First of all, Happy New Year everyone! Back to topic: I am thinking of opening an online store. Consider making eCommerce website done. Now I have two options: 1) This would involve selling digital products. That would mostly be eBooks, and mostly AdSense and Money Making related. The question is how people actually are willing to buy it? I know that DP members usually DON'T buy eBooks, at least not at satisfactory conversion rate (probably because there are simply too many eBooks). The thing is that those books are not written by me - those are books with master reseller rights. 2) This option, which is significantly harder to achieve, but will eventually (if everything goes fine) bring more money, involves opening an online store that would sell "you-can-touch-it" goods. Take t-shirts for example. The thing is that I have nothing in my "inventory". Should I consider contacting local wholesale shops, buying their goods, packing it up, and shipping it to the customer worldwide? How am I going to ship it? How am I going to pack it? And, most importantly, how am I going to process the payment via credit card? How do I do that (without paypal)? Please note that I had had Number 1) shop before, but even though the price was only 2.99$ per eBook, I sold only 4-5 books. But I haven't advertised it a lot though. Any tips are more than welcomed! Help one newbie here Thanks.
Nice ideas you have got...I also planned a similiar venture but friends inquired and informed me about the complexities in Custom Clearance issues..and matters like that.. So i dropped this idea, anyways if you start an auction store then the members(sellers) will be responsible for shipping "u-can-touch-goods" and I think your life will be much easier then..
You can use a dropshipper for the items in your store. Most dropshippers will provide you with a list of their products, descriptions and pictures that you can upload to your store. You do need to be careful because there are a lot of scam dropshippers out there. A legit one will ask you for your tax ID number before they can sell to you. You can set the store up with PayPal and your customers will have the choice to pay with PayPal or Credit Cards when they get to the payment page. You just need to set up your PayPal account as a business account and then it can be integrated into your shopping cart. Feel free to PM me with any questions.
for the second part, there are a lot of great credit card processor 2 Checkout being my favorite and PayPal is alright, but not for many transactions due to the high fees, 2 Checkout had lower fees. You can always contact American Apparel to design T-Shirts. They work with w00t.com, and wordpress.com on different projects, so they might be open to yours.