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I want to take you step-by-step through building a web site, from beginning to end. To help those of you on the fence, or confused. The site we are creating today is going to be a web store, selling wholesale products, or even your own.

1. The first step will be to register a domain name and purchase hosting, this is the main spending you will do. I recommend StartLogic as a great host, I have all of my sites registered with them, and the hosting is much less than other hosting companies. I have never had any downtime or issues with support.
   

   

   Always choose the yearly or two year option, you will not get a good google page rank if you are not on at least a yearly host, as it shows longevity, and that you will be around- with a month to month plan, you look more stable and will have more authority. (Which is VERY important if you expect to make money.)

2. Once you are registered and set up, you will get an email with your login information, the address is usually something like yourdomainname.com/cpanel for the first few days you will have a domain name like 123.43.6543.com/cpanel while they register the domain name and set it up. You can now log in with one of the addresses from the email and see your options on cpanel.
   

   

3. Ok, so we are setting up a web store, the option we need to choose is the “Applications” the choose the “e-commerce” option. From here you can choose one of two shopping carts to install, my favorite is Agora because of its ability to customize. So, for the purpose of this tutorial, let’s choose the Agora cart option.
   
   When you fill out the form below, if you don’t put anything in the top box it will be installed in the home directory (example - blank to field = http://yourdomainname.com - “store” in top field = http://yourdomain.com/store ) If you choose the /store option you will need to design a index.html page that will point to the /store page.
   

   

   You may need to login twice, sometimes it will make you, sometimes it wont.

4. Once you have it installed, choose ‘admin_interface’ and login with the info you set when you installed the cart.
   
   Once we are logged in, choose “Product Add” from the top menu. Now lets enter a test product.

   

   

   Once you have added your first product, a sentence will appear at the top of the form “Product number 00011 has been added to the catalog.” Click on the product number and you will see this:

   

   So, it is not very pretty yet. But lets get back to the main menu by choosing “Done Adding Products”. Lets choose the “Payment Gateway” menu option. Here you have a few options, really the only things you need to worry about are if you accept checks and money orders, discover and mastercard, shipping options, and any text on the mentioned pages at the bottom of the page. One you are done adding you can click done and you will given the main menu up top.
   This time let’s choose “store Layout” go through and play with these options until you find one you really like, testing after each change. Do a search for Agora Templates to see if you can find a template you like for your store. There are a lot of sites on customizing your store so I will not go into detail on design.
   Make sure to visit the Agora Cart page to learn how to easily set up your payment processor and find neat tools and downloads to make your site setup easier. You will need to add in products, either from your own home, or from a wholesale company.
   Some recommended suppliers of wholesale drop shipping companies are Doba.com, Liquidation.com, MegaGoods.com, and Sunrise Wholesale. Fees and membership fees vary so make sure to compare them all to be sure you get the right one for you.

So thats it, aside from setting up your payment gateway, store layout, and adding products you are ready to go. Coming soon will be setting up a paypal shopping cart tutorial. Let me know if you have any questions.

Posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 8:48 am in Working at Home, Business Advice | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback