[smellymelly]

I have an idea for a website to start selling selected goods. However, I have no idea where to start to get the wheels moving. Where can I build my on-line site? Which is the best host? Do I need to register my company? Where can I find retailers?

Any help at all would be greatly appriecated

[Jeka911]

Best hosting: http://commonacre.com/
Find freelancer to develop n design: rentacoder.com
No company needed. (with small website).

[akula]

any kind of help kind of gonna ruin all the fun

google kind of questions

[youngmoneyblog]

are u getting items wholesale?

welcome to YE and good luck!

[Brandon MacKenzie]

Firstly, welcome to the forum

hostgator is probably your best bet for hosting. You can get an e-commerce site anywhere; off ebay, scripts, or get someone to build you it. You also need to buy a domain name (about $10).

If you want to build and maintain the site on your own then download a program similar to dreamweaver off the net.

Or you could just start selling your products on ebay, and if they sell you could upgrade to an anchor store or something. Just don't invest hundreds into a market that is probably already saturated.

Good Luck!

[Slevin]

Host Gator (or Host Gator if you don't want me to get commision ) for hosting, very cheap + good customer support. You will get a free domain with that.

Then depending on your budget either buy a web designer (who will code aswell) or design it yourself. HTML, CSS, and PHP arent hard to learn really.

Depending on your income you may have to register your company

What do you mean by retailers?

[Rose Marry]

Hi,
Finding the best host for your company's Web site is one of the most important steps when taking your business online. Not only will your host be responsible for placing your company's site on the Internet; it will also be responsible for keeping it there and available to potential customers.

However there are thousands of Web hosting companies with even more Web hosting plans, and it can be confusing when trying to compare offerings by separate companies. When you reach this point it is crucial that you understand exactly what it is you're looking for, and what Web hosting services or companies to avoid.

TopHosts.com is an online resource that helps businesses learn about and compare Web hosting companies. TopHosts.com helps you determine the issues you need to be aware of when choosing hosting services, and you can use their free database of hosts to develop a short list of the ideal compani es to meet your site's needs.

[Website Studio]

Selecting a domain can be as cheap as $8, keep a look out for domains that expire be it a .com or .co.uk there may be something that is suited to your business model that may have some exisitng traffic. A kickstart like this can only help. If you have some sort of budget you may even look at purchasing a domain that is already in use by another registrant.

When selecting your host, be sure that the level of support is 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Nothing worse than your site going down on a Saturday morning and nobody answering your support tickets until 9am on Monday. Also consider what geographic location that you are marketing too. Combine this with a server hosted in the same location. i.e if you're marketing to just the UK, make sure your hosts' server is in a UK datacenter. This not only helps with speed but some say it can affect your SE ranking.

I am slightly biased on the website design front, but shop around and pay somebody to do this for you. It is fun to learn and build a site from scratch, but the learning process can sometimes been long and errors however small will affect the success of your business.

Once your site is up and running look at the many options for marketing online and offline. Set yourself a budget for marketing and keep to this until such time you have gathered enough information to see which form of marketing worked best. If it workd well, keep it going, if it didn't, bin it. Be sure to let a campaign work over a long enough period of time for you to gauge its success properly. make sure the campaign included weekends, holidays, sunny days, big events on TV etc, these can all have an effect.

Hope that this info helps, please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions

[softball8624]

I am having a friend build me a site to sell drop shipped goods. I am getting them mostly from bnrdistribution.com . all thier stuff is cheaper then ebay so there is a nice profit for me

-Sam

[F360]

Originally Posted by akula

any kind of help kind of gonna ruin all the fun

google kind of questions

Thats a good point, and alot of the Q's asked here are easily answered via google in a few seconds...... (maybe not this one though). It's been stupid the amount of simple/un-entrepreneur-related questions around here lately.

[yenamon]

no question is stupid, first rule to entrepreneurship (well, if not first, it's sure to be up there, somewhere)

[thehunter]

www.openhost.co.nz give you database hosting for as little as 6.99 + GST per month. If you know or are keen to learn web developement you can also for free plug in an OSCommerce online store into this hosting package. I used this host after much research for my own website, plus they had a good review in the NZ PC World magazine.