Hi! This is part II of E-commerce: How to Start? (go to E-commerce: How to Start? part I)

Asking for quotations to get a company to make your website will take a huge amount of your precious time. It is time-consuming because you will need to explain exactly what features you will need in your website.

Creating your webpages all by yourself is quick and easy with Autoweb Creator free online tools. No need to learn any html language, it’s just user friendly and fun.

So let’s do it by ourselves! Let’s take this opportunity to make more out of life,  just like our grand grand fathers built their house, their shop, their farm in their own time and with their own hands.

What is the risk? What do we have to loose? Not much, really: A domain name costs less than usd 20. It only takes a few minutes to build your website from scratch with free templates at autoweb-creator.com

The difficult part, the one that you cannot buy (because nobody can guarantee such a thing) is the positioning of your website in the search engines results.

However they are ways to put Good Luck on your side:

- Choose a domain name that is keyword rich,

- Key in a quick description of your business.

- Make sure that your homepage is full of text with little code.

- Put a link from your website to an other (quality outbound link)

- Offer internet users to sign up for an alert, so that you can contact them as soon as your shopping website is fully functional.

- Submit your website to the 10 major search engines for indexation.

- Set up a Google Cost Per Click campaign with a very small daily budget.

Each single task above is simple. Just take it step by step. The good news is that you get online assistance from Autoweb Creator if you are stuck.

Smart Tip: Do the above early to gain a bit of profile history.
After that, just let your website’s homepage alone for a few months.

Now, you have time to:
- Become an expert in analyzing other websites titles, body text, bold text, Meta descriptions, H1 headings, links texts.

- Study your competitors’ websites and their link popularity in directories and search engines (Alexa, Google, and Yahoo) as well as in the social marketing websites (facebook, digg, delicious, YouTube).

If you want your shopping website to be amongst the most popular, then you need you website to be of the same caliber than these websites.

Do what they do and you will have what they have. Remember this: “It is possible if you work hard at it.”

Build your mailing list. Time is on your side: While your website is automatically collecting email addresses from your prospects as they sign up for an alert, you are setting up your shopping website in a secret sub page of your website.

Make it easy for yourself, choose a freeware such as OScommerce online shopping platform which is user friendly, easy to install and offers the right options for payments, products pictures etc…

When your website is completely ready, send an email to your email list to let them know the shopping season is opened.
That’s what I call a good launch for your line of products.

About the Author: L Lemaire is a internet business writer and partner of Ellen Clothing Manufacturer. ECM is a French clothing company with a factory in Vietnam. Related article: Start a clothing line from scratch.

How to successfully launch online a new line of products? Yet another one million dollar question!

In this article, the author shares his personal experience in launching Ellen Clothing Manufacturer (ECM) online catalog: www.wholesale-clothing-supplier.com

This article is not targeted solely to business people in the clothing industry, it may be of interest to anybody getting started in the online shopping business.

Various references to the clothing business are made here, if you are not in this industry, simply ignore the references and pay attention to the method used by ECM and approved by Autoweb Creator.

How to start a shopping website successfully?

L Lemaire about the launch of ECM shopping platform.

Here we go again with all these logo drawings you’ve made and those shattered dreams of being your own boss. And apart from these drawings? What do we have?
The thing is these services, products and the way they are designed might be very popular with a certain population and not so popular with another.

So the designs, logos, colors and all aspects of the products (or services) are not in my mind the most important part of the business.

Here we are talking of launching a business. From the day you start your business, it may take a couple of years to become a solid, fully operational, self standing money making machine.

Focusing on the product may result in neglecting the other important parts of the business, the cash flow, the composition of your dream team, the way you lead the company.

Let’s start with the cash flow, without it the business won’t start.
The day you run out of cash, you are out of business.

Therefore, pay special attention to the following and make sure:
- To keep your customers happy and returning to you for more products or services.
- To find new customers who will enjoy a pleasant buying experience at a competitive price.

You are a customer too. Just take inspiration from the successful business and businesspeople of this world.
If you are running a manufacturing business, why not read about Henri Ford, the most successful manufacturer ever.

When it comes to advertising your products and selling them, reading Zig Ziglar or listening to Nightinggale Conant will make a difference.

At the time of writing this article we are in May 2009, and internet has definitely taken its place in our everyday life. If you are selling your products in Ebay, you are probably surrounded by competitors, same goes if you are one of a million showing products on a large shopping website.

My feeling, and also the fact that I have tried such platforms as a way of advertising my products, is that it is difficult to stand out of the crowd on someone else’s website. The reason for this is that you are not in control of the design and the general structure in which your product is presented.

Since running a business from a concrete and mortar shop would mean higher entry and fix costs, and because doing so might result in focusing on a limited location, why not avoid these pitfalls by owning your own shopping website?

Sounds brilliant, no? Right but, how will making my website stand out of millions of websites will be easier than making my products stand out in the middle of EBay?  Well, here, we are talking about taking control of your website and its ranking. This can easily be achieved by getting education.

By getting education I mean obtaining the power of using useful organized information which you actually apply to make your website come up in the best results of the search engines’ research. Start with Autoweb Creator webpages templates to make sure the fondation are sound.
Because of the huge benefit of a good ranking / good qualified traffic (with the credit card at hand), you can imagine that outsourcing this website optimization will be equally big a budget. With Autoweb Creator you can easily get started in seconds and get your webpages online within days.

A good website structure such as the one provided by Autoweb-Creator.com and interesting content (which may be a presentation of your business) is the best way to get started. Read part II of this article very soon and check the To Do List to see how you can successfully launch your online catalog with our step by step guide to online success.