Discovering Internet Retailing
By: Dave

Apparently it is not as hard as one might think to open and operate a profitable internet store.  It seems that the start up costs could be as little as $500 dollars.  This is the cost of registering a business, getting a merchant account so that you can accept MC, and Visa, getting a domain registered and obtaining a list of drop shipping wholesalers, among other things. See World Wide Brands, inc.

Retailers can create internet stores in malls like Yahoo's shopping mall.  www.store.yahoo.com. (Yahoo offers a free 30 day trial that you may use to design your own store and get familiar with the idea of having an online store. Make sure you cancel before the 30 day trial period is over to avoid being billed.) Using drop shipping from a wholesaler, it's even possible to run a "stockless" store. This could dramatically reduce the costs associated with traditional retailing.  It sounds pretty good, but you know that old saying, " If it's too good to be true,.....".  So I definitely recommend researching the whole thing thoroughly before making any kind of decisions. My research indicates that there may be some people out there that take advantage of others by setting themselves up as a false wholesaler.  They come between you and the true wholesaler taking a cut of your profits and making it tougher for you to compete. 

On the positive side, I found a great website operated by Chris Malta.  He offers a freely downloadable book that teaches people how to open their own internet retail stores from scratch and avoid the middle man rip off artists. His company also offers a directory of true wholesale dropshippers to help people run their internet stores.This directory isn't free, but the e book called "Starting You're Internet Business Right" is. Chris'  Site

I felt that I got a lot out of reading Chris' free manual. In fact, it was quite inspiring.  I'm not sure when I will open an internet retail store or if I will, but I am thinking about it. Chris is also a Microsoft Certified System Engineer, but he insures us that you don't need to know much about computers to be successful in the online retailing world. Due to the depth of information in the free book that Chris offers, I feel comfortable recommending his free book to you. I really learned some useful knowledge from it that I may apply in other areas as well. You'll need to make a careful evaluaton of wether you want to purchase his list of warehouse authorized drop shippers or not; I didn't purchase that directory myself and I haven't tried it out. But the free e-book is something I definitely recommend.

Write to me with your ideas or experiences about online retailing..  Maybe I could add them to this page.  david @ tobeinformed.com

Additional information

Hope that was informative, Best wishes,

David