Turning Your Website Into A Revenue Generator

There are three broad ways to turn your web site into a place where your customers can buy your products and services and pay you money for them.

The first is to get a merchant account and set up a professional private shopping cart. This makes sense if you also do consumer shows where you can take credit card orders, or otherwise have reason to take credit card orders in person. However, if you're predominantly a web-based business, it's probably overkill. It requires installing somewhat arcane software, it requires going through and configuring said software, and getting a signed security certificate, and the list of things that can go wrong (without you being aware of them…) is long and somewhat scary.

The third option is to get an eBay shop or an Amazon.com shop. If you sell electronic products that are downloadable, there are other sources to sell ebooks, like fictionwise. While a PayPal transaction fee will be in the realm of 2-3% of the purchase price, these shops will take a cut of anywhere from 10 to 25%. However, they'll almost all calculate shipping in ways favorable to you, and they get you something that's very important:

Exposure.

Your web site will get exposure from people who know your products. No small business web site can get exposure like Amazon.com or eBay; fortunately, you can create your own web site and use Amazon shops plus eBay shops to make one combined multi-dimensional sales process.

All of these techniques have their place and their proper time - and most of them just take a little bit of studying to figure out what needs to be done to set them up.