When starting your drop shipping business, you need to decide where to sell your products. Many people like eBay because it’s a highly trafficked marketplace with lots of hungry buyers. Unfortunately, theres also tons of competition and they charge ridiculous fees that hurt your margins. Other people like to sell on Amazon because they don’t charge listing fees and offer a similar amount of traffic. But again, they charge high fees and have very strict rules. The third option is to build your own online store, and that’s what we’ll discuss here.

Building an online store may sound intimidating, but it’s actually a lot easier than you’d think. There are lots of premade shopping cart solutions available to you that can be customized to your liking with minimal programming experience. Shopping cart software is a type of script that allows you to easily add products, add descriptions, options, pricing, and more. They also should include an integrated shopping cart and payment processing options.   All you have to do is populate it with products, descriptions, graphics, and features.  Here are a few of the best solutions for building an online store:

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions

Yahoo offers a shopping cart solution that is highly customizable and gives you everything you need to start selling as fast as possible. This includes your web hosting, software, payment processing, marketing tools, and more.  They even help you customize it with detailed tutorials and support.  Plus your store automatically gets listed in the Yahoo shopping directory.  They charge $39.95 per month for all this, but it’s well worth the simplicity it delivers. If you want to build your own online store but don’t want any of the hassle that comes with it, this is a good option.

Zen-cart

Zen-cart is a free open-source shopping cart software that is a spinoff of the popular osCommerce software. It’s highly customizable, it comes with hundreds of free add-on modules, templates, marketing tools, and most important of all, its free! This solution is a little more difficult, and requires you to have your own web hosting, but is fairly easy to learn. Most of the modules and add-ons you need are already premade and available for download.  It’s cheaper this way, but requires more work on your end. On the plus side it’s much more customizable. This is how I build my online stores.

Whichever solution you choose, you will already be ahead of most other dropshippers. Many people rely completely on eBay to sell products. Having your own website allows you to utilize tons more marketing tools and get a lot more customers. Plus, you can always sell on eBay as well. I highly recommend building your own store if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Of course, the most important part your drop shipping business, as always, is finding the right products.  Check out Salehoo for a huge directory of legitimate wholesalers and dropshippers.