by Claudia Bruemmer

Over 300 million consumers are buying goods online worldwide and this number is increasing on a daily bases. After being wary of buying online for years, consumers are finally comfortable buying merchandise online. Online shopping was made attractive by sites like Amazon, Overstock, Zappos, ShoeBuy and eBay offering free or low-cost shipping and low prices. Every day, people of all ages are buying goods like software, books, music, videos, flowers, electronics, office supplies and more on the Internet.

Whereas traditional retail operations are growing at about 4.5% annually, online sales are growing at a rate of 28%! It’s easy to see why people are buying online rather than driving to a brick and mortar store because of the convenience and time savings.

This is good news for every person who always wanted to be in business. With an online store, you can compete nationwide or globally. The important first step is to do some market research and decide what products would be easy to sell and ship. The next step is to create a professional online presence. With the right knowledge, tools and motivation, almost anyone can be successful online.

The cost of starting an online business, or moving your business online, is relatively inexpensive although there are some startup costs. You need a well-designed, well-functioning website and some savvy marketing skills. Let’s look at how we can cost effectively start an online store.

Putting up a website can involve a lot of time and money if you are not knowledgeable and don’t know what it takes. One way to avoid the hassle of putting up your own website is to become a store owner on eBay.

With an eBay Store you have all the advantages of a website without having to build it yourself. Once established on eBay, you have a unique Internet address. Your website address or domain name can be promoted to gain high rankings in the search engine results pages.

To establish an eBay store, you must register your account as a seller on eBay. You can follow a step-by-step process to become an eBay seller. The first 30 days is free, and then you pay a monthly fee. You can add items to your store inexpensively with a user-friendly template.

Once your online presence is established on eBay, it’s important to market your store and its products. EBay offers a menu of management items for promoting your store. First, you want to make your store searchable by search engines. Then, you want to choose relevant keywords for your store and its products to help search engines rank your store in their databases.

People search with keywords on search engines, and the engines want to find relevant websites for those search queries. So the more keywords you can generate that will be used by people searching for your products, the more chances you’ll have of getting visitors to your site.

Google has billions of websites in its database. Using the keywords you want to be found for in your website content will help Google bring visitors to your site. If you sell Avia walking shoes, for example, you can use avia, shoes, walking shoe, running shoe, tennis shoes, walkers, etc. in your content. You can never guesstimate all the keywords words people use to find your products. That’s why you should look up your main keyword (Avia walking shoes) in a keyword suggestion tool to see what terms people are using when they search for this product. Then select your keywords from that list.

In addition to the promotions available from eBay, there are other low cost methods you can use to promote your site, a few of which are listed below.

• Create a Facebook Fan page
• Tweet special offers on Twitter
• Solicit customer reviews on Yelp
• List your business on Google Maps and Yahoo! Local
• Create and distribute newsworthy press releases
• Look for free online classified ad opportunities
• Create a business sig file with a link to your site for your email messages
• Create business cards
• Create promotional flyers for posting on bulletin boards at various offline businesses

In closing, consumers are comfortable buying online and prefer that to shopping at the mall because of the convenience and time savings. Since online sales are growing at a faster rate than traditional retail sales, it’s a natural to consider opening an online store.