Simple Ways To Sell On Your Own Website

Hey guys, the last year or two has really been a learning experience for me in terms of learning ecommerce and continually learning more and upping my game in terms of geting more functional websites and more professional looking websites.

I know alot of you guys don't like paying ebay fees or want your own brand or want more control over your business so maybe setting up your own website is a good option. I think one thing people forget to remember is that it's tough to drive traffic to a website. You can have a great looking site with great products and it can be a well functioning easy to navigate site but if nobody visits it its all for naught.

That said I just wanted to sahre a few tips I have picked up and some things I have tried.

Sorry accidentally hit post beore I was finished. Anyhow, I started off using a blogger blogspot website for my selling. It's really simple, point and click, it's free as long as you dont mind having a .blogspot as oppsed to a .com plus it's only $10 a year to make it a .com. You can easily create paypal buttons, write up a blog post about an item your selling, put a paypal button in the post and sit back and wait for someone to buy. is

This actually worked out surprisingly well for me for quite some time. Then I had a colleage mention to me I would do a lot more business if I had a more professional site which inspired more customer confidence since the area of business I'm dealing in requires a more professional presentation than if your just selling a cocuh for example.

I then got a godaddy template website. Under $300 a year, alot of customization you can do, pretty easy to link up to paypal and or a merchant processor, they also give you free name is slipping my mind but security token to accept credit cards. This was better than a blogger site, a little better for seo as well, comes with free credits for adsense, yahoo ads, bing ads, facebook ads, etc. This worked out well for a while too but then wanted again a more professional presentation and more functional and user friendly site.

I found out that most US web designers dont do the work themselves, they outsource it to india jack up the price about 4x and charge you and act as the middlemen. I got a recommendation for a great web designer, do sites for companies like car companies  and purell. Got a site that would have cost me 15k-30k done for under 4k. Also doing some seo work with them normally $1500 a month in the us, I'm getting it for $450.

There's alot of other options as well, I've played around with wix.com which I was actually kind of impressed with, you can get a really professional presentation of your site and it's all point and click. Not at all template looking like many other site design programs and sites.

Anyhow, just wanted to share some stuff I've tried and what worked and what didnt

I actually use OpenCart for 2 of my sites, custombandmerchshop.com and customdiecutmagnets.com. It's a bit more advanced than the drag and drop sites. But, I started with no experience in building these types of sites. As long as you get familiar with an FTP program like FileZilla, customizing your site is a breeze. There are so many templates out there as well, that it's easy to look different than the next guy. OpenCart is free, but you have to pay for hosting. I have HostGator for $10 a month and I can host as many sites as I want.

However, shopping cart programs are really meant for stores with static products. For junk dealers like us on this forum, it will be clunky and cumbersome because of the uniqueness of each product.

thanks for the tips about those shops/products. im always curious to try out new stuff