How to Setup an Online Store in an Afternoon

A lot of people own small side businesses which they use to make some extra money. Personally ,I do web-development, for others it might be something like creating wooden furniture, making personalized clothing, doing lawn care, or just about anything. Unfortunately the barriers to moving one’s online business is still somewhat high for the non-technical individual. One could fork over hundreds of dollars to a company to set you up an online store, but you can create your own online store in practically minutes! All you’ll have to do is pay a minimal fee (if anything) to get your website hosted.

Before we can begin, you’ll need to have some sort of web site hosting, and have a package called Word Press installed. If your site gets a lot of traffic, you might want to turn to a dedicated hosting package, if you’re just going to get started down the line, look for a service that offers domain hosting.

In most modern web-hosting accounts, you can install Word Press with two or three easy clicks. Word Press is actually a piece of blogging software, but can be transformed into a functional and vibrant online store with a few additions.

After you have your hosting and Word Press install ready to go, you’ll want to download what’s called the WP E-Commerce plugin. This is the piece of software which will run your online store, it’s very simple and easy to use. It allows you to create product pages, online order forms, and provides a useful shopping cart. You can find it using a simple Google search. A set of simple installation steps to follow should come with the files.

Before you configure WP-Ecommerce, you’ll want to get a PayPal account. This is how you’ll receive your payments, they take out a fee, but it’s still much more reasonable than anyone else would charge you online.

Once you have WP-Ecommerce installed, you’ll need to configure WP-Ecommerce. Click on “Shop Options” in the plug-in and fill out all of the necessary info. You’ll need to put in some basic information about who you are and some information about your store. Be sure to go under “Gateway Options” and set your PayPal account to the email address you registered with PayPal, otherwise you might not get paid!

Now that the store is setup, you can go ahead and add items to it using the built-in tool. You’ll also want to create a static front page with some basic information about your site. You can do this from the Word Press Dashboard by going to the options menu, reading options, and then selecting static page. Simply select the page that you’d like to show up on your front-page.
Finally, be sure to create a contact page. Your customers need to be able to reach you if they have questions, this is a must!

It does take a bit of technical expertise to accomplish this task, but most people with a year or two of web experience should be able to figure out setting it up. If not, you can always bribe your technically proficient neighbor with $50 to do it for you. You might throw down a bit of cash, but it’s still going to be a small fraction of what you’d spend if you went to a prepackaged solution online.