In the firs part of this series I explained how to get started with your new Ecommerce venture.  Now that it has been a couple of days it is time to continue where I left off.  In this article we are going to look at setting up a merchant account to accept payments and finding an source for your products.

The first thing we need to do is find an payment processor.  There are many around the net, for example there is Paypal, 2CO, and Google  Checkout.  These are all a great place to start because you only pay a per transaction fee instead of a monthly fee. I would suggest reading the terms on all of the merchant account providers before you make a decision.

All of these providers will allow you to accept credit cards and bank transfers.  Once your business grows enough and there is some steady income you may look into a merchant account at your bank or authorize.net.  These will save on your transaction fees but there is a larger monthly fee.

Now that we have chosen and signed up for a merchant account it is time to find products to sell.  There are many ways to find products, but we are going to do it without having to put out a bunch of money up front and but inventory.  One way to do this is to look for suppliers that offer blind drop shipping.

Blind drop shipping is when someone orders a product from you, you turn around order the product from your supplier, and the supplier ships the product to your customer with your shipping label on it. Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it?  Well it is.  The best way to go about this is your trusty google search engine.  For example, lets say you want to sell computers and PC parts.  Go to google and do a search for “wholesale computer dropshopper”.  There are many to choose from and you could contact more than one before you decide or you can try a couple.

Some of the reputable PC Distributors that I found are:

Ingram Micro
SYNNEX
Ma Labs
Bass Computers
MaxGroup

When you decide on a distributor you will need to fill out there vendor or partner registration.  You should have your reseller permit to submit with the application.

Now you will need to choose a niche of products.  For this demonstration I’m going to choose energy efficient small form factor computers and parts.

In the next article I will go into detail on choosing the web hosting for your new store and choosing a shopping cart to display all of your products.