opening an online shop

[B1984]

If anyone has opened their online shop could you please tell me how to go about it?
What do i need to do first and if you have any good tips i would be very grateful!
Thank you!

bump

I have my own online shop.

You have to buy a domain name and find somewhere to 'host' your shop. I use 1 and 1 , I've been with them nearly a year and not had any problems with them, they often have good deals on web hosting and domain registration.

I have my shop with them, and it's very simple to set up, you choose from various templates etc then just add your items to it.

I do have webpages too, but can't give advice about that as Dp is the technical one in this house and coded all that for me, although I know there are webpage designers on here too.

I know you can buy Mr Site which is a program that sets up a shop for you, but some people I know have had problems with it.

Other than that my only other advice is promote your website as much as you can , there's thousands of pages on google that will advise you. The higher up the rankings the more hits you'll get.

Good Luck

Fasthosts are another that do domain name and free sitebuilder software to build your own website. Its not as hard as it sounds I made my own, and I'm not that good on computers. But if you have a shop, you will probably need an e-commerce website for the payments and 'basket' facilities, I think you would have to get someone to do that for you. HTH. Good Luck.

Looking into it thank you both!

One thing is pretty much guaranteed, unless you have a VERY specific niche you will spend more money promoting your site than you will building it.

It's worth building it with Google in mind rather than going for the cheapest website build option.

The shopping cart aspects are fairly standard these days, what makes you successful is being found by search engines.

Getting a load of search-engine-relevant content is critical, so get writing! You need a relevant library of content, and good incoming links to your site.

I'm going to use this lot

Their basic package is £20 for a year. You get a domain name and web hosting as well as the ability to accept paypal payments. I think it all looks excellent.

I used Mr Site for my webshop and have been more than happy with it. Lot's of people put them down but I really couldn't spend the sort of money web developers wanted for a bespoke site.