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Even though we have mentioned the basic steps for establishing an online shop, when you are starting out, it might make more sense to go with a service that provides you with most of these facilities in one go.
For example, by signing up with Yahoo! Small Business or Microsoft Live Small Business, you can create a storefront, quickly list your products online and start accepting payments. Instead of investing and maintaining all the infrastructure that is required to run an online shop, you might want to wait and watch a little to see how your business does.
By joining up with big businesses such as Amazon.com, PayPal, eBay and Microsoft, you can easily start making money.
These services will provide you with powerful tools for creating a home page for your online shop, set up a shopping cart for your store and select ways of accepting payment for sales through your store, either for free or for a very small fee.
Since your online shop is associated with a well-known and well-established business venture, there will be enough exposure for your online shop and you will manage to attract visitors and sell your products, without too much marketing or spending too much on infrastructure.
Subscribers to these services will be able to offer toll-free phone support and 24/7 customer services.
Further, since these are one of the most reliable businesses in the industry today, customers will tend to trust your shop more.
And one of the biggest advantages of signing up with these services is that they offer many additional services for free like online marketing, search engine submissions and even affiliate marketing.
As you can see, depending on what your needs are, you can decide to go in for a full-fledged, professionally designed online shop or start off with a simple storefront with one of these small business services.
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