The Easy Way to Start Selling Online

Most people have bought products online from major online retailers like Amazon, and so when they think of going into ecommerce and selling their own products/services they immediately think that they need to emulate the Amazon experience.

However the truth is that although some businesses will need to create online stores using shopping carts, and provide multiple payment methods, order tracking etc, many small businesses will not need to go so far.

Fortunately there is an ideal solution available for business that only need to sell a small number of items (products/services), that is is easy to implement, and can be added to an existing website/blog.

So How Do You Do It?

The answer is to use simple PayPal buy now buttons.

A PayPal buy now button is simply a piece of HTML code that is generated by PayPal after you fill out a form specifying the produce details.

All you need to do is to paste this code into your web page and you are ready to do business.

If you are selling several products/services you will need to go through the button generation process for each product/service. For a step by step guide take a look at PayPal buy Now buttons.

Here is an example of PayPal buy now button looks like. You can of course create your own product images.

NOTE: don't try to buy this it is only a demo link. PayPal now includes this functionality by default

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All you need to do is to paste this code into your web page and you are ready to do business.

When the customer clicks the button to make a purchase he is redirected to the PayPal site where the transaction is completed, and when complete he is then redirected back to your site.

 Because PayPal is  so well known and trusted, using PayPal  conveys trust in your site as the customer knows that PayPal would resolve any disputes.

If you are selling several products/services you will need to go through the button generation process for each product/service.

PayPal also offer shopping cart functionality in addition to the standard buy now buttons for those who want to sell multiple products and want the customer to be able to add and remove items from the cart.

You may be wondering why would anyone bother with other solutions when PayPal provide the basic functionality for free.

The answer is that PayPal doesn't provide an easy way of making changes to product details and managing the product database.

Therefore if you make frequent changes then it usually involves generating the Buttons again and this can become tiresome.

However there are companies which have built on the PayPal Idea but have extended the functionality but staying with the core idea of generating standard HTML code which is then embedded into a standard site/blog to provide ecommerce capabilities.

Advantages

• No Merchant account needed
• Free to setup
• Can be used on any site/blog
• No additional software required
• Easy to use
• Search Engine friendly as existing html pages are being used.

Disadvantages

• Product/service details are not manageable but need to be recreated
• You don't have complete control of your product database and could have problems when moving away from the provider for any reason.
• Doesn't have all the features of a fully functional store<

PayPal is certainly the ideal way of getting started in ecommerce and for many small businesses it is probably all they will ever need.

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