Hi, I'm thinking about selling some electronic gadgets online and was wondering if folks that have been running Ecommerce stores already can give me some advice. What types of things do I need to prepare for? DO i need to sign up for shipping accounts with Fedex and UPS? Do I need a merchant account with Visa..etc? How much of a profit margin should I consider when selling my product? Other advices. Thank you
First of all you need to make a very good attractive website to sell any products online. Following things are the required for that: 1. Shipping Account Signup - This is not compulsory as you can handle it offline also but most of the shopping carts are providing 2-3 shipping options to their customers. 2. Merchant ID for payment gateway integration. Hope this helps..
Also you should install SSL certificate to provide protection to your customers, they should feel safe while executing transaction through your website.
1) research your product, is it too competitive? will i make enough? You need at least a 100% markup to make it 2) pricing your product 3) setup your company structure, get a business credit card 4) set up site with SSL, rapidsslonline.com is by far the cheapest 5) signup for a merchant acct is a must. (look out for cancellation fees, monthly statement fee should be $10, gateway fee $15, ask what the midqualified rate is 2.25% is good, with .25c per transaction fee, DO NOT FALL FOR QUALIFIED RATES, these are only for brick and mortar stores where the credit card is on hand) 6) add paypal, google checkout, amazon checkout 7) get a toll free number if u in the US 8) yes signup with a shipping company 9) build links everywhere: social bookmarking, article marketing, directories, etc.
If you don't have signficant capital for inventory I would switch products all together. Electronics are ridiculously competetive and is dominated by the few large websites with huge budgets and buying power. Try a more niche product category.
Electronics are not only competitive, but margin lower, you need to make sure you have high turnover. Not to say, fraud rate for this category is higher.
Get a server, put a script up like osc or magento then upload products - setup your fedex and payment processing accounts and then sell sell sell using seo, sem and smm
use only paypal to do transaction because it's save...chinavasion is best dropshipper and wholesale from china because they accept paypal and has much pleased customer...
Actually paypal is not that safe. I hear that they get hacked into a lot. I had a friend get their account hacked into and they took a pretty good sum of money taken out. When he called PayPal to report this, Paypal themselves actually told him that Paypal is a 'virtual account' and not 100% safe so they should not store their balance on there for too long. All Paypal could do was stop the hacker from taking any more money out but they could not and would not retrieve or reimburse the money that was already taken out. I think the safest would be to get credit card processing going.
You need merchant account, drop ship account, SSL certificate, hosting and software code for running the shopping cart and taking care of the backend order fulfillment process. I wonder if there is a flowchart or roadmap somewhere for someone wanting to start anew in ecommerce.
Thanks everyone for sharing so far. It's making me think a little harder about what I plan on doing. So I'm spending more time planning before I go out and start building a site and adding products. All the information has been great so far.