Before creating or commissioning your new on-line website there are a few things to check out.
First you will need a Merchant account to be able to accept payment cards, which are mainly debit and credit cards. Merchant accounts are available from most banks or if not they can provide you with a list of their recommended providers. (3rd Party Providers).
With a Merchant account you can collect payments from customers all over the world, but accounts are not free, they, do come at a cost and usually there is a set up fee, a set monthly fee and a set transaction fee. We advise you to shop around as some companies offer no set up fee and low start fees. But make sure you remember these extra fees when pricing your products for sale.
Try to get a name that features the product or services you are selling so if its shoes it could be sallysfashionshoes.com. For UK customers choose either .uk or .co.uk for the world customers choose a .com.
Don’t just jump in and press the go button on your new website just yet as you need to try and find a niche market place to aim your shop at. We will do more on this in another one of our blogs later.
Next you will need to decide if you are going to create your own website or commission a developer to create one for you. There are many themes you can buy cheap and create yourself, Wordpress, Shopify, PrestaShop, Magento and 100’s more. Then it’s a case of sitting down and following instructions, it can be a little hard at first.
With a developer it will be a week to a months work depending on size, but ready to go live and most developers will do the start up marketing for you to get you going.
Starting & Running Your Own On-Line Website, is a lot easier and cheaper than most people think.
