How To Set Up Your Own Online Store

Melanie Pinola — How To Set Up Your Own Online StoreWith free tools and cheap web hosting, there's really no reason you can't have your own catalog and shopping cart on the web if you've got something worth selling. Whether you're looking for a side project or a real source of income, here's a starting-from-scratch guide to setting up shop on the web.
Why Host Your Own Online Store?

There are plenty of places you can easily sell stuff online, Amazon and eBay included. We've previously looked at the most popular places to set up shop online, covering sites like Shopify and Etsy. Still, the winner of that Hive Five was a self-hosted storefront, and for good reason.

Hosting your own e-commerce site gives you more control over the shop and its presentation, is better for business branding, makes moving to another web host easier, and can be more cost-effective. You can, for example, avoid transaction and listing fees, but you'll still have to pay processing fees from your payment gateway (more on that in a bit). The downside is that it's more hands-on, and you'll need to regularly update the shopping cart scripts whenever an update is available to avoid security vulnerabilities. But if you're serious about what you're selling, that should hardly deter you.

via Life Hacker
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