by Jewelry Collectibles

Created on: April 27, 2008   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

Selling products through your website takes a great deal of work, hard work, and a good bit of serious thought and research.

Depending on what you sell, your approach will be a result of your research that you conduct. The research you conduct is critical to the success of the website.

First off you need to sit down and plan what it is you want to sell, work it out on paper, along with a very basic broad business plan. Once you've decided what you want to sell and a few of your basic goals, it's time to move on to see if the viability of what you want to do will work.

To see if your plan and products are a viable "do" for you, research the market. Do extensive searches on Google for other sites selling the same thing, and you'll instantly do yourself a favor.

This research, however tiresome you might find it, will yield you several golden eggs.

You'll be able to identify:
1 ~ popularity of the product or products in question
2 ~ your main competition
3 ~ your main competition also happen to be your mentors (that's right, learn from them by watching them)
4 ~ how these people do things and how well they've saturated the market and how well they are linked up in the market (yes, that's right, do searches on them as well once you've identified them)
5 ~ general pricing and selling techniques (doesn't matter if the products in question are goods or services ~ here you get a ballpark idea of what you will charge as well)

If your products are goods (as opposed to services) you will need to invest in a good camera and learn to take the best photos of the products you can. Since your website visitors and ultimately your website customers can't feel and touch your items, the pictures of your products will truly have to "speak a thousand words", in addition to being the eye candy of your website, they will have to portray the product clearly, attractively and truthfully.

If your products are services, you'll need to learn how to take screen shots, crop them and resize them to accurately portray your portfolio if you are a web designer, or graphic designer. You'll need to learn to make those screen shots clickable as they ARE the eye candy that will attract customers and then the customer will naturally want to click on these screen shots to experience the real thing.

Next is the description of the product (either goods or services). The description needs to be accurate, truthful and detailed. Again, the customer or website visitor/prospective customer cannot touch / feel / experience

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