Your eBay store and your website are your business

Your web site, Your eBay store is important to your business, success in e-commerce follows a natural progression. There isn’t a quick fix. All business expansion will cost you time and money. When you’re rushing to make the big bucks listing items so fast you can’t count them you can’t possibly learn from your mistakes. Also, expansion costs money, so it only makes sense to make some profit before you spend it. The progression goes like this. One, get started on eBay and get the hang of it (make money). Two, open an eBay store and stock it (make more money). Keep in mind that no one can learn the intricacies of running an online business in a month or two. That said, here’s number three: After you’ve shown some healthy profit, it’s time to expand and invest in your own e-commerce enabled Web site.

Your eBay store is important to your business, but it doesn’t replace an e-commerce Web site. Yes, eBay is an important site (duh) for your sales and store, but so is your own business Web site. You should establish your own presence on the Web. And although you can and should link your site to eBay, don’t miss out on the rest of the Internet population.

You don’t have a Web site yet? The Web has so many sites with pictures of people’s dogs and kids that I just assumed you had your own site, too. The space for a Web site comes free from your ISP. (I even have an embarrassing one with family pictures.) One of these sites can be the practice site for your business. Take down pictures of the baby, and post pictures of items you’re selling or at the very least, install the eBay-To-Go package. You do have a Web site? Have you taken a good look at it lately to see whether it’s up to date? Does it link to your eBay auctions or eBay store? Most small and medium businesses are increasing their online revenue. In a recent survey of small online businesses, 63 percent of respondents have five or fewer employees does that sound like you?

Whether or not you have a Web site, this article has something for you. I provide a lot of detail about Web sites, from thinking up a name to choosing a host. If you don’t have a site, I get you started on launching one. If you already have a site, I give you some pointers about finding the best host. For the serious-minded Web-based entrepreneur (that’s you), I also include some ever-important marketing tips.

Free Web Space a Good Place to Start

Although I love the word free, in real life it seems like nothing is really free. Free generally means something won’t cost you too much money but may cost you a bit more in time. When your site is free, you aren’t able to have your own direct URL (Universal Resource Locator) or domain name.

Having some kind of site at least gives you the experience in setting up the site. When you’re ready to jump in for real, you can always use your free site as an extension of your main business site.

To access the Internet, you had to sign on with an Internet service provider (ISP), which means you more than likely already have your own Web space. Most ISPs allow you to have more than one e-mail address per account. Each e-mail address is entitled to a certain amount of free Web space. Through the use of hyperlinks (small pieces of HTML code that, when clicked, route the clicker from one place to another on the page or on other Web site), you can combine all the free Web space from each e-mail address into one giant Web site.

If America Online (AOL) is your Internet service provider, you may already know that AOL often has some serious issues regarding its users getting e-mail from the rest of the Internet. You can’t afford to run a business in an area that has e-mail issues. Your AOL account gives each of your seven screen names 2MB of online storage space. You can best utilize this space by using it to store images for eBay, not to run a business site. Each screen name, at 2MB, can store fifty 40K images. Many ISPs have their own page-builder (HTML-generating) program that’s free to their users.

Poke around your ISP’s home page for a Community or Your Web Space link. For example, after looking around the Road Runner ISP’s home page, I found and clicked the Member Services link, which led me to a page offering various options. I finally found a Personal Home Page link, which took me to a page that would walk me through setting up my own home page. After agreeing to the Terms of Service, I can simply log on and set up my home page. Road Runner offered me the option of using Microsoft FrontPage, which is considered to be one of the best and easiest Web site–building programs around.

I’ve used Microsoft’s FrontPage in the past, and if you want all its benefits, you need a site that uses FrontPage extensions (portions of the FrontPage program that reside on the server and enable all the HTML magic to happen automatically you don’t have to write in the code). Save the use of FrontPage extensions for hosted Web sites (the ones you pay for) when you have a good deal of allotted space. Installing Microsoft FrontPage extensions on a small Web site like the one that Road Runner provides will take up too many of your precious megabytes. (Yahoo!, however, has them installed for the GeoCities sites, and doesn’t count them as part of your allotted megabyte count.)