The main focus of your store is to sell goods so why would you ever need to include any other information other than your product listings? To run a successful store, you need to let customers know that they can trust you. They need to feel absolutely comfortable and secure that you will deliver on your promises when they hit the submit button and pay you with their hard earned cash. Below are 5 pages that will help you with that goal.
About Me
I used to think that no one would ever look at the “About Me” page on our store. However, Google Analytics has proven me wrong. It turns out that a sizable portion of our customer base actually takes the time to read this page. Since we are not a large store, customers want to learn who we are and why we sell …

The eventual success of your online store will depend on several factors. Probably the single most important factor will be where and how you are indexed in the various search engines. I’ve compiled below a comprehensive list of items that your online store should focus on to obtain the best rankings possible. In my experience, most online stores do not follow all of the rules shown below. Implementing these 10 little SEO techniques on your own online store should give you an advantage over the competition.

Make Sure All of Your Internal Links Point to the Same Domain
By the same domain, I’m referring to whether you want your site to be known as

http://www.yourstore.com
or
http://yourstore.com

This is important because the search engines actually treat both urls as different sites. If you allow the search engines to index both versions of your site, you will be effectively diluting your page …

If your store is anything like ours, we have to go through hundreds and hundreds of product photos in selecting the best ones to use for our website. If you don’t have a good photo flow from your digital camera to your website, you could easily waste many hours fiddling with the product photos alone. I’ve put together some tips below that will hopefully make your picture flow more efficient.

Use a Good Photo Software Manager
While there are many good software packages available on the market, I have found Google’s Picasa to be an excellent solution for your photo sorting needs. Not only that, but its free too. We first started out using Adobe Photoshop to go through all of our photos and found that it was terribly inefficient. Google’s Picasa allows you to

See thumbnails of all of your photos in an intuitive interface
Allows you to …

Taking good product photos is essential to operating a successful online store. Even more important than taking good photos though is how they are displayed on your website. Any online store can have beautiful pictures, but many stores make critical mistakes in the organization and efficiency of their product displays. Below is a list of 4 things to avoid when displaying pictures on your online store.

Don’t Use High Resolution Photos
I’ve seen many online stores fall into this trap. They use an extremely high resolution photo for all of the product pictures on the site. As a result, the website loads extremely slowly and drives customers away. Unless you are actually selling photos on your online store, the resolution of your pictures don’t really need to be that high. You can also get away with turning the jpeg compression settings lower (higher compression) …

Once you’ve customized the look and feel of your store and have populated it with products, the next step is to make sure that customers can purchase products securely from your website. In general, customers will not buy anything from your store unless they see a padlock next to your URL when they are entering in sensitive information such as credit cards and passwords during checkout. They will not see the padlock on their browser unless you have an SSL certificate installed on your website.
What is SSL?
SSL stands for secure sockets layer and is responsible for encrypting and providing secure communications on the internet. Many people have the misconception that the information encrypted by SSL remains encrypted even after its been fully transmitted to the website. SSL only encrypts the data during transmission only!
What this means is that the website accepting these secure communications is …

So you’ve decided to host your own website and open up your online store. Where do you go from here? There are a multitude of shopping cart packages out there and it’s extremely difficult to compare them all. Hopefully, I can save you some time and tell you what to look for.

At the very basic level, there are 2 types of shopping cart packages, paid software packages and open source shopping carts, both of which have their advantages and disadvantages.
Paid Software Shopping Cart Packages
With paid software packages such as XCart, Miva Merchant etc…, you usually have to pay an upfront license fee and an additional monthly fee to use their shopping cart package. If you have the money, these packages appeal to those who are tech adverse and those who require an extreme amount of hand holding to get started. What you are paying …

If you are going to take your online store seriously, you need to register your own domain and implement your own website. Many people who don’t consider themselves tech saavy often question their own abilities and end up relying on 3rd party sites such as Ebay, Yahoo etc… to implement their website store for them. Let me tell you why that’s a bad idea.
Ebay Doesn’t Have Your Interests In Mind
Ebay, like most publicly traded companies are primarily concerned with their own growth and stock price. They don’t care whether you are successful, nor do they care whether you provide a genuine service to the community. They’ll do whatever it takes to demonstrate growth and make shareholders happy.

What this means is that you are always at their mercy and they can choose to put you out of business at their own whim. Most of their changes …

While everyone has different ways to motivate themselves, here are 3 unique ways to give yourself that little extra kick to jumpstart your business.
Look at Your Tax Return
Go ahead and dig up your last years tax return and paste it up on the wall directly in front of your desk. Make sure you highlight your adjusted gross income, your taxable income and your total amount of taxes paid. Now take a calculator and take the amount of taxes paid and divide that by your adjusted gross income. Let’s call this number the “Getting Screwed” percentage or GSP for short. Go ahead and write the GSP clearly on the wall in front of you. Focus on this number because, this is the percentage of your hard earned money that is going straight to the government. If you don’t have any deductions, over …

Often times, finding the right market to pursue is the hardest part of starting your store. Here are 5 things to consider when choosing which market segment to attack.

Choose an Area or Set of Products That You Are Passionate About
Many people make the mistake of opening a store and selling a product just because a particular product is hot. If a product is hot, chances are there will be lots of competition and unless you are truly passionate about what you are selling, you will not be able to differentiate your store from your competitors.

Having expertise in your products will also allow you to easily distinguish good and bad products when deciding what to carry in your store. The ability to write in depth reviews and product descriptions about items you love will instill confidence in a buyer as well.

Most importantly, selling products that you love will …

In theory, it shouldn’t have required much courage at all for us to start an online business. Opening a business, especially on the web, is about as cheap and easy as it gets. All it takes is 10 bucks for a domain name and as little as 5 bucks a month for some web hosting to throw up a website. There are already a plethora of open source web packages already written and presented nicely for you to use and everything is extremely well documented.

There is almost zero financial risk involved, so why was it so hard for us to start? Personally, I think my wife and I needed some time to gather the necessary emotional courage to begin. Starting a business of any kind requires a tremendous amount of time and effort, and to devote a large portion of your time to …