Guide to Selling your own Product Online

Great customer service. Great value - is it really going to bring value to ones life?

If it's a physical product, do you have all the shipping and handling ready?

Do you know all your numbers? What unit sales you need to break even? All the costing? etc... You would be suprised how many people mess up here.

Do you have an auto-responder service set up - or any type of follow-up marketing strategy?

Other than that, don't try get it 'perfect' just get it going.

Thanks .... I got most of these things that you mentioned...I might check out if there is like an ebook or a book online that can lay out these things for me so I will be sure Im not forgetting anything.

Building traffic to the site is going to be your real struggle. I wouldn't stress about the small stuff. You could even start out as a dropshipper, that way you don't have to worry about the shipping and handling. If you spend months getting your products in order, organizing the shipping, building the site, etc. it's going to take many more months from that point to drive traffic to the site through SEO. If you're not doing SEO, you have to have the money to invest in media buys or PPC. My main point is, start focusing on getting traffic now by setting up a simple solution like using a dropshipper. Later on you can begin to grow your business into something more substantial.

I agree that for the most part you should just work on getting it going right now. Too many times people get caught up in the small details and trying to perfect everything. I wouldnt even worry about setting up the business name yet personally. There will be time to do that once the sales are rolling in. I'd focus on getting the site up and the traffic to the site. From there, the rest is much easier.

I'm not a lawyer so there is no reason you should ever listen to me or take my advice under any circumstances...

However, I HAVE set up and run a business selling physical products on the internet.

Assuming you are selling a product that already exists and not something you created yourself (involving patents, etc.) my first piece of advice would be to try to sell a few items on Ebay and see if people are willing to pay for what you're selling.

Next, you need to look up the laws in your state (if you're in the US) and see what's required to start a business there as every state is different. In California, where I live, you would contact the California State Board of Equalization.

In Oregon, you don't have to do anything! (or, so I was led to believe).

You will also need to look into establishing your fictitious business name (usually, that means running an ad in a physical newspaper announcing that fact).

Open a bank account under your business name (the fictitious name you established before) and you're good to go.

I think...

Basics are...

1. Website - sales page that converts visitors into buyers. It doesn't matter how much traffic you get, if their attention is captured in the first few seconds and a message to market match is not made that fulfills their desire - nothing will happen (which is the norm to be honest...this takes some work, some insight and some testing)

2. Your payment processor - Paypal is fine.

3. List Building - start with an autoresponder (to manage collection of email address) and a strategy for a give away to incent list signups out of the gate - typical websites convert under 1% of cold traffic as buyers but can convert upwards of 25% onto a list that can be turned into a much higher percentage of buyers. Each day you operate your online business without the list building piece you are throwing away a good portion of your marketing effort/dollars

4. Start a blog as one of the leading methods you will build traffic and a relationship with your market to feed your sales page leads

5. While not mandatory immediately, consider a platform that will allow you to manage your own affiliate program so you can leverage the authority, lists, contacts and marketing power of more established sites...this can easily be the quickest way to build profits and a reputation online

6. You will also need a well designed, compelling product graphic - this along with your title and web page become your primary selling tools online.

Hope this helps,

Jeff

thanks guys for the advice...I am selling the product already as an affiliate so I know how well it sells...so my next move is to sell my own product and I already have a supplier in contact....I will check out the rules here in AZ about starting up your own business...

You need concern about variety of payment methods and not only one.
You need to concern of the security of your site while thinking that you need ssl and truste to build trust to your customers.
You need concern about how your products been categories.
You need concern that how you charges on and will it get tax.
You need to know who is your target market and how to reach them.