Going to set up an online store. Anybody have experience?

[skylineTT 10+ year member]

I will soon be selling brand new rockford, stinger, jbl, pioneer, kenwood, jvc, etc. equipment through an online store. I would like to set something up that will advertise what I am selling and use paypal for the money transfer. I know this somewhat limits my customer but the point of it is for me to get into online sales. I will be selling items that don't take up much space so that shipping wont be killer. This will help me compete with online prices until I can move enough inventory to get better pricing.

Do you guys know of any sites that offer a free store or free trial? I would like to have it launch this weekend. Thanks

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[GAMEOVERCCA 10+ year member]

goodluck with that.. will be close to impossible for you to compete with sites like audiosavings or vminovations and so on.. they sell most of the time cheaper then you can get it from you wholesale vendors.. unless you can buy 1000's of each item at a time like that can, your better off just doing ebay

 

[skylineTT 10+ year member]

that is the thing, I am working with a shop here who moves a ton of volume so I might be able to compete with pricing. They get equipment direct as opposed to wholesale and I might run this site as their online sales division if I prove worthy. They can set up an online store easily but the owner isn't too interested yet so if I can prove it to be profitable, we will build a full blown site. Otherwise, I will be on ebay as well.

 

[kramer_212 10+ year member]

that is the thing, I am working with a shop here who moves a ton of volume so I might be able to compete with pricing. They get equipment direct as opposed to wholesale and I might run this site as their online sales division if I prove worthy. They can set up an online store easily but the owner isn't too interested yet so if I can prove it to be profitable, we will build a full blown site. Otherwise, I will be on ebay as well.

ebay will kill you 10% + but very interested, once its up and going ill check it out and shoot some pms your way to help you get it started.

 

[MANTI5 10+ year member]

Yeah, ebay is a crap-hole for sellers now. Been using them for 10 years and am just fed up with their policies for sellers so now I'm pretty much buyer only.

 

[GAMEOVERCCA 10+ year member]

Yeah, ebay is a crap-hole for sellers now. Been using them for 10 years and am just fed up with their policies for sellers so now I'm pretty much buyer only.

agreed, i sell of my website and off my brothers website.. i try to not sell on ebay unless there is promos going on for sellers..

 

[trumpet 5,000+ posts]

Your goal of having an online store running by this weekend is completely unrealistic without prior experience. If you haven't already you should seriously look at current prices of products online from the brands you mentioned and make sure there is any profit potential. Unless you have a seriously legit looking website why would anyone buy from your site? What type of ads do you want to run? What's your advertising budget?

Think of it this way, how can you answer the question, "Why should I spend money on this web site"? If your "hook" is the lowest prices you're going to lose money. On average people will spend less than 20 seconds to form their first impression of a web site. If there's a way to create a web site in less than a week that will accomplish that goal with car audio products I would love to learn it.

 

[skylineTT 10+ year member]

I'm working with a buddy who sold workout supplements with his own website throughout highschool and he is helping me out with some of it. I just said this weekend because I wanted to have a goal, whether realistic or not. I will have a full price list of what I'm selling that I can compare to all of the big online companies to see if it is worth it. Just trying to get some ideas as far as a website goes as of now. Thanks

 

[MANTI5 10+ year member]

Just look at popular sites that are doing what you want to do, see what you like/dislike about them for good ideas.

 

[pro-rabbit 5,000+ posts]

The quickest way to get a full out store up and running would be using something like a 3D cart setup and using a copy/past like most stores do for details. Pictures may be a little harder to work around, but no way to have it up and going by the weekend no matter how you do it.

 

[skylineTT 10+ year member]

I gotcha. I can probably take my own pics and watermark em with my website name for now. I'll keep researching. should be getting all the pricing tomorrow and i'll be figuring out what will be sold.

 

[brodeisel 10+ year member]

gl

 

[SourDeez 10+ year member]

Basically unless you can offer prices cheaper than sonicelectronix/vminno/etc you're gonna fail.. whos gonna buy from a new, unreliable, no reviews, not authorized warranter for MORE than they would pay from a legit source?

For instance, when I am searching for products and I see a crappy site that has a product for 10, 20, or even 50 cheaper than say sonicelectronix, ill still gladly pay the extra 50 to get it from a reputable source

 

[hispls 5,000+ posts]

eBay will run closer to 15% fees after you figure in everything + paypal. I do high volume of sales on there and I can tell you my monthly bill is brutal and their "protection" policies pretty much screw legit sellers and let scammers get away with anything at the expense of buyers.

I'm working on a specific website and actually bought a package (back end, design, hosting) from a company that specializes in online retail for my particular items. We are over a month along and still only a mock-up of our site. Any website you could possibly launch in a weekend (unless you had a couple dozen professionals on the job) wouldn't be worth launching whatsoever.

There are open source online retail suites that we looked into, but unless you're really good with web design I'd say pay for a proper site management and development service. You get what you pay for and there's no sense launching a half arse site.