Your Own Online Shop Lesson 2

When you are considering selling your items online the most tried and true method has always been to sign-up with Etsy, HandmadeArtists, Amazon Handmade, eBay or some other kind of big named online store that charges fees to list your items (perhaps), monthly fees and/or commissions on any sales you actually make using their services. They have a list of rules that you have to follow about what can be listed with them, how you can ship your items, requiring tracking numbers to prove you mailed the items, etc. These are all good ways to introduce yourself the public but after a while, the fees get to be a little too much. The shipping policies are good though. They protect you and your customers. If you think you have enough clients that would buy directly from you or you just don’t want to have to deal with all the red-tape of selling your items on these other sites you might want to consider creating your very own online store.

This is the second post in a series about creating your own online store to sell whatever you make. We have already discussed what you should do if you already have one or more of the above online shops and how you can move your items over to your own website to begin selling on your own. This posting will be more for those who haven’t tried them yet and want to start off with their own online store. We may be repeating some information so be patient.

The first thing you really ought to consider is the name for your business. Most people like to name their businesses after themselves and that is fine of course. But if you would like to use a fictitious name of some kind you will need to register it with your state’s Fictitious Name registry. If you become big you will want to protect your brand name and you most definitely don’t want to infringe on someone else’s. The cost to register a fictitious name in Florida is $50 for 5 years. You fill out the form online pay with a credit card and you are done. They will mail out the confirmation within a couple of business days.

“A Fictitious name, DBA, Doing Business As or Trade name is filed with the Division of Corporations if you will be doing business as another name than your corporation, LLC, partnership or person name.”

Information on whether you should incorporate is really above our pay grade here but you might want to talk to a business attorney about the advantages of creating an LLC or Limited Liability Corporation in the name of your business to protect you and your family from any future product liability lawsuits. (We will talk about craft vendors insurance later.) You can, of course, file for LLC yourself online here in Florida and I believe it is about $125 per year. Again, please talk to a business lawyer or someone at your local Small Business Administration for help and information about these things. This may become important when you get ready to sign-up for a credit card processing service for your online store and to get an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for your website. You know that little “s” at the end of “http” so that your customers know you have encryption on your website to protect their credit and personal information.

In Florida, you will need to sign up for a Federal Tax ID number in the name of your business and a Florida Sales Tax Account. Any sales made to someone within the state of Florida (mailing address only) you will have to collect sales tax and file a return for every quarter. Both of these are FREE to do and can be done online. You will need to keep this information in a safe place along with your Fictitious Name registration and LLC (if you did that). You can, of course, file everything as a single or sole proprietor and use your social security number for everything. For a Federal Tax ID go to: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/apply-for-an-employer-identification-number-ein-online For the Florida Sales Tax ID and Filing Information go to: http://floridarevenue.com/dor/taxes/registration.html

Now that you have a great name for your handmade business you will need to purchase a domain name of the same name for your website. You can check the name on almost any of the major website hosting websites such as GoDaddy, 1and1 or some other service that you feel comfortable using. Keep in mind it will be easiest to have your domain registered and your website hosted using the same service. You will be given a variety of choices the extensions after the name such as the ever popular “.com”, “.net” and the newer ones such as “.biz” or “.mobi”. You shouldn’t use “.org” unless you are creating a non-profit sort of website and they will not let you use “.edu” or “.gov” because they are reserved for education institutes and government websites. To make it easier on yourself and your future customers stick with the one everyone knows “.com”. You can always buy the other extensions in the future and have them linked directly to your main website later on.

Then you will need to purchase a web hosting package to go with the domain. Some companies will give you the domain name registration for free the first year if you purchase the web hosting package first. The domain has to be renewed every single year after that. You can pay for more years up front if you like or later on once you start making some money. We also recommend that you pay for a year’s worth of web hosting if you can afford it. That way you will not need to worry about paying for them every month or every quarter. You will more than likely get some free perks to go with that purchase like free email accounts (which you really should get at least one when you purchase the web hosting package anyway), percentage off on SSL certificates for the website, and other perks. If you want to pay month-to-month some of the big companies will allow that as well. We still pay month-to-month for some of our websites and every quarter for the rest. Remember the more you can pay for upfront the less expensive it should be for you while you are getting started.

Also, remember to get a web hosting service that has “unlimited bandwidth” and as much server space as you can. By this, I mean how much you can upload onto their servers where unlimited and unmetered is the best option. You will probably need to know if you want to use their site-builder services for plain web pages or if you can install programs like WORDPRESS to create your website. Granted, the site-builder services are fairly easy to use, for the most part, are limited to just creating pages and changes the colors and layout of each page. WordPress is harder on their servers and take a bit of time to learn. But once you become comfortable with using it you can build your website in minutes with hundreds of free tools to help you create your eCommerce website. It creates the frame and interfaces for you and you change it to look like you want and add the tools you need to get going.

Next time we will review the different eCommerce software options available for those who would like to sell physical items online.

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