Selling products online is one of the many ways to make money on the internet. It sounds like you have already researched a market, found a supplier, and have a fulfillment process planned. Now you want to get a website up and running.

As I have mentioned before, there a several different ways to approach selling products online. One is to go with what I like to refer to as a Store-In-A-Box solution such as Yahoo Small Business or ShopSite.com. These solutions make it easy to get a basic store up and running but as you grow you may find that there are things you want to do with your site that you just can't get done with these services. Then you will be forced to move your site to a more robust and customizable solution. If you are interested in a step by step guide to building a Yahoo Store then I recommend a product called Online Store Profits. I have personally reviewed this product and find it to be the best guide to building a Yahoo Store.

Now let's assume you have plenty of time, you consider yourself to be technical (or ready to learn), and you want to have full control over your store and have plenty of room for growth. Well, there are several steps you will need to take to get your store online:

1. You will need a domain name. You can read one of our previous articles on Choosing a Good Domain Name.

2. You will need to find a company to host your website. Basically there needs to be a computer that you put your files on that allows people to access your files from the internet. There are many different plans available ranging from a shared hosting solution to a dedicated hosting solution. A shared hosting solution is where one computer has many different websites on it. You just get to use a small piece of the computer and share resources with everyone else. A dedicated server is where you have the entire machine for you own use and you do not share machine resources. You will need to decide what level of service you want and then find a reliable company that provides that service at a reasonable price. A wonderful resource for finding a good hosting company is http://www.findmyhost.com/. I currently have several websites as well as a dedicated server hosted with Superb.net. I have had good luck with this company but I urge you to do your homework and find a company that will work best for you.

3. You will need a shopping cart. Many hosting companies provide a shopping cart for you for an additional monthly charge. This is usually a good way to go but it requires you to do extra homework in the previous step. You will not only have to find a host that provides you with the functionality you need but that host will have to offer a shopping cart that meets your needs. Zen Cart, OsCommerce, and X-Cart are all excellent carts that will meet the requirements for most of you. I am not a big fan of Miva Merchant but that is just based on my personal experience. You must do your homework.

4. You will have to decide how you are going to collect payments on your cart. Many new store owners get started with Paypal and this is an acceptable starting place. The good news is that it is pretty easy to move from Paypal to another solution so you can feel comfortable starting there to keep things as simple as possible initially. Do keep in mind that if your sales volume starts significantly increasing you could trigger some paypal flags and they can disable your account without notice. Yes, any merchant account can do this to you. Business is suddenly exploding and the next thing you know your merchant account has shut you off. Now what? Panic sets in. How do I know this? Because it happened to me. My second Christmas online one of my retail sites had sales explode and my merchant account company informed me that I had suspicious activity on my account because sales had drastically increased. I explained it was Christmas and this was a retail site but they didn't care. I had to quickly find a new provider and the previous provider held my funds for 90 days before releasing them. The point of telling you this is to understand what the rules are for the company you choose. Do you have a maximum amount you can process monthly? Can the company just turn you off without notice? Ask lots of questions before choosing your merchant account company.

5. Now that you have a domain name, hosting, a shopping cart, and a merchant account your next step is to design and create your store. At a minimum you will have to have a logo that you can upload to your site. If you are good with graphics and you are a bit technical you can tweak the template of your shopping cart to your liking. You can also go with the default template that comes with your shopping cart to get started and when the revenue starts rolling in you can hire someone to create you a customer look for your shopping cart.

6. Lastly you will need to add products to your store. If you have a small number of products then you can use your shopping cart administration area to manually add products. If you intend to load products from a flat file make sure that you choose a shopping cart that allows you to import products.

7. Your store should now look like it's ready for business. Go through the process of searching for products on your website and placing test orders. When you are satisfied with how the website works ask some friends or relatives to give it a try. Get some feedback on the usability of the store and make changes as necessary to make the user experience a pleasant one.

8. Most people think that once the store is online and ready for business that the money will start rolling in. Unfortunately a website is nothing like the baseball field in "The Field Of Dreams". In the movie you kept hearing the phrase, "If you build it, they will come". On the internet, if you don't promote it, nobody will come.  You will need to create a plan to promote your website and drive buyers to your products. This can be done via Pay Per Click advertising, affiliate programs, search engine placement, and other methods of online promotion. You will need to research the methods that will work best for your business.

9. You now have a website, traffic, and sales. What is left to do? Well, you are going to want to monitor, test, improve, and then test again, and again, and again. Once people are coming to your site you will want to have some type of tracking installed so you can see what people are doing on your site and where your sales are coming from. You will need to analyze the data and see what can be done to improve sales and increase your profits. If one out of 100 people who visit your site are making a purchase, you can double your sales by making changes to your site that will result in 2 out of 100 buying. Once you have traffic you can quickly increase profits and sales by testing changes to your website.

Believe it or not this is just a brief summary of all the steps. Step 8 alone would require volumes of information just to provide an introduction to promoting your online business. The best thing you can do at this point is get started and ask more questions as you progress.