There are a lot of ways to make money with a webshop on the internet. You can start your own webshop with your own products but you can also promote the products of other webshops by offering links and images from their products on your website.
For each sale (= lead) you make on your website you will earn a commission. It’s like being an agent and sell a product offline, but in this case your website will do all the work for you(except for shipping the product to your customer).
And because of the fact that your website does the work for you, you have to:
- Keep your products up to date. Make sure you update your stock to the latest products / trends on the market
- Make your website is as attractive as possible. If I visit a website as a customer I like it to contain unique content and not just a lot of products that you sell. For example information about your services, contests, games, videos, free stuff to download or for example free coupons your customers can use to get a discount on the products you offer. Make sure your website has more to offer than just products, so that customers have various reasons to revisit your website again.
- Promote your website. Your website will get more visitors if you do a link exchange with other related websites and if you add your website to the search engines. Don’t forget the social media, you could open a Facebook and / or Twitter page with the same name and logo of your company. (potential) customers will not only visit your website but also your social media pages. This can attract visitors to your website.
- Add a refer a friend button on your website.
- Start your own newsletter. Customers can subscribe to your newsletter and you can promote your latest sales, coupon codesand new products
- Open your own YouTube channel with product demonstrations of products that you are selling. You can use the logo of your company in your videos and add a link back to your website.
- Add the possibility for customers to review your products on the social media. The best promotion is the word of mouth. The best promotion of your products is not spamming customers yourself, you should let your happy customers speak for themselves, they add a review on Facebook, Twitter, review sites and you get visitors (potential new customers) back to your website. Sell decent products, offer a good customer service and make sure it’s easy to leave a comment on Twitter or Facebook, because it’s integrated on your website.
Send your customers a reminder a week after a purchase, they will remember your webshop and visit again (also if they don’t leave a review). If a customer leaves a review it’s also gives you an idea how well your products are received, it’s good to know if customers are happy with their products (they are more likely to return). If they are not happy you could change the products you are offering to better products in order to get better reviews and more returning visitors.
If you got a website about your favorite artists you can try to make money by selling their music and merchandise on your website. One of the ways to do that is by promoting the music of your favorite band or artist by selling official merchandise, legal music downloads, e-books and videos of them on your website.
Amazon
With Amazon you can earn a commission by selling products from Amazon for example on your Website, blog, forums or in social media. There are several ways to add products to your website if you use the Amazon affiliate program. You can for example add products with the use of a product feed, with widgets or you can add products one by one by using a product link. It’s also possible to open a e-commerce shop with Amazon products for a monthly fee.
ITunes
To start with your own music webshop you can apply for the ITunes Affiliate program. Once you have applied to the ITunes affiliate program ITunes will review your application and they will email you within 5 business days with the status of your application. It’s free to become an affiliate
ITunes offers you the possibility to offer paid downloads to your website. You can think of music videos and songs. If you have a website about your favorite artist you can sell mp3 files, books and music with links from ITunes. With ITunes you earn 7% commission for each sale.
Other Options to sell products online
There are other options than selling products from Amazon and ITunes. You can also sign up as a drop shipper, and sell the products this drop shipper has to offer. The positive aspect of using a drop shipper is that if you make a sale and receive the money for the sale, the drop shipper ships the product for you to your customer. You don’t have a stock with products and in this way you can offer a lot of products on your website.
Using a drop shipper also has a downside. First of all you don’t see the products, so you are not sure what kind of quality the products are that you are selling (and if the positive reviews on the drop shipper website are real, if there are any reviews). And second off all it seems nice that the shipping is done for you by the drop shipper, but if the drop shipper ships the product to late, your customer will be unhappy. If you ship a product yourself and you have your own stock you will have more control over your product quality and the shipping of the products.
Bigcommerce
It’s possible to start with a trail account so that you get to know the interface and the tools of this online shop builder before you make a purchase. Because Big commerce is very easy to setup and use and has more options than several other similar priced webshop building tools it’s a good choice for new online businesses. It Includes the best SEO configuration. Newsletter and affiliate software is not built in. BigCommerce does have “Up Sell” functionality in the form of cart suggestions.
Eciwid (short for e-commerce widgets)
Eciwid doesn’t offer a trail period, you can however sign up for a free plan. This plan means that there is a free plan with no cancelation of services after a certain amount of time. Eciwid can be integrated to an existing website in minutes. You can add your store to multiple websites. Eciwid has partnered with PayPal to handle your in-person credit card transactions. Transaction fees are 2.7% per swipe.
Etsy
Etsy is a good website for example to sell your own handmade products online. If you want to start a bigger webshop it’s good to know that it’s easy to export your Etsy products and import them in a Shopify webshop.
Wix
Wix has an easy drag and drop website builder so that it’s easy to add content almost everywhere on your website. Wix has over 510 professionally designed templates you can choose from. Wix is meant for small businesses.
Weebly
Weebly is an easy and straightforward webshop builder and it does have a long list with useful features. Weebly is a website builder that allows you to drag and drop elements in the body. You can arrange the elements (text and images) in columns. Some of the things you can do with Weebly:
- customize your mobile theme,
- build dynamic forms (with file uploads, drop-down selects, phone number fields and custom confirmation URLs)
- design custom backgrounds
Squarespace
Squarespace can build you a pretty good, functional store. If you want a simple store, the ability to just add images and take payment you can try Suaqrespace. If you like more apps and options you can try Shopify and browse through their many apps, which can help you to grow your business.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the leading shop building tools on the internet. You can try Shopify risk-free for 14 days. Shopify offers you 100 professional templates which makes it possible for you to have a webshop with a professional appearance. You can choose from over 600 free and paid apps to use for your store. The apps include tools in the category social media, customer service, reporting, accounting, shipping and more.
Shopify Works withPoint of Sale (POS) System. If you have your own offline retail shop you can integrate your entire sales system with an Shopify online store. Shopify also offers you abandoned checkout recovery. If someone adds products to their shopping cart but for some reason didn’t buy them, you can see who those customers are with this functionality. It enables you to automatically remind your customers of the articles they had in their shopping cart with an amount of hours of your choice. And because of the fact you know who your potential customers are you can also do offers (for example a discount) to your customers so that they will come back and purchase your (other) products.
Sell your own documents, software and other files online
If you want to sell documents or files online there are several options you can use to offer paid downloads. You can offer PDF files with tutorials or you can restrict a certain part of your website (member area).
Or you offer premium content. You can offer part of the article for free, and you will trigger your reader to continue reading the rest of the article for a certain fee.
Another idea is to offer (your own) PHP scripts or templates for paid or free download. If you offer software on your website you can offer a free version and a paid version with more options in order to attract more visitors to your website. Free software always attracts more customers to your website than just a paid version of the software. And customers that use your free software can become paid customers later on if their website has enough customers and they have an income from their website for example. Or if they miss certain functions they do need for their website. Of course you offer all of these function in the paid version. You can also offer extra options / customized options for a higher fee.
You can join affiliate networks and sell products from others
There are many other affiliate programs on the internet than just Amazon and ITunes, but there also many affiliate networks. Some examples of Affiliate networks are: Viglink, Daisycon, Tradetracker, Tradedoubler.
The positive aspects of joining an affiliate network is that affiliate networks already have listed a lot of affiliate programs that you can join (you don’t have to search for them). You can search on genre / niche of your website and you can easily find out which commission you can earn if you make a sale (lead) for the affiliate program.
If you join several affiliate programs with the use of one (or more) affiliate networks you can set a certain minimum amount on which you get paid out. If you would join each affiliate network separately. it would take more time to get a payment because you sometimes have to reach a certain minimum amount to get paid. And it would take you a lot of time to track all leads because you have to login at each affiliate program separately. It’s much easier to track your sales and clicks, all in one time, when you are a publisher of an affiliate network.
List of Free Scripts and Extensions you can use to built your own Webshop
Even though there are many other scripts and extensions you can use while building your own website or webshop, this list will give you an idea which extensions and software you can use. This list is not intended as showing the best free scripts in one list, this list is meant to give you inspiration to make quick start while you are (re)building your own website. With this list you can get your own ideas and search for your own scripts.
AV Booklibrary
AV Booklibrary allows you to store your book information under categories (like: Fiction, Health, etc) along with the key book details like title, author, publisher, ISBN, pages, whether you have read it or not, whether you've loaned it to someone, a description of the book etc.
Hotscripts
Hotscripts has been my favorite script website because it offers a lot of free and paid scripts. Things i can’t find on Google easily because Google also has a lot of trash in it, is already listed on Hotscripts in a nice and clean way.
Open Classifieds
The script Open Classifieds is a free open source script which you can download and use on your own website. If you don’t have much technical experience there are also paid hosted options available on the Open Classifieds website
Webring Script
A Webring script might be useful in order to promote your website on other websites. People place a certain code on their website to place the webring on their website. If someone clicks on the webring they can visit your website or the website from another person in the webring. There are hosted versions of already existing webrings. But it’s also possible to start your own webring with your own script. A script to add a webring to your website can be found on the Orca PHP Ringmaker website
Free (and Paid) Joomla extensions to start a webstore or sell products
Joomla Affiliatefeeds
A way to start you own entertainment related related webshop is by using the Joomla CMS. There is A Joomla extension called Joomla Affiliatefeeds. You can download the affiliatefeeds extension at Affiliatefeeds.nl
Booklibrary
Ordasoft offers a free and Pro version of Booklibrary. And also the Modules that you can use with the Book Library Component. The paid version of the Book Library component also lets you export your book collection to the Virtuemart component so that you can start your own bookstore with payment options. You can make the library lend status disappear in the back end configuration of the Bookstore component, so that your Book Library will become a book store (you can also use it for other products than books). You can also add a buy from link (your affiliate link) to the products. This makes the Library suitable to offer and display products from ITunes, Amazon and other affiliate websites. An example of how the bookstore can be used can be found on my website Blackorwhite.
Virtuemart
If you want to sell your own products you can also try Virtue mart for Joomla to sell your own products online. Virtue mart is a free extension for Joomla in order to start your own webstore with your own products in it.