Opening an online shop, general tips?

Bryony84

As a professional web developer I am looking to use my skills to bring in some extra income for myself. I enjoy selling on eBay, just stuff I find around the house that is no longer needed at the moment, but this got me thinking about opening an online store. A friend opened an eBay store several months ago and is doing very well out of it now.

I've done some research and have 2 possible product groups that I am thinking about selling (I won't go into what they are on here), but I would be planning to sell through eBay, Amazon and my own website which I can put together myself easily and cheaply.

I was wondering if anyone who has an online shop has any tips for starting out, stock levels etc. Would I be better off doing just eBay/Amazon for a few months and then opening my online store?

mkooo

There is a lot of work involved to get a website set up, and to get traffic/constant traffic to the website, however ebay is relatively simple. So i would go for that. And slowly work on introducing the website, as that will in the long run probably bring you more custom.

Bryony84

Hi mkooo, I know there is a lot of work involved, I'm a web designer/developer as my day job so that side of things isn't a problem. It was more from a point of view of stock volumes than anything else that I was considering doing the website as stage 2 as it were. An eBay shop would be fine with maybe 20 items to start off with, which would then grow as the shop does, but a retail website with only 20 items may look a little sparse.

InsideInsurance

There are many sites with less than 20 products and they do just fine.... look at insurance companies for a start!.

"Web designers" come in many breeds from those that can make something look very pretty to those that have a deep understanding of SEM etc. Where are you fitting on the spectrum?

The question of stock will depend a lot on what you are selling and to whom. Generally, the more stock you buy the cheaper the unit price becomes but you dont want to end up with 10,000 chocolate tea pots nor to buy 5,000 iPad2s only for it to be announced the next day that the iPad3 is out and the 2 is discontinued. The more stable your market, the more certain you are of your product then generally the bigger discounts are worth getting.

Bryony84

Ok, I see the point about number of products, but these are small, relatively low cost items rather than services, if that helps.

I'm a web designer and developer, for the company I work for as a day job I design sites, build w3c standard code as well as working with php xml and mysql, SEO optimise sites. My knowledge of SEM isn't what I would call deep (we have a search marketing exec for that) but all the information they get from the latest Google information/recommendations/algorithms gets passed on to me to implement so I know enough to be able to do some decent SEO work on the site.

The market I've chosen is a growing one, and the items (at least initially can be pretty low cost. I had initially thought to stock 20 or so 'popular' items (after some further researching) and run these through eBay/Amazon as a starting point and then move on from there.