Successful e-commerce requires marketing skills (or hiring someone with good marketing skills) , hard work, and a good website/selling system. There are some good free tools out there to set up a store online, such as ZenCart . A free Zencart site includes everything you need to sell online and includes a system to track all of your orders, control inventory with your browser and process credit cards online without having to open a merchant account (using a paypal payment gateway) Getting a good site is just half the battle. Getting traffic to a new online site can be a challenge. The good thing is that there are alot of free things you can do to get a bunch of traffic to your site. You need to reach out to your existing customers and maintain a regular (at least monthly) e-mail list that you send to regularly. There is a free article you can get about this often overlooked source at listautomater.com . You need to have good content on your site that is didactic to some degree that has relevant info for persons doing searches on the big 3 search engines. You need to do some work on what is becoming known as Web 2.0 - Write blogs frequently on your site and if you can, get engaged in social networking sites like technorati , Facebook , MySpace , and Linkedin . Find out about social bookmarking sites like delicious and stumpledupon . Make posts with links back to your site on Squidoo (called a lens there) and Digg to get free content. Taking steps to get links back you your site from popular "relevent" websites is well worth the effort and can be done with little or no cost. You need to give value in order to attract traffic to your site so make sure you spend some time on this as it is very important. There are also web consultation services out there that will coach you in the process and set up your web store -such as Affordable-E-Commerce.com . The Hurdles are certainly not financial ones as you can get online with very little money. You need to have some time to do your homework or at the very least you need a good coaching service to help you on your journey. Take advantage of every free tool that you can out there like posting youtube or ustream videos on your site before paying for traffic. Make sure that you or your web service add google analytics to your site so you can track traffic to your site and can get important information like what people are entering on search engines to arrive on your site. With some time and effort, selling online can be fun and very profitable. I have sold a ton of stuff online and I have a great time doing it. It took some time to learn some of the tricks of the trade but its not like they are big secrets or anything. Don't worry about the Hurdles. They may slow you down a little but keep on trying and you will succeed. The most important quality of any successful online merchant is persistance. Good luck with your new venture and have fun. (Life is too short not too!)
