Building Your Own Merchant Site from Scratch

Prepackaged storefronts are fine, but if you want a truly full-featured web storefront, independent of stock layouts and generic checkout systems, you'll need to build your own e-commerce website from scratch. This is a lot of work and will cost a lot of money, so it's not for novice or hesitant sellers. But if you're really serious about making a lot of money on the Internet, building your own e-commerce site is the only way to go.

Finding a Web Host

You can't build a complex e-commerce website on Yahoo! GeoCities or other typical home page communities. These sites are designed to host individual web pages, not complete sites; you certainly don't want your professional site to be burdened with a URL that begins www.geocities.com/yourname/.

Instead, you need to find a professional web-hosting service, a master site that will provide hundreds of megabytes of disk space, robust site-management tools, and the ability to use your own unique domain name. (And with your own domain name, your site's URL will read www.yourname.comjust like the big sites do!)

A professional web-hosting service, at the most basic level, provides large amounts of reliable storage space for your websitenormally for a monthly or yearly fee. Most hosting services also provide other types of services, and many offer e-commerce-specific tools.

All of these services will cost you, of course; that's part and parcel of going pro. A good web-hosting service can run as little as $10 a monthor a lot more, depending on the storage space and tools you need.

Literally hundreds of site-hosting services exist on the Web. The best way, then, to look for a web-hosting service is to use a site that performs the search for you.

Several sites on the Internet offer directories of web-hosting services. Most of these sites let you look for hosts by various parameters, including monthly cost, disk space provided, programming and platforms supported, and extra features offered (such as e-commerce hosting, control panels, and so on). Many also offer lists of the "best" or most popular hosting services, measured in one or another fashion.

Among the best of these host search sites are the following:

• HostIndex.com (www.hostindex.com)

• HostSearch (www.hostsearch.com)

• TopHosts.com (www.tophosts.com)

• Web Hosters (www.webhosters.com)

Obtaining a Domain Name

A professional e-commerce website needs its own unique URL, in the form of a dedicated domain name. Reserving a domain name is just part of the process, however. Once you have a name, that name needs to be listed with the Internet's domain name system (DNS) so that users entering your URL are connected to the appropriate IP address where your site is actually hosted. Most website-hosting services will provide DNS services if you provide a unique domain name; some will even handle the registration process for you. You can also go directly to the Network Solutions website (www.networksolutions.com) to register your web address.

Creating Your Website

Once you have a host for your storefront and a domain name registered, it's time for the really hard workcreating your site. If you're handy with HTML and Cascading Style Sheets and have a lot of free time, you can choose to do this work yourself. Or you can bite the bullet and hire a firm that specializes in designing e-commerce websites and pay it to produce the kind of site you want.

If you opt to build your site yourself, you'll need to invest in a powerful website-creation tool. You don't build a complex website using Microsoft Notepad or a freeware HTML editing utility. You need to use a fully featured program, such as

• Adobe Creative Suite (www.adobe.com)

• Macromedia Dreamweaver (www.adobe.com)

• Microsoft FrontPage or its successor programs, Microsoft Expression

  Web Designer and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (www.microsoft.com)

• NetObjects Fusion (www.netobjects.com)

Incorporating E-commerce Software

To power your new storefront, you'll need to incorporate special e-commerce software. This software will enable you to build web pages based on your current inventory, generate customer shopping carts, funnel buyers to a checkout page, and handle all customer transactions. Here are some of the most popular:

• AbleCommerce (www.ablecommerce.com)

• BazaarBuilder (www.bazaarbuilder.com)

• Miva Merchant (www.miva.com)

• Nexternal (www.nexternal.com)

• X-Cart (www.x-cart.com)

Note

You'll also need your new storefront to be able to handle customer payments via credit card. Learn more about enabling credit card processing in Chapter 16, "Managing Customer Payments."

Web Design Firms

If you're not an experienced web page designer, you may be better off hiring someone who is to build your new storefront site. Tons of web design firms are out there, most of them small and local. When it's time to go professional, use the following directories to find a professional web page designer that's right for your needs:

• AAADesignList.com (www.aaadesignlist.com)

• The Firm List (www.firmlist.com)

• The List of Web Designers (webdesign.thelist.com)

Putting It All Together

At the end of the day, what you want is a site that showcases all the products you have to sell, is easy for potential buyers to navigate, provides enough information (including product photos) for buyers to be comfortable ordering sight unseen, offers a shopping-cart system with secure checkout, and lets you collect credit card payments online. Ideally, the site should also link back to your current eBay auctions and eBay Store listings so that everything you have for sale is listed all in one place.

Then, once your perfect e-commerce site is launched, you need to keep it up and runningand monitor it constantly for current sales. You want as much of the operation as possible (including payment and postsales operations) to be automated so that you don't have to do a whole lot of work by hand. And you want the whole thing to be relatively easy to maintain and not cost you an arm and a leg. (Let's face it: As your business gets bigger, you probably don't want to be paying a big cut of your sales to whichever service is hosting or managing your site.)

Sound like a lot to ask? Not really; you should be able to find an e-commerce service that delivers what you need at a reasonable priceor, if your business is big enough, you can just build it yourself. The key is to make sure the site is easy for customers to use and conveys your business's branding in its overall look and design. Once the site is up and running, you can go about the business of promoting it and driving sales through your checkout system.