What storefront is best for me?
By Brendan Fitzpatrick
There is almost an unlimited number of storefronts available for you to make money off of. Be careful, there are plenty of sites that are looking for you to signup to sell a t-shirt to 10 of your bowling buddies fully knowing that you won’t be able to sell more. If you’re a beginner and are looking for a simple sale then sites such as cafepress.com might be ideal.
However, if you are beyond the hype and have a semi legit product that you want to sell online then you want to stay away from storefronts and hosted solutions. The choice now is “do I want to pay $1,000’s to my business?” or do I want to spend “$100’s or less for my idea?” .. Assuming that you care about an idea vs. a real business I will dig into the options as follows:
1. ebay.com is always a great starting point to sell products online initially
2. craigslist.org is a great resource to find local buyers, ideal for oversized products that are not cost effective for shipping purposes.
3 drop shipping companies (ie. doba.com) are ideal when setting up a free open source solution (such as oscommerce.com).
4. if you’re a legitimate local business with several $1,000’s profit per year then you probably fit somewhere in between open source and a paid solution. Unless you are looking to expand your product line in a niche way then you probably wan to stick with an open source type solution.
5. It’s very, very expensive to customize a storefront. Unless you have $1,000’s to pay for a custom site and the legitimate potential for growth the be aware.