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Hi Jamila,
Am really serious about building my website.I want to start selling on the web as soon as i can.Pls,kindly get back to me via e-mail.My e-mail address is sammyaliworld@yahoo.com.Pls,make the tag the subject Jamila so i will know it's from you.I really thank you in advance for this.Once i have your e-mail i will give u my contact number.

rgds,

Samson.

Hi Brainbag,

At the risk of a shameless plug, I would recommend our comany ( http://www.websignia.net/ ). Browse our porfolio online at let us know if we can be of any assistance. A few of our recent carts can be viewed via the following links: http://www.lifesignmed.com/icat/ , http://www.delprocorp.com/ecat/bin/ , http://www.shreddingbetty.com/shop/

No matter which service provider you choose, I would strongly recommend investing in a custom solution over a "do it yourself" template solution. Even though, I feel the template solutions are quick and dirty ways to get your store online, you will quickly outgrow them should your business take off. A custom solution keeps the door open to grow and change your store based on your changing needs as a business owner.

A quick checklist of things you will need to work with any developer:

• Your product catalog - create a spreadsheet with your product detail including information such as product names, descriptions, pricing, weight (if shipping a physical prduct), brand (if you are a reseller), on-hand quantity (for inventory tracking), categories, etc.

• Organizing your products into Categories and Sub-Categories that would make sense to a potential customer is also key

• Quality Product photos - quality product photos are key. Larger photos offer your designer more posibilities to be creative in the presentation of your products, ie. in the reference site above for shreddingbetty, we created a product zoom feature because the client had access to hi-resolution photos, that would not be possible with low quality images.

• Choose a shipper - our shopping carts as well as many others offer options to use UPS, FedEX and US Postal

• Credit Cart Gateway/Merchant Account - I recommend having your own credit card gateway account with a reputable provider and keeping the entire transaction on your own website. Most major banks including BOA offer credit card processing services.

• SSL Certificates - to ensure the security of your transactions, a good 128 bit or 256 bit encryption certificate from a reputable company is a good idea, some are Verisign (our choice), Thawte and Comodo. http://www.abceasydomains.com/ also provides good low cost SSL Certificates

• Web Hosting - if you make the decision to invest in a good custom store, also make sure to invest in a good web hosting account to store your site and customer data. If you choose a shared hosting plan, make sure to pay close attention to the amount of disk storage space, bandwidth, email accounts and database storage space.

Good luck in your search.

Hi Samson,

Our office number is 908.791.1800 (NJ). I will contact you via email shortly. I'd be happy to assist you in any way I can.

PS. We will look into the dead links, thanks for the heads up. Domain names sometimes expire, and we're not generally the first to know.

Steve

Hi Abbas,
Can i see some of your works?I would really appreciate that.

rgds,

Samson.

Please see my posting (which does NOT plug my own services!) on this thread:

http://smallbusinessonlinecommunity.bankofamerica.com/message/6362

In short, custom is nice, and maybe you'll one day want to spend the bucks, but to get started, and started the right way, without the amateurs ruining your reputation with a cheap or broken website, take a look at the alternatives I mention in the other thread.

Hope that helps

Hi...
If you are a small business and dont want spend a loat of money you can use OS commerce! lt's a software you can install on your server and it's FREE OPEN SOURCE!!!!!
lookup on the internet oscommerce!
good luck

You get your own separate site, and I am almost certain you can even point your own domain to your shopify website.

One benefit of shopify is that they have created a global directory of all their websites, and someone could lookk for your product through their directory at shopify.com.

To create your own site, visit shopify.info.

Hope that helps.