E-Commerce Site Setup?

[Eagle]

My wife is interested in trying to initiate a small (very) sales operation, Internet based. Rather than offer one item at a time through e-Prey, we would like to grab a domain name and set up our (her) own e-commerce site. The problem is, I lost track of how to work on computers once we progressed beyond MS-DOS.

 

What's the easiest and cheapest way to create a small e-commerce operation?

 

(I know that "easiest" and "cheapest" may be mutually exclusive. If that's the case, what's easy, and then what's cheap?)

 

TIA

[sinkrun]

I make part of my living on ebay and have tried other sites(never my own) and I am very sad to say there is just nothing out ther that has the traffic ebay does. I have thought about my own but have never tried it you will have to let me know how she makes out. Every day the cost of doing bussiness goes up on e-prey.

[WahooSteeler]

Eagle, I'm definitely no expert but while setting up your own site can be super cheap (lots of template based sites out there) it's getting the traffic to come to your site that can get expensive. If you expect it to be a small business as you seem to describe, eBay may be hard to beat as far as all the e-commerce tools readily available. I'm sure someone on here has set up an eBay store. You can still have your own website for professional appearance and when someone clicks on products or purchases it takes you to their ebay store.

[kastein]

Eagle, I'm definitely no expert but while setting up your own site can be super cheap (lots of template based sites out there) it's getting the traffic to come to your site that can get expensive. If you expect it to be a small business as you seem to describe, eBay may be hard to beat as far as all the e-commerce tools readily available. I'm sure someone on here has set up an eBay store. You can still have your own website for professional appearance and when someone clicks on products or purchases it takes you to their ebay store.

X2, I see a lot of this.

 

It can be real tough to draw business to a hole in the wall internet site just like a hole in the wall brick&mortar store. I watched a friend's virtual private server hosting business fail after he poured thousands of dollars into it... why? he had no idea of how to advertise or get customers, neither did I, neither did any of his other tech friends, it's pretty tough to do sometimes. I would use ebay as a storefront. Another option would be yahoo shopping / yahoo stores if you want to do your own thing, they make it so you can have your own look&feel etc and they handle the ecommerce part but don't expect anywhere near the traffic as ebay will get you unless you can do SEO pretty well. Some of my favorite mil surplus parts stores are yahoo stores and I found them via searching for part numbers and part descriptions on google.