Selling books on your own Web site

Several vendors have pre-packaged solutions enabling booksellers to quickly open a store on their own Web site. By keeping customers at their own Web sites, seller can potentially pay commissions and lose fewer sales to competitors offering the same book for a few cents less.

To build their own store, a seller must first choose from two basic designs: a PC-administered system, or a Web-based administration. A Web-based store is usually easier to set up but it has less flexibility. By contrast, a PC-based store has a higher learning curve but can be more customized.

The danger is that if your vendor fails or goes out of business, your business can go down the tubes with it. With a Web-based store, your site will go down when your vendor’s site is down, and if the vendor goes out of business, your store might be lost for good. A PC-based store, however, could be switched to a different Internet host if necessary. Security is also better with PC sites since your customer data is stored offline.

The key to getting sales on your Web store is driving traffic there. Buyers won’t find your site unless you market it. Traffic coming from search engines such as Google is typically a major source of Web shoppers. A store admin-istered on your PC may show up better in search engine results if you can customize HTML meta-tags for each product page. Web-based stores don’t rank as high as PC-based stores with search engines, so your marketing may have to rely on e-mail.




New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)