Introduction

If you've spent any time watching infomercials on TV or have an email account, you most likely ran across someone or some company trying to sell you on the idea of starting an online business. All you had to do was buy their Internet money-making package. It was yours for the asking. They were asking $79.95, paid out in three equal installments. You might also have heard the testimonials and how you can make money selling just about anything you could think of on the Internet.

And doing this while you slept!

If you haven't found out by now, making money by opening a business on the Internet is not easy. To paraphrase the famous twentieth century actor Edmund Gween's deathbed quote, "Dying is easyeCommerce is hard." Looking at the littered landscape of failed eCommerce sites after the dotcom bust, one would believe that to make a small fortune in eCommerce, one would have to start with a large one.

If you want to set up your own online business or extend the one you have, and have dreams of becoming the next Amazon, there's both good news and bad news in the eCommerce world of today.

First the bad news.

Why is it so difficult to build a successful online business? Well, there are a variety of reasons and they come in all sizessmall, medium, and large. There's the small cost of maintaining a full-blown eCommerce site. You need a web serverthat is, someplace to host your eCommerce website. Then you have the medium cost of receiving and sending emails, taking orders online, processing credit cards, and not to mention the high cost of a host of software applications and the programmers to use them to build and maintain your online storefront. And all this reaches deep into your pocket even before you ship your first order or provide your first service. And you better have deep pockets because establishing and maintaining an online storefront can run into the thousands of dollars.

Now, the good news.

There is a light at the end of this gloomy tunnel of expenses. And it has a name: Yahoo! store. It's been a mere 10 years since the appearance of the first eCommerce site on the Net. Since then, a lot of digital river has run under the eCommerce bridge, but one thing is certain. eCommerce is here to stay. One case in point is the Yahoo! stores. All through the eCommerce turbulence and dot-com bust, the Yahoo! network of stores has grown and is growing stronger.

If you are an individual who wishes to dip his or her toe into the eCommerce river, and want to set up a part-time home business, then establishing a Yahoo! store could fill the billand fill it for what you might pay for video rentals for a month. You can set up a Yahoo! store for as little as $39.95 a month, a small fee per transaction of 1.5%, plus a $50 setup fee. To add icing on the cake, a simple store can be created in 24 working hours using nothing but your web browser.

The Yahoo! stores have grown into one of the largest online shopping destinations on the Web today. The Kelsey Group estimates that approximately 20% of U.S. websites are eCommerce enabled and that there are a total of approximately 300,000 eCommerce websites currently operating in the U.S. market. Based on the number of eCommerce stores (300K) and the number of Yahoo! hosted online stores (almost 40K), nearly 40,000 merchants currently use Yahoo! Small Business solutions for their eCommerce needs. That is, Yahoo! hosts approximately 1 out of 8 online stores.

Now that's a strong business partner!

So why is Yahoo! store so popular? Because of what it offers for the asking price. Speed and ease of setting up your store. A comparatively small fee that covers all software costs, secure site hosting, traffic and sales tracking, a payment gateway to process credit cards with your merchant account, 24-hour toll-free phone support, regular website backups and restores, valuable marketing tools for your store, and importantly, exposure on Yahoo! Shopping, one of the most frequented eCommerce destination on the Net.

The end result of this bargain storefront technology is a huge interest by businesses to take the eCommerce plunge with a Yahoo! store, because a part-time home business can save thousands of dollars in programming costs, without the need of any technical skills whatsoever. You might think that because of its price, a Yahoo! store is an amateurish, meagerly featured, dumbeddown version of a real online storefront.

Not so.

For the economical price, you will get a fullfeatured online storefront built for professional eCommerce. But don't take our word for it. There are more online storefronts built with Yahoo! store than any other online store software. Big names such as Ben & Jerry's, NASA, the Guggenheim Museum, Pepsi Cola, and Yosemite National Park are just a few of the big companies and organizations that have trusted Yahoo! store for their eCommerce solution.

With Yahoo! store, there is simply no easier way to have a highquality, professionallooking, secure online store.