then provide text, images and redesign your online store as you want it to be. This is also the case with Prostores. You are provided with a wide variety of themes from which you choose the one that you like the best. Don't worry if you do not understand many of these things or haven't done it before. Prostores has many "human-friendly" wizards that can help to do this for you. This brings another feature of prostores to mind, 'Design Studio'. This is a cool feature that is supposed to help people who are relatively new to the area of web-designing create the look and feel of their stores easily. Further, another advantage is that since it a web-based program, you don't have to install any software on your computer. This is preferred by many people.

Prostores also takes many steps to help ensure security for their customers. If you have shopped at popular websites like Amazon, Ebay, you will notice that whenever you have enter your credit card information, the address of the page in the address bar changes to a https: from a http:. https: is basically http: with a secure which is what the 's' stands for. This means that the data is encrypted and makes it tough for potential hacks by hackers. This is a feature offered by Prostores. Your online store will have this https: when your customers have to enter their credit card information. This increases your website's or your online store's credibility.

You will also find that it is very easy to navigate around the different menus in Prostores. Even if you don't, they have an excellent support system. I was very impressed with this part of it. Right from the FAQ's to the documentation provided to the prompt responses to the e-mails that you send to them, everything is very well organized. This is something that you can make use of.

Some disadvantages include not being able to sell "downloadable" products on the internet. This is however, a good thing because it helps keep the number of spam online stores at bay. So go ahead and give this amazing ecommerce solution a free one-month trial. Check it out and let me know about your experiences.

The Benefits of Starting Your Own Ecommerce Store

You may have had second thoughts about starting your own online store because you have a small little question nagging at the back of your head that kept saying, "What's there in it for me?" This is a question that most people starting out on marketing online are worried about. So this post aims to clear that confusion and tell you about how ecommerce help you in many different ways. This is basically to get you motivated and get you started in this new venture.

I will tell you about some of the good things that I have been able to enjoy and which you will enjoy too, if you decide to open a web store. One of the main differences and the difference between starting a shop in the "real" world and a online shop we is that the money you will be spending for the start-up costs is much lesser if you decide to opt for the online shop. You pay money only for the initial set-up and after that it is all your work in decorating your online shop, Even when decorating or as I would prefer to call it, "promoting" your web store, you can decide to limit the amount of money you spend by opting for free marketing methods which I will talk about in another post and save a lot of money.

Trust me, this is where the actual benefits lie. Many marketers spend a lot of money for paid marketing such as PPC (pay per click). By doing this, you are displaying ads in websites that are relevant to the niche that your web store is based on and everytime someone clicks on those ads, you are going to have to pay a certain amount of money. Now, please don't misinterpret what I am saying here. PPC is good and should definitely be something that you should keep in mind when you are planning to start off. I use PPC a lot whenever I want to market my websites. But the fact is that you should spend money carefully. You have to make sure that you advertise at the right places for the maximum conversion rates. You don't want to have just visitors but you want visitors who want to buy some products that you are selling on your online shop.

Another one of the benefits is that this business is like an avalanche. Once enough snow has been rolled into a snowball and an avalanche starts, it doesn't need any more pushing, right? The same analogy can be applied here too. Once you have set up your ecommerce store and have regular visitors coming in and also rank good on Google and other search engines, all you would have to do is regulate it once a week or once a month. Post some more articles on your website and make some small changes to the layout of your web store and you are done. What I normally do is work on a niche once a month and then move on to another niche while making small changes to the first one. This is not the case with an actual shop and is something that I have found to be very useful.
Another benefit is that everything can be done at home. You don't have to move outside and call people etc. Of course, this depends on what kind of products you are selling. If you are selling your own inventory, then you probably would have to do some walking around. But, generally as long as you have your own PC, then you can sit at home and finish all your work. You can even attend a full-time job and do this work part-time.

Even better is having a laptop. If you have a laptop, then all you would have to do is get a wireless connection and make changes while on the go.

Here is some inspiring aspects to look at. Dell Inc. gained $61 billion in the fiscal year of 2008. Let's assume that half of it ($30 billion) came from people buying Dell products online. This is because dell's main policy is to sell directly to the customers and not (as much as possible) through retail stores. And recently, most people have been buying through phone or online at their website. Let's say that you signed for the Dell affiliate product which promotes dell's items and that you promote some of their products. The total amount that people earn in this way maybe about .01% of the remaining amount i.e. $30 billion which is about $3 million. If you start and do a good job of promoting your website, you can get atleast 50% of what's being sold. Let's assume that you get to keep 4% of the total what you referred from your ecommerce store through the Dell affiliate program. You make around $50000 every year. And besides, that is just for one company. See the point? This maybe based on many different assumptions. But I know what I am talking about because I promote Dell through my own online stores.

So, I hope you are getting the picture of what potential lies ahead if you choose to start venturing in ecommerce. You just have to have some determination and market your products the right way and you will be very successful. There are many people who have gotten to be very rich in this way.

So go ahead and follow all the tips that I have provided in this blog and become rich with your e-business.

SEO for your Online Store

As I have been telling you in some of my previous posts, just creating a wonderful good-looking online store will not be enough. There are many other ingredients that have to be added to this recipe in order to make it successful. One of them and the most important one is the quality of the products that you are selling and the other one is optimizing your blog for the search engines. This is nothing but SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If the latter is done effectively, then your web store will have a solid ranking in the search engines like Google. This also means that you will get a lot of traffic i.e. which in turn means a lot of sales.

Let's first talk about the importance of creating high-quality products. What would be the reason for you to repeatedly go to a shop near your house? It could be because of multiple reasons. It could be because the owner is a really nice friend of yours or it could be because he is the only one in your area who sells great products compared to the other sellers in the area.

Now, why am I telling you all this crap?

Because I am trying to make you understand how a business works in real life & I am trying to make you compare the two and consider similarities. You require essentially the same qualities to succeed online as well. If you regularly keep in touch with the people who buy from you and say something simple like "thanks for buying from my online store" by sending a personalized email, you can be sure that you have earned a customer. The same customer will buy from you next time he/she is looking for something that you are selling.

Now do you get the similarities between the two?

That's how it works in real life too. The only difference is that here you write convincingly and "there", you speak convincingly. I can't explain to you how much money I have made just because I wrote a simple e-mail saying "thanks".

Anyway, let's move on to today's subject. Just keep in mind what I said above as it will help you achieve long-term success.

Today's topic is SEO & I will tell you about why SEO is really important for your online store. By simply optimizing your blog for the right keywords, you will rank high in the search engines like Google and get a lot of traffic.

There are 2 parts in SEO:-

On-page optimization - This part involves the content that you put on the pages of your ecommerce store.                                                                        Click here to get SEO Elite

Identifying the right keyword phrases – This is the first step in On-Page Optimization. Basically how it works is that the more the number of terms Google finds on the web-pages of your website. Let's consider this page that you are viewing right now as an example. Let's say that I am trying to rank first on Google for the keyword "SEO for your Online Store", and then theoretically, if I repeat it over and over again in this page, I should rank very high in Google. But unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. It was like this before until spammers abused the system because of which Google changed its algorithm. So your best bet would be to get a good keyword research software like SEO Elite in order to recognize the best keywords that you can use to market your online store.

Monitoring the competition in your niche – You would also have to constantly monitor your competitor's and keep track of what they are doing in order to succeed in this business. Oh and by the way, a niche is simply the kind of business you are marketing for. If you are trying to sell watches, then you are in the "watches" niche.

Off-page optimization – This is even more important than the on-page optimization. Remember that I had told you about how Google had changed its algorithm in order to reduce "spam" in its results? Now, Google has started to put more emphasis and consistently ranks websites that are optimized better off-page.

Backlinks – These are extremely important for your website. Let's go back to the "watches" niche that I was talking about earlier. Let's say you get a link from a reputed website in this market like Rolex.com to your website. This would significantly boost your rankings because Google considers Rolex.com to be an authority website in this niche & since you have a backlink from them, your website is important too. Use SEO Elite to analyze which websites rank high in your niche and to see if you can get backlinks from them.

How does Google know which websites are authoritative?

It uses a technique called Pagerank to determine the authority of a website. Pageranks is a scale of 10 with '10' being the best and '0' the lowest. All new websites start with a '0'. If you get backlinks from high PR websites, then the PR of your website increases. Now, this system can be abused too and our favorite people, the spammers recognized that. So they got links from many reputed websites by putting links in the comment's section.

So Google changed its algorithm all over again. It introduced something called as "nofollow". How it works is that Google will not recognize "nofollow" links as valid backlinks. So if you are trying to spam by putting up hundreds of links in the comments section of a reputed website, then forget it. Most reputed websites make all their nofollow because they are aware of what spammer's are trying to do.

There are many things in SEO that is beyond the scope of this article. Most of them can be learned by experience as go on this journey of online marketing. But I can say this about SEO. When I started out, I had to use Microsoft Excel to make a list of potential keywords that I could use for my online store. I would then have to search for the keyword in Google to do some research on the competition that I had & try and copy their backlinking strategy.

But now you don't have to do all that.

Most things that had to be done manually before can now be done with the help of some software. SEO Elite can do this and much more for you with just a couple of clicks. If you have checked out the screenshots that I have posted above, then you will know that it is an extremely powerful software that can achieve wonders for your online business since it reduces the workload so significantly. It has saved me a lot of time & you should consider this as an important one-time investment for the overall success of your web store. Besides, if you don't like it, you can return it because they offer a 100% money back guarantee for it. It beats most other keyword research software that it competes with.

Check out the screenshots to get a feel of what SEO elite can do for you.

Summarizing, I would say that if you are serious about making your newly started online store successful, then you should seriously consider implementing SEO for the WebPages of your store. This is something that most online marketers miss out on. They think that if they put up attractive images with very good quality products, then visitors will "automatically" come. But trust me; they will not "automatically" come. You would be a fool to think so. Before starting your ecommerce business, you have to use SEO Elite to analyze the market that you are planning to enter and then market well for that product specifically. That constitutes on-page optimization.

Then you have to use SEO Elite again for effective off-page optimization as well. Building a lot of backlinks & getting a good pagerank will help you a lot in this regard. Check out some of my other posts on what to sell online and tips for building a successful e-business

Good luck and be sure to let me know if you have any questions or comments in the comments box,

Chris.

Some Challenges I faced when starting my web store

Before you go ahead with building your web store and make it successful in the e-commerce niche, I thought I should let you know about some of the challenges I faced when I was a fresher looking to make my web stores successful.

When I first started out online in my vow to become really successful online, I had nothing more than a couple of e-books telling me about how important it was that I start an online store & and some other software that I had bought off the internet because they claimed that they would completely change my life if I did that (my life did change, but not because of the software). But it would be wise to keep in mind that I had no idea until then about what ecommerce was or anything about it. I was still looking for some guides on how to "make money online with ecommerce".

So, after some meticulous research on the internet, I decided to step into the world of affiliate marketing in an effort to try and make some money. I waited and still waited, implementing all sort of SEO (search engine optimization, I will write more about this in another post) strategies but still, pooh! there were just about one or two sales a month or none at all. It was then, as I was looking to buy a laptop online (a Dell laptop, to be precise. I love Dell products), I stumbled upon (no, not with the social networking website Stumble Upon, but actually stumbled upon it when browsing through the Internet) some other websites which said that if I bought the laptop from their stores and applied their coupon, I would get a discount on my price. I was surprised because till then, I had been thinking that the price would always be the cheapest if you bought products directly off the company. Till then, my mantra was that I should never buy from retailers if I could because I would be paying more than was necessary.

That was one of the many turning points in my life. Since I already had a degree in Marketing from college, I knew something about how companies generated revenue and all other basic concepts about marketing in the "real" life. So, I decided to utilize this talent of mine by starting my own store that would sell some products on the internet. Besides, it had always been my dream to start my own business or company & this venture seemed to be the perfect outlet for this dream of mine.

So, I went ahead, bought a domain for a cheap price, got an inventory of products that I would sell online. At that time, I didn't know about wholesalers and drop shipping and I had to get my own inventory of products and ship them myself. (In case if even you don't, then check out this post on how to find products for your online store at once). This was where I made the first mistake in my venture to become successful. You see, I have always set high goals for myself & dreamed high. So, I started marketing my online store with the help of broad keywords.

I will write about what I mean by this in another post, but here are the basics. Suppose you are trying to sell cars in your ecommerce store (something that I don't recommend for beginners. I am in this niche because I know I can succeed there and have), then the keyword "cars" would be a broad keyword & should be something that you should never aim at. It is one of the broadest of keywords. However, let's say that you are aiming to rank good for a keyword like "Toyota cars". Even this would be a broad keyword since as a beginner; you won't be able to rank high for that keyword in major search engines like Google & Yahoo. What you should be aiming at, however, is something like "Buy Toyota land Cruiser". This term, still very tough to rank for, would be something that you could try to "optimize your web store" (SEO) for, since it is a concentrated keyword or as we internet marketers like to call it "Long tail keyword". Anyway, I am starting to digress & so, let's get back to my story.

When I started marketing my web store, I aimed at broad keywords such as the one I talked about in the example above. Thus, initially, it was not ranking very high in the search engines for any of the keywords that were related to the blog. It was not ranking high for the broad keywords because of too much competition and not ranking for even the long tailed ones, because I hadn't "optimized" my online store for those keywords. This made me lose faith in myself and my venture & I was starting to think of dropping the whole idea and go back to getting back my full-time job.

But I held on since I did generate one or two sales over the period of 2-3 months and since I had inventory that could last for a long-long time, I didn't have to worry about them getting deteriorated. However, I was starting to spend more of my time on my full-time job though I kept track of what was happening to the web store I had started from time to time. One fine day, I realized the mistake I had made after sending an e-mail to one of these internet marketing guru's about why I was not being successful.

So, I got working. I re-optimized my website, implemented all the SEO strategies that had worked for me before when I was active with affiliate marketing which is almost the same as selling products online, and yet, different. After this, I set up PPC campaigns, and wrote articles and worked really hard for the success of my web store. This (hard work), as I realize today is one of the most essential requirement if you want to succeed not only with your online store, but also in your life with whatever goals and aims you may have.

But the initial months were frustrating. I was not having much success with Google & there was little to no sales being made. But this was exactly the same thing that the internet marketing guru I had consulted before had warned me about. He had told me that I would have to be patient if I wanted to see results. So, I kept promoting my online business and after about, one and a half months, Google recognized my efforts and rewarded me with a very good ranking. I relished the sight of my web store doing really well in the search engines and also with the sales that it was generating.

I spent my money on getting better quality inventory and also for getting more traffic. This was all I needed for a psychological boost. I knew exactly what I had done that had made it successful. This is another mistake that most beginners make. They do not keep track of all the changes they are making to their website or web store. This is important because the next time you start another online store, you will know what change brought what effect. This can help you make better decisions.

After that, there was no stopping. I moved one new project after another with the main objective of helping people and making money while doing so.

I also discovered many new methods and tools that I could use for promoting my online store properly from some of the wonderful like-minded friends that I made during this journey. We helped each other make our websitesuccessful. If you are sitting their planning to "start your own online store" and not knowing how to start, feel free to comment in the comments section and me, or someone else, who knows what to do will help you out. This is a new blog and I need some help from you guys to make it more interactive and help people. So feel free to interact, people.

That's it for now.

Next post on "SEO (search engine optimization) for your online store" and about the "benefits of starting an online store".

After that I will review websites such as eBay's Prostores and other websites to help you choose the best. I know that this is the part that most people have been waiting for.

Stay tuned.

Good Luck,

Chris.

About Chris Eelis

Hello guys, my name is Chris Eelis. I have been marketing in the "online stores" niche and have helped people in starting their own online stores from the past couple of years. Over the same time, I have gone from being a total newbie to earning a decent income that i can safely say is much more than the average income earned by most American households. I want to help other newcomers who want to start their own online stores become successful. Read this blog and learn how to make your online stores successful.


http://start-an-online-store.blogspot.com

Common mistakes made by people starting their own online stores

Everyone in this world aims to be flawless in his/her work. And yet no one in this world is perfect. When I started my own online store, I made a lot of mistakes myself. But I learnt from my mistakes & made sure that I did not repeat them when I continued with the marketing of my online store. In this post, I will highlight mistakes that people who are newly starting their websites commonly make. This is from my own experience & also with the help of people in my field who have had the same mistakes. In short, these are the things that you may want to try and avoid initially.

1.       

      1.     Entering an overcrowded market – This is one of the most common mistakes made by beginners. When people start out looking for products to sell & researching on which market would be the most profitable, they choose to enter overcrowded and extremely competitive markets because of the money involved in it. For  example, when I started my first store, I entered the electronics market, the computer market, to be specific.

I did this because I saw that large amounts of money could be made by selling laptops or other similar electronic    items. I fell for the money & started marketing my online store & put in a lot of hard work to promote my online store only to find out that my store stood absolutely no chance compared to some of the other “biggies” that had already been in the market from the past decade or so.

So, in a short time, I was exhausted & really disappointed with my results & started thinking negatively about the whole ecommerce business. Now, this can be very bad because self-confidence is the first & the most important thing that is required for a beginner if he/she wants to succeed in this business. Things can be extremely discouraging at first & is, for most beginners. But you have to continue with what you started out non-stop if you want to succeed.

So anyway, I was forced to say to myself that the market I had entered was the wrong one & drop all plans for that & shift to a new market. Now, I am not saying that you should never enter a competitive market. Just postpone your plans until you are a seasoned and an experienced marketer. For example, right now I am in the same electronics market making a lot of money a couple of years after my failed first attempt. So enter a low-competition market. Succeed there; learn a couple of lessons & move on to other, more competitive markets.

2.      2.       Keeping in touch with your customers who visited your web store – Another BIG mistake made by beginners. When a customer buys from you, it is vital, extremely vital, that you get his contact details like e-mail address & keep in touch with him. I can’t stress how important it is to build trust with customers who have previously bought from you.

    

      Doing this not only helps to keep them updated about new niches that you will be starting in the future, but also builds trust. When people trust you, they will buy from you. For example, when you are trying to buy a laptop, why do you buy from Dell or HP & not from the new store that just started? It is because you have heard from your trusted friends talking about how great Dell & HP laptops are & so, you want to buy from them.

      So, when you are a beginner, & a customer buys from you, it is important to keep in touch with the customer since when he/she bought from you, he was trusting the legibility & its author, you. If you delivered a great product to him, then he is happy with you & your store & may be willing to purchase more from the products that you recommend or stores that you start. For this purpose, I use services like Aweber to send out weekly newsletters to my precious customers. But be careful not to bombard them with e-mails about your products. This doesn’t help either party.

      3.       Not checking conversion rates of the products you are promoting – This mistake is unusual in that it is the only one that can be corrected the easiest. When you are selecting products from websites like Doba or others, you must make sure that you also take a look at the conversion rate. What is a conversion rate? Well, it is simply the number of visitors to a website that get converted into buyers.

      So, that is why you hear many people on the internet who are in the same field, moaning about how they are not converting very well. Since you can’t foresee how your websites will perform, it would at least be a good idea if you checked out if the products that you choose to promote are converting well or not based on its performance by customers who have promoted it before you.

      If the product has good conversion rates, then go ahead & start promoting it. Otherwise, promote it if you believe in it, or else move on to another one.

So make sure you don’t repeat the mistakes above & your online store will perform much better.

How to find products to sell on your online store

You are very excited after having learnt about the enormous potential of starting your own ecommerce store but you are not sure as to what to sell online. But you have no idea what you are going to sell. Is this you? Then this article is just for you.

In the real world, newly formed stores who are having the exact same problem get to sell products with the help of people called “wholesalers”. The wholesalers are a kind of intermediate between you, the seller, & the manufacturer of the product. They, of course, work for a small commission for doing the same. Similar to the wholesalers on the internet, there exist many wholesalers online as well.

I use & highly recommend three websites for this purpose.
1.     Worldwide brands
2.     Doba
3.     Simplx

These websites have huge inventory of products that you may want to sell online. You need not go beyond these 3 websites to find products to sell on your online store. Even if you don’t plan to start a web store immediately, it would be a good idea to sign up for one of them so that you will not end up in the waiting list as the inventory may get used up. Nevertheless, you will get whatever products you wish to sell in one of these websites.

Now, after you have signed up for one of these websites, an important thing to decide would be about what kind of products you want to sell. Just ask yourself, "what do I want to sell online?". The good thing & the basic difference between the “real” scenario (store) and with an online store is that the products need not pass through your hands at all. It ships directly from the wholesaler to the buyer. However, it is important to note that this is not always the case & that sometimes, it may have to pass through your hands too. But normally, this is not the case.

Anyway, moving on, in order to decide as to which product to choose from the websites that I mentioned above, you have to make sure that they satisfy certain criteria. This is how I determine which products I am going to choose and sell.
1.      If you have not signed up for one of the websites that I mentioned above, then you will have to consider these factors as well.

i)      You have to be able to ship the product easily - This factor is really important since the product that you are planning to sell is going through your hands & not directly from the wholesalers or the websites that you have signed up for. Make sure that the shipping costs are not so high that it wrecks your profits. In short the smaller the product, the better.

ii)       Fragility – If you are in the glass market, then you don’t want unhappy customers who have received a broken product. You have to be careful about this as well.

2.      If you have signed up for one of the websites, then all the details about the product are clearly given in the information section of the website. But there are a couple of things that you may want to keep in mind.

3.      Don’t sell products that decline in value over time – this can be overcome by updating your online store frequently. But by my experience, many of my readers have had this problem because major search engines like Google value & trust older websites than newer & younger ones. So it may result in some of the older products that are obsolete being displayed in Google which you don’t want. So, either you form an online store that you update frequently & regularly, or you set one up market it & move on to another market. The latter is my preferred way of working as it leads to innovation & keeps thing fresh. Of course, your opinions may be different & you choose the path that you think is the best for you.

Dropshipping
This, as I mentioned earlier is the method by which products get shipped to the customer. If you have signed up for one of the three companies that I mentioned above, then you don’t have to do anything with the inventory. All you have to do is this.
a)   Make your customer like the product a lot.
b)   Make him place an order for the product.
c)       Get the wholesaler to ship the product to the customer.

Yep, it’s as simple as that. But you have to remember that as the owner of the customer, if you decide to ship your own products, you will be held responsible for any problems in the product. So, it’s always better to be signed up with wholesalers like Doba, worldwide brands or simplx.

The best part about all three of these websites is that you get a lot of information about the product, not only about its various features, but also about how many other people are selling the same product and how well it is getting sold for every visitor that is exposed to it.

You also get information about how popular the product is on the internet. You will get the number of results in the search engines like Google for keywords related to the product that you are planning to promote.

Trust me, if you try to do the same thing manually, it would take a lot of time. Why should you waste time when data has already been collected for you & presented to you? This concludes the post on how to find products that you can sell on your online store. A question that most internet marketers ask themselves is as to what to sell online. Remember that the happier your customers are. The happier your customers are, the more the popularity of your web store. The more the popularity of your ecommerce store, the more the traffic and the more the traffic, the more money you make. It’s a simple formula for making money, isn’t it?

Be sure to let me know what you think. Good luck.

Creating a good looking and decorating your web Store

An important thing you should know before starting your ecommerce store is about web 2.0. If you haven’t heard about Web 2.0, look it up in Wikipedia right now. This is the age of web 2.0. If you have been following the trend of successful websites in recent times, then you will probably know about the importance of it. Web 2.0 basically involves merging visual elements like video, audio & pictures into a webpage instead of just a plain old webpage with text.

In recent times, websites that have been using exactly the same kind of features on their web pages have been succeeding online. Therefore, it is very critical to make your online store have these features in it too in order for it to succeed. (I know that I have been saying the exact same thing in my previous posts but I hope that you do understand how important it is).

So, you have a couple of choices to make in order to do this part of it effectively. Both choices have the same end result. But the time taken to accomplish the same is different for both of them. You have to understand that it is a tradeoff between money & time. I am sure you must have encountered this dilemma before. It is similar to the situation wherein you are trying to decide whether to have dinner at a restaurant or cook food on your own in your house. It is the perfect example for a classic tradeoff between money & time.

By going to the restaurant, you are saving time but you will have to spend money on it. But if you choose to cook your own food in your house, instead, you are saving a lot of money, but you are wasting time in preparing the food.

So, back from restaurants & food, here is what you may choose to do:

a) Choose one of the websites that is listed in the homepage of this blog to host your online store on.
OR
b) Buy your own domain for a lesser price but dress it up on your own.

Now, I hope you understood what I was talking about when I was telling you about how the two choices were a tradeoff between time and money. By choosing option a) you are spending less time creating & designing the website & more time researching the traffic or marketing it. By choosing option b) you are spending more time on designing you online store to your liking for lesser money considering that you bought your domain off a cheap hosting service.

Also remember that option b) need not always be the worse choice of the two, but I would definitely recommend it. I personally know many people in the same online store business who have designed their own websites & still made it look very good. But if you, like me, are not so enthusiastic about art & web designing, and just like to get along with life by paying some money, then option b) would be a much better choice for you.

If you choose option a) also, there are many advantages. You can choose between many different varieties of templates & choose one that you best like. Once you have done that, you can modify the colors & whatever else you think and you will have a good looking online store. This is as good as if you decide to host your own domain. This is one thing that I really like about these websites. You don’t have to stick to just one theme. You can modify it to your liking.

If you do in fact, want to do it on your own, then do a Google search for “templates”. You will see a list of many websites offering free web templates. Choose the template that you like the best & one that you think will look not only good, but also relevant to your store. I personally prefer to use this website called http://www.templatemonster.com. It has many many templates that you can choose from. If you don’t want to pay, you will find many other similar websites offering web templates for free. Go ahead & check them out.

You must also be careful with what kind of colors you use. For example, it would be an appropriate for the website of a metal band to have their homepage filled with a lot of black color. This is because black is totally related & relevant to the website of a metal band. However, the same black color when used in the homepage of an online store selling spiritual books will not be appropriate. You know what I mean, right? It is important that you do.

As I said in one of my previous posts, keep the template that you choose for the homepage of your online store as simple as possible. Just put up a couple of links that lead to other places on your website where you create landing pages which sell some of the products that you decide to sell.

Also, it would be good idea to use the same template for all the pages inside your website. Unless, you think that there is some sort of a correlation between them, having different templates for each page inside the website is not recommended by most of the Internet marketing experts who have done some research on the psychological thinking of customers when they are about to buy something.