Beginners Guide to eCommerce - 'Where to Sell'
by Palyn Peterson

Where to sell your products can sometimes be just as important as what products to sell. I'm sure you have heard the phrase, "Location, location, location!" and how true it is.

As a general rule about where to place your business, I would suggest you stay away from the small internet mall sites, and stick with the big names. They may have cheap hosting, but are you really after "cheap hosting"? You are running a business here, not an experiment.

My suggestions for places to sell are Yahoo! Stores, Amazon Z-Shops, EBay Stores, or rent your own secure web hosting.

If you are selling tangible products, I would recommend Yahoo! Stores above all else. Your site will be secure, it will be integrated into a very large mall, they have consumer ratings (if you become a 5-star store, you will sell more), and people trust Yahoo! They charge about $40 a month for a complete package. People go there with the sole intention of buying, and often they already have their credit card information stored on Yahoo!'s servers making it that much easier.  By being part of community like Yahoo! Stores, a large part of your marketing is done for you automatically, which cannot be said for other online malls or buying your own hosting service. For a more detailed review of Yahoo! Stores, see my review in the Products, Services & Tools Reviews section.

Or, just get your own webhosting, like Thirdsphere. Thirdsphere is by far the best web hosting you can get. They are inexpensive, yet have so many features and options its just mind blowing. But even better, their tech support is first class. For a more detailed review of Thirdsphere, see my review in the Products, Services & Tools Reviews section.

With either choice, I would suggest building your web pages from scratch using an HTML editor like Dreamweaver. You can use Microsoft Frontpage, but silly rabbit, Frontpage is for kids. But not everyone is good at designing webpages. If you are interested in running internet busiesses, it would be GREAT if you learned the in's and out's of it, but it isn't for eveyone... In that case, Yahoo! lets you build a store via templates.

But whether or not you use Yahoo! Stores pre-built tempates or import the product data on to a webpage you build yourself, I would still suggest Yahoo! Stores above all else. The reason, they provide a GREAT store and order manager. With their system it is very easy to fulfill orders, send order tracking information, they have a perfect shopping cart, you get detailed stats about your vistors, and more. For the price, Yahoo! Stores is the way to go for selling tangible products.

If you are selling information products, you will probably want to just get web hosting service like Thirdsphere. Why? Because generally you will have only 1 product per domain. And at Yahoo! Stores and the like, you can only have 1 domain per store (not true with a trick I teach you in my Yahoo! Stores review in the Products, Services & Tools Reviews section, but even that trick is NOT good for information products). At Thirdsphere, you can pay a 1 time fee of $10 and have another domain name point to your web hosting account. You can do this unlimited times. So for 1 monthly hosting fee, you can get hosting for unlimited domains? Pretty cool eh? And don't think for a second that you won't use that feature.

Another reason is, for information products you want to use a "shopping cart" or merchant service like Clickbank to sell your information products. Clickbank has a built in affiliate program. They track for you and mail checks for you. It is completely automatic. Affiliates and Joint Ventures are a major player in information product profits, and Clickbank makes all of that easier than ever.

Of course, if you are selling through Clickbank, you are going to need to be able to securely let people download your information product. Check out Protection Generator. It's a great script that protects your information product from theives. Without it you risk your ENTIRE effort and prfits with the product. It's only $34.95, it works GREAT and you get resell rights with it. Check out my review of it in the Products, Services & Tools Reviews section.