As the economy dwindles and the cost of living rises, we have to start being adventurous and try out new things or businesses to supplement our income. To start traditional business like a retail store or whatever, you will need substantial capital and time investment. A good alternative that lets you carry on with what you doing, low risk and low capital investment is to start an online store.
Starting an online store is easy and anyone with a little bit of knowledge on how web sites work will be able to start one without much problem. What we are saying here is not the kind of online business which you normally see, that would involve huge capital, manpower and special expertise. We are more interested on a business that we can do as a sideline and which do not need us to spend too much time attending to it. Along this line, the best business we can start online is an affiliate store.
There are many sites that offers affiliate programs that lets you sell that their items on a commission basis. Major stores like Amazon dot com and giant online store, eBay are two of the most popular choice. Both these giant online stores lets you showcase items of your choice in your very own online store which you are solely responsible in developing.
There are programs that will automate the setting up stores for ebay affiliates that will cost less then 100 USD. Consider this as capital investment. The other costs involve will be a domain name that suits what you are selling. This cost about 10 USD. If you already have a hosting account that lets you host multiple domains, then you can save about 200 USD on hosting fees. Else, include this sum into your start up capital. In all you would have spent around 300 dollars. That is a very low start up capital for a a full fledged online business. The program that you have bought lets you start unlimited stores so the next store you start will even cost you less if you have signed up fo an unlimited domain hosting account.
The problem now is to do some promotions and apply SEO to the stores so people looking for the kind of items you sell can see your store when the do a search. This is the hardest part, but if what you sell is very specialize and not many others are selling the same thing, the chances are high.
The main thing is not to expect thousands of dollars in commissions from the stores. Make a modest target of say, 50USD per month for each store. What polished marketers do is they have more than 50 stores. Some who are in it full time have 100s of them. They too know that they won’t make enough from one store, but if one store makes 50 per month, then 50 stores will make them 2,500. That is almost a full time income.
The reason they can manage so may stores is because these stores, once up and running, needs no maintenance. You just leave it there and check on it once a while to see how it is doing.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Favoured
Ah pek, does this means, the products that are sold by the shops are actually other people’s stuff?
And we don’t have to come up with our own stocks?
Just Simple
Definitely yes. We just earn the commission and the sign up fees for those who sign up with them to buy their products. Take a look at one of my stores:
http://unplugthewire.com
I sell guitars there. That is my seventh store. I have plans for 50 initially selling everything under the sun that people needs. If I can manage the 50, then I’ll go for more.
Volume is the key here becos not every store is going to do he same sales.