The Retail Business Model, part 2

Shipping: Keep in mind you're going to have to mail whatever it is you sale. If it's the size of a small horse, that could be problematic. But if you're just throwing CD's, or DVD's into a shipping package than that's something else.

Cost of the product(s): Unless you are going to drop ship (which can be a great way to go and will be covered in an upcoming page) your items, you are first going to need to buy them. If they are high-end or just expensive items all that money is going to first have to come out of your pocket. Something to definitely keep in mind.

Okay, once you've figured out what you're going to sell and who your supplier is going to be, the next thing you need is a web site to sell it on. And you need a little more than just a regular web site (as with the Advertising based business model). You need one that allows people to put the products they want to buy into a shopping card (shopping cart software) and a way to accept credit cards (an online Merchant Account).

We're going to cover both these things in just a few pages. However, if you don't want to build your eCommerce web site from scratch there are a couple of really sweet options out there for you. They are outsourced retails stores and they are pretty much ready for you to upload your products into and start selling.

In many cases, using one of the following turn key stores makes a lot more sense than creating one from scratch. When you create one from scratch you need to: 1) Design the web site itself 2) Set up shopping card software and 3) Set up a merchant account. The three options below do all three of those things for you, which is nice.