Selling Products Online 

• PayPal or Alternatives like StormPay
• Use an ecommerce Package/eShop
• Use an Affiliate Network like Clickbank.

PayPal or Alternatives

PayPal offer all elements of the selling process. Therefore the only thing you need to start selling your products online is to open a free PayPal account. The traditional method of selling products via PayPal was using Buy now buttons, however PayPal also offer a shopping cart facility.

Whether or not PayPal is the only option you need for your site depends on the requirements you have. PayPal and its alternatives tend mainly to be used when you are only selling a small number of items.

 However because of its popularity and universal acceptance, PayPal  it is almost always offered as one of the payment options by all online sellers. It is the ideal choice for starting with online selling.

Shopping Carts/Ecommerce Packages/eShops

Most people are familiar with shopping carts as they are used by all the major online retailers like Amazon etc. There main use is for selling multiple products.

 You display details of your products, and with each product you add a button that says ‘add to basket’ (or similar). If your customer wants to buy the product all they need to do is press the ‘add to basket’ button.
 What this does is create a list of things being purchased. The customer can view the list at any time to see what they are purchasing and how much they have spent. They can also add/remove items at any time. When finished they click another button to actually make the purchase (often labelled ‘go to checkout’).

Although you can buy your own shopping cart software and maintain it yourself this tends to be the preserve of the large companies like Amazon themselves.

For anyone starting online selling the normal method is to use an ecommerce package/eShop from:

• Your hosting provider
• Third party hosted solution.

Hosting Provider Ecommerce Packages

There are usually several package levels available and they usually differentiate the levels by the number of products supported, payment providers supported, local taxes, invoicing etc.

Although the packages may include invoicing, delivery tracking etc the one thing they all lack is a payment provider service. All ecommerce packages/ eShops require a third party payment provider service for accepting online payments.

Because there are many different payment providers like Worldpay, Protx, PayPal you will find that the eshop provider lists all the payment providers that the package supports.

Because you may have local tax considerations and you also need to have the money transferred to a local bank you may want give preference to local ecommerce/eshop provider.

Third Party Hosted Solutions

These are by far the easiest options and certainly the preferred route for anyone starting to sell online. The product details (price description etc) are stored on the third party server and you link to them via HTML code supplied by the third part provider.

This means that all the security aspects are under the control of the third party which because they are well known names like PayPal is also reassuring to your customers. There are many providers of third party stores/ store features and I will be doing a review shortly. In the meantime I would recommend you take a look at PayPal as even though you may not consider it as our only solution it is almost always offered as an alternative solution on most online stores.

Using an Affiliate Network

Using an affiliate network like Clickbank solves two problems simultaneously.

1. Finding other people to sell your product

2. Handling product sales.

Affiliate programs are used by many companies to sell their products. Affiliate networks are basically vendors that sell products from other people i.e. a network of vendors.

As a seller you simply add your product to the network catalogue. The vendor already has many affiliates eager to sell products and hopefully will start selling yours. The affiliate network is usually responsible for all sales tracking, credit card processing etc.

After PayPal this is probably the easiest way of starting to sell online provided your product has a large appeal. For Niche products you are unlikely to find many affiliates willing to promote your product but that doesn't stop you selling the product from your own website.

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