Singapore Expats

Hi all.. do any of u know how to start a online shop.. Like what should i do? Who should i look for? How much will it cost? etc etc.. Thankz

what are you going to sell?
your capital?
logistics?

eBay already has such facilities to facilite seller to put their stuff via the ebay site. All the expensive cost like online credit card payment methods, server hosting, website maintainece, transaction tracking & sales report will be taking care by them. All you need is just to login to ebay to post item that you wanted to sell. However, charges apply for each success auction,and the ebay unable to customised according to your request.

This is idea for the starter who don't have much capital, as the ebay don't charge until transaction succeed.

Vynn wrote:Hi all.. do any of u know how to start a online shop.. Like what should i do? Who should i look for? How much will it cost? etc etc.. Thankz

hi there...
friend of mine is a freelance ...
price is good n reliable...
i just got him to develop my website also hehe...

Vynn wrote:Hi all.. do any of u know how to start a online shop.. Like what should i do? Who should i look for? How much will it cost? etc etc.. Thankz

Hi, setting an online business is easy nowadays, but making it success requires a lot of hard work and time.

1. If you have already thought of what you going to sell, first you have to do is think of a website address. Try to think of a name that is as short as possible and as descriptive as possible.

2. After knowing what website address you going to use, you need choose a reliable hosting company, talking about reliable mean their monthly server uptime, stability and the most important is how good is their support. I can recommend you a few which are resellerzoom.com, piwebhosting.com. Been using these 2 hosting company for a year, Price is affordable and great so far.

3. Web design, hire someone who can design a professional website for you. If you can do it yourself by all means. Or you can buy templates from templatemonster.com. Whether you want a sophisticated database driven website or just a simple displaying website is up to what you going to put up there.

- Do you want to have customer profile store in your database? Transaction history etc.. If yes, you need some programming for your website, I'll recommend PHP, a very fast and easy to use programming. Widely use now for professional websites.

4. Choose a merchant, a payment processor. How do you want your customers to pay for your products? Accept credit cards? A few to recommend...

a. Paypal.com :

Pros: Is free to sign up and use the service, customers can pay by credit cards, check or by paypal itself. Bank wire fee is very low and fast. Support shopping cart.

Cons: Support is under average, many charge backs occurrences.

b. E-gold.com :

Pros: Is free to sign up and use the service. Low rates. Support shopping cart.

Cons: Customers can only pay by e-gold and withdrawal you need to use another e-currency exchange.

c. 2checkout.com :

Pros: stable Company since 1999. Need one time setup fee of $49. Acceptable rates. Support shopping cart.

Cons: Only payout on 1st and 16th of the month.

5. After you have set up everything on your website and really to launch to the world... here comes the challenge.... ADVERTISE.

- How are you going to advertise your website??? There are trillion of websites in the net how people are going to notice you?????????

- How much are you willing to fork out for advertising???? If you are a pro in Search engine optimize, than congrat to you else you need to do extra hard in advertising.

ALWAYS REMEMBER ONE THING, you want to have a successful online business you need to keep advertising... You need to get a lot of unique hits per day for your site... NO UNIQUE HIT PER DAY = NO POTIENTIAL CUSTOMER.

For example out of 100 unique visitors visit your website you get 1 of them to buy your products. So 1000 unique visitors will get you from 1-10 customers and you do the math after that... SO HITS HITS HITS are very important for an online business.

Word of mouth is very powerful for online business too, make sure you have good business ethic and service. You can see results in a very fast time.


Hope it helps and good luck for you online business.

The easiest way to get started small is by selling on EBay. Set up your web pages and create a web presence so you can direct traffic to it but start your sales on EBay. See how the other companies do it.

The advantages are two: It is cheap to get started, and millions of people go to Ebay and search for what they are looking for. You'll have much better exposure than trying to promote a website that nobody will every come to.

Take Strong eagle's advise and remember there is a whole range of online shops, from Amazon alike to the occasional basic shop selling viagra pills in an obscure way. Guess Amazon spends millions on maintaining its site, whereas viagra.com probably did it for less than a dollar....

It's like saying I wanna buy a car, what will it cost me.

Eric

i think ppl here are still not used to the idea of buying things online...they will only look for cheap stuffs. Most prefer to go out and shop for stuffs instead. All these are based on my experience as an ebay/yahoo auctions seller

The majority of internet traffics are still revolving around usa, then europe.
However, things changing fairly fast for asia.

I won't be surprise that in 5 years time, asia might play catching up with rest of world (singapore, yes definitely)

It never be too early to setup an ecommerce site. it takes time to get your site known.

vandals wrote:i think ppl here are still not used to the idea of buying things online...they will only look for cheap stuffs. Most prefer to go out and shop for stuffs instead. All these are based on my experience as an ebay/yahoo auctions seller

true but then....at this moment i tink better dun invest too much....my adidas stuffs which i sold last time only manage to sold at 50% the price of outside...too expensive those singaporeans only ask for fun...its those foreigners that buy most of my stuffs..so i have to agree with you on that

I think customers who buy from auction sites such as Ebay or Yahoo tend to be bargain hunters, where as those who buy from e-commerce sites are willing to pay a 'fair price'. So perhaps what you need Vandals is your own e-commerce site. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a customer base, but in the long run, its much better than trying to sell widgets thru auctions. And your widgets are out there 24/7, you don't have to keep relisting them.

Might be a good idea to join a mall with some established traffic, like MSN shopping but make sure you can also promote your site outside the mall.

hmmm how much does it cost to set up an e-commerce site? is it very expensive? i have never heard of msn shopping le care to elaborate?

MSN shopping is the shopping portal of the search engine MSN.com.sg, but it may be a bit too expensive for newbies. I managed to find only one more e-mall in Singapore called can.com.sg?
Can't recommend one or the other as I have never use their services since I live overseas.

One last tip : If you do decide to go-ahead, try to get behind those closed doors of online business forums where all the e-tailers (mostly Americans) congregate, compare notes and share ideas. If you can't beat them, might as well join them and pick their brains too...

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Anyone want to meet up to discuss?