This has been a wish of mine for a very long time.  For the past 5 or 6 years I have been developing sites for other people.  I have been doing a little research off and on about the many aspects of having your own e-commerce site.  I’m sure I am going to miss a step or two along the way but it will all be part of the learning process.

Since I already know what products I am selling my next step is to choose a domain name for my store. The name of the store is up in the air. I came up with 2 possible names but need the approval of my partners…my wife and my mom. Choosing a name is a very important step. Search engine wise it can be very helpful to choose a name that includes a keyword or two that encompass what you sell. You can do a search of phrases at Google Adwords to see how often the words you choose are searched.

My next step is to choose a content management system (CMS). There are a number of ways you can have a go at this step. You can choose a canned solution like Yahoo! Small Business, eBay ProStores or Amazon WebStores. The benefit of these in a nutshell is that once you signup and have a few things in order your only worry is populating your store. There are pre-designed templates you can use if you are not design savvy and once your item and section pages are created with a push of a button they are live. The downfalls can also be many depending on the amount of control you want, monthly fees, limited functionality, and poor customer service.

I chose to go with a CMS called Magento. It is an “open source” solution meaning you have complete access to the code of the application and when you or other developers create features for it there’s a great chance you can add it to your system.

In my next step I purchased a hosting account from Host Monster which is an incredibly affordable hosting solution with a plethora of features waiting to be tapped into.  I did some shopping around and thanks to John Dawe had a chance to give the control panel a test drive before getting my own space.  This very domain was hosted on his space until I figured out what I wanted to do.  From my experience so far I highly recommend Host Monster.

Current Status: Installing the CMS and designing the site.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under E-commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.