For some reason many people think everything is different when they start an online shopping site as a business. This is wrong. The Internet is just an additional sales channel — albeit a very powerful one.

So accepting money from customers via a shopping cart is not all that different from accepting money from a customer on the telephone. In fact it can be much easier and safer, if you know what to do.

Good eCommerce software such as ShopFactory makes it easy to accept payments in many different ways in your online store.

Making the decision to sell online is a big step. Following the right business opportunity can change your whole life and allow you to become independent. Or it can extend the reach of your existing business to help make it sustainable for the future. But this decision is only the first step. What should you do next?

Don't worry. Starting an Internet business to sell online is not rocket science. Virtually anyone can do it with some dedication. Creating an online store is actually the easy part with powerful e-Commerce solutions such as ShopFactory.

Before you can open your own shopping cart site, you must decide what you want to sell to your customers in your online store — and how to source your products. Even the best shopping cart software solution such as ShopFactory can't make this decision for you. This article has been written to help you solve these two questions. Find out how to avoid the most common mistakes made by eCommerce start-ups and how to find the products you can sell.

Have you ever wondered how to source the products you want to sell in your online store?

If you want to open your own online business, but haven't yet found your suppliers, it's time to get serious about doing business online.

Without suppliers you have no idea what you will be paying for your products. Consequently you will not know how much profit you can make — or if indeed you can make any profit at all. Proper planning becomes pretty much impossible.

To move from having an idea to create an Internet store to actually running your own online business you have to take a number of steps. One of the most important steps is to find reliable suppliers for your products.

PCI, DSS and CISP are the new acronyms n the block — if you are accepting credit card payments you’d better know about them.

Devised by AMEX, MasterCard and VISA these acronyms stand for a set of regulations shop owners online and offline have to follow when they store, process or transmit credit card data. Large fines loom otherwise.

Reading the regulations alone is enough to give you a heart attack. The good news is that ShopFactory eCommerce software makes complying easy.

The right type of Internet address can set you up for the future. The wrong one can cost you your business down the track. 

This article explains how to find and select the right name for your business at the lowest price, lists automatic tools which make the name selection easier and explains how to avoid expensive mistakes when you set out to build an online store with eCommerce software solutions such as ShopFactory.

Optimizing for search engines (SEO) is a must, when you build an online store. After all, searching the Internet for products and services has become as common as it used to be to look up the Yellow Pages.

Your online store should be among the results Internet users find, when they use search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Fortunately the act of optimizing is not too difficult. The best shopping cart software solutions such as ShopFactory support many search engine optimization functions.

When you start looking at search engine optimization, you’ll quickly find that it all comes down to keywords. Or rather key phrases. These are the words your potential customers enter in search engines to find what they are looking for.

If you know what these search phrases are and you optimize your website for them, your site might be just the one they find. That's what SEO is all about. But how do you find the right search phrases?

Search engine optimization is all about integrating the right search phrases in your website in such a way that the search engines find your website appealing enough to display it to their customers when they do a search.

Searchers are the customers of search engines — making them happy is therefore high priority for search engine companies. We have collected a number of free tools to help you find the search phrases your potential customers use when looking for your products and services.

Homophones are words which sound alike, but have different meanings and are spelled differently. When you look for a domain name, you should avoid these words, to make it easy for customer to correctly spell your domain name. Sometimes a homophone is just a miss-spelling.

PayPal has become one of the biggest payment service providers in the world, comparable to Visa and MasterCard. With PayPal you can accept credit cards as well as PayPal's own payment method.

ShopFactory is great for Search Engine Optimization, and many shops created with ShopFactory and the products they contain are listed highly in Google search results. But if you want your products also to be listed in the Google Product search results, you have to publish them to the Google Merchant Center with ShopFactory Marketeer.