To succeed in e-commerce, the following eleven steps are those 
that every business owner should tackle when developing their 
new online business:


THE BASIC ONLINE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CHECKLIST

1. Determine your products or services - Know what products and 
services you will be offering and define the common thread that 
will tie all of your products and services together.

2. Research your products and services marketplace - Find out 
who your competitors are and the differences in the product 
offerings they deliver to their customers. Find out your 
competitors price points and value offerings. Find out who 
your customers are. Find out how many customers exist in your 
market and how you can reach them.

3. Establish your site goals - Determine how you are going to 
use your website in the quest to develop your customer base. 
Are you going to use it as a billboard on the Internet Super 
Highway? Or, are you going to use your site to develop long-term 
relationships with your customers? Or, do you intend that your 
site should provide everything necessary for an immediate, 
one-time transaction?

4. Plan your site layout - Understand how you are going to 
utilize your site to the fullest of its potential. Make a 
pre-determination as to the different sections of your site, 
which will be vital to meeting your goals.

5. Plan for growth of your site - Understand that your site 
will grow and change to meet with the challenges of the future. 
Anything that you can do now to simplify the transition into 
future design changes will increase your overall productivity 
in the maintenance of your online storefront.

6. Take a quick lesson in HTML - 
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/teachingtool/ HTML design 
software can help you build your website fast. Learning the 
basics of HTML firsthand can improve your effectiveness in 
modifying your website. If you ever need to make minor changes 
or troubleshoot display or formatting problems in a web page, 
you will have the basic understanding of the technology to 
work through those problems without outside assistance.

7. Build basic HTML template - Your HTML template should be 
thought of as your custom letterhead. Each page on your website 
will be demonstrated with a basic visual format to secure the 
cohesion of your website. It is this basic visual design or 
letterhead that you want your HTML template to represent.

8. Build e-commerce section - The payment area of your website 
is the most important element of your entire design. Without an 
effective payment processing system, your customers will not be 
able to pay you for your products or services. 

StormPay is a third-party payment processor that enables small 
businesses to provide secure payment options to their customers. 
Learn for yourself the advantages of using the StormPay program 
on your website: http://www.stormpay.com

Paypal is a more popular payment processor from which I take 
90% of my own online payments. You can register at Paypal by 
visiting the following URL: 
http://www.paypal.com

9. Build customer support section - While a FAQ (Frequently 
Asked Questions) page can be a very useful tool in keeping 
support requests to a minimum, it cannot stand alone as your 
customer support system. Some people need one-on-one human 
contact to answer their sales and support questions. As a matter 
of trust, some folks simply will not do business with a company 
that does not offer some type of human contact point --- either 
by email or by telephone. 

10. Build site content - Once you have developed the bulk of 
your site structure, the time will come to tackle building your 
content pages, which will include your sales pages. As you 
conclude building your page content, it may also be helpful 
to undertake an understanding of the use of Meta tags with 
your web pages. For a quick tutorial on the subject, visit: 
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html

11. Begin Promoting - There are simply dozens of ways in which 
you can promote your website --- both online and offline. We 
simply do not have enough space here to go into all of the 
methods available to a website owner for the purpose of 
promoting their website. Our primary goal is always to sell 
products or services through our business. Online or offline, 
it is important to remember that sales cannot happen where 
there is no traffic. To draw traffic to our business, we must 
promote our business. 


My hope for you is simple. I hope that you will be able to 
develop your own online business and you will be profitable 
in doing so. It is my hope that this checklist will serve 
to help you reach that end.