After many months of cutting, folding, pasting, printing, and over half a dozen prototypes later, you finally have it: an impressive little line of paper products. You’ve gotten the nod of approval from your family and friends. And you’ve done your research looking online at the other stationery items that are currently selling in stores, so you have a good idea of how to price your goods and what type of people might be interested in buying them.

It’s time to start thinking about the business side of things. While opening your own brick and mortar store might be somewhere on the horizon, that’s a little bit larger of a playing field than you might be able to handle at the moment. Instead, it’s much more practical (and much less stressful) to start by opening your own little shop online. Here are some main things to include when you open your online store:

- an easy-to-remember (and easy-to-type) domain name

- good product photography

- detailed product descriptions and prices

- ordering and shipping information –  what services are available at what costs, if there are any discounts for ordering over a certain amount, do you provide gift-wrapping for free or at an additional rate – you’ll need to do some research on these things and decide which work for you and how much you want to charge your customers for these features

- information about your stationery line, your store, or yourself — besides having a great product, it’s always a plus to have a great story to go with it!

- your contact information  — yes, you will be answering questions about the products, accomodating to different payment and shipping options, and handling all other types of correspondence you might get from people interested in your products

- a shopping cart to process payments – there are a quite a few reliable options out there, and you’ll need to do more research on which suits you. Of course, they all charge you a fee, but that’s reasonable considering they take care of complicated financial transactions for you. Paypal is one of the most reputable for this service.

So now that you know what your store needs to have, how do you actually go about constructing it? You have three choices:

(pictured above: Susie Ghahremani’s Boy Girl Party Shop)

Build, from scratch, a personal website with complete online store functions. If you’re tech-saavy, or know someone who’d be willing to help you with web design and programming, you might want to consider this.

Pros: you have your own domain name, making it easy for people to find your store, and you have a completely customized site that you can update and change however you want.

Cons: if you’re not doing the technology part yourself, you’ll need to wait till your programmer has time to help you; and it gets costly — payment for your web designer (unless you can figure out a fair deal, like you making a bunch of stationery items for him/her in exchange for help with building your site) hosting fees, software fees, and transaction costs.

It’ll probably take several days or weeks before your store is ready for business. In the meantime, instead of having an “under construction” sign on your homepage, you might want to put up some product photos and descriptions, and a contact e-mail. 

Another way to build a customized online store, without having to keep track of so many things on your own, is to opt for the next closest thing. Sign up and pay to use online store-building software and services to create a template-based shop.

Pros: you get the basic functions of a store with a package that includes a reliable shopping cart and product-display software; you pay your fee per month (Yahoo! Small Business offers 3 different packages for varying storefront needs) so you can upgrade if you decide you need more features, or if you decide you don’t want to work on your store anymore, you can simply close up.

Cons: you’re charged a set fee per item you sell; the functions are limited — you can’t add links to other sites that might be selling your stuff, and there are only cookie-cutter templates for you to choose from (so you’d have to get a web designer to help you if you want a more unique look).

If all this sounds mind-boggling, you might want to consider something on a smaller scale: open a small online shop that’s part of a larger selling community. Think of it as if you’re one of the shops inside a big shopping mall. You’ve already got tons of people in the mall window-shopping, so as long as you can make your catch their attention, they might stop by, take a look, and buy a thing or two.

(above: hundreds of small handmade boutique shops are thriving on Etsy)

Pros: it’s free to setup! And the listing fees are so low that you can add new products as often as you want at very little cost. It’s so user-friendly you’ll hardly ever run into problems with uploading product pictures or editing descriptions.

Cons: you don’t have your own domain name and there’s very little customization so you’ll have to stick with their templates. With CafePress, they do the printing and mailing for you, so you don’t have much control over the production quality of your designs, nor of the way the items are packaged and shipped to the buyer.

With some thorough planning and attention to detail, you could have your own online store up and running in matter of days. Then it’ll be time to put your energy into promoting your website, getting people to stop by your shop to see, and buy, the things you’ve made!

July 17th, 2006