Build your own online stores and make money selling your own products

Building an online store is not a big deal these days. You can use any of the shopping cart CMS available in the market rather than writing one from scratch to build your online store in minutes and start selling your products. I have seen many web developers writing themes and plugins and selling it online and making good money. There are many template vendors like Elegant Themes, Woo Themes, Studiopress, Gabfire, Headway who are selling good and making money online.

Steps to start your own online shopping mall

Decide and design your product

First you need to get your products ready for sale. You need to design products which has some USP and have to be useful for your customers. If you are a good programmer, you can write templates, plugins or add-ons and start your online shopping mall. You can also hire developers to get your products done if you are not into development. Its not mandatory that you can sell only themes and plugins online, but you can think of other products that you can deliver online like E-books, content writing, review writing, and many other options available. You do not need to have 100′s of products to start with. You can slowly add new products as you develop or come across. You should make sure that your products are tested well, probably you can ask your friends to give test it and give their valuable feedback well before you put it for sale. Its very important that your customers are happy with your products and recommend your products to others or your business will be a failure. You should always think about a long run and establishing your brand and name online.

Setting up your shopping mall

• CMS -There are many readymade shopping mall scripts like Multishop, ShopScript, osCommerce, PHP Shopping Script, etc. You can find more shopping scripts here. Install the script your server with a good domain name and customize it. Do all the settings to make it work the way you want it to be before you go online. I recommend you to install the script you a local server and test it well before you go online.
• Payment Carts – You will find options to add the different payment methods like Paypal, Moneybookers, Credit Cards and other online payment systems inside the shopping carts, so you do not need to worry much about that. Once the payment is transferred, you will be able to transfer the money to your bank account.

Marketing your shopping mall

You will have to get customers to your shopping mall which is the toughest part, but I feel, if you run an affiliate program sharing your profit with others, then it should not be a problem. You can start an affiliate program using affiliate management scripts like PAP4, which is very robust. You can also go for an Adwords campaign, social media marketing, twitter marketing, writing guest posts, reviews, article marketing to get started. If your products is standing out and has some USP, then you will be surely successful. Design excellent banners and add to your affiliate banner section for your affiliates to promote your products.

Providing support to your customers

Another very important factor is to provide support to your customers. Your customers will only be happy if you respond to their queries and sort out their problems in time. You can use support centre (has knowledge base section also) for managing emails of your customers and Live Agent for providing live chat support. If you are close to your customers, you will surely win their support in promoting your products and getting referral sales.

If you are not ready to manage your affiliates directly, then you can use clickbank or E-Junkies which has its own tracking system.