Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The Danger of Buying a Ready-Made Store
Before I get into how to find a profitable niche for your business, I realized there was one warning I needed to make. There are plenty of scammers and semi-scammers out there who gladly offer to set up a complete store for you, filled with lots of cheap and sparkly products. Just pay them a chunk of money and you have a real online store to call your very own!

What a deal, huh? Well, it isn't. Here's why. By the time you've bought your ready-made store, thousands of other suckers--excuse me--budding entrepreneurs have already bought a site identical to yours. That means the Web is flooded with the exact same cheap and sparkly products you're trying to sell.

You're trying to sell products that people stumble across everywhere--or that they would if the owners had any idea of how to promote their sites. The companies that sell ready-made sites don't give you any help learning how to promote your site on the Web; they're counting on three things:

• They'll get a good chunk of money up front for something that takes them no more than a few seconds to duplicate
• Each site owner will want everyone they know to see their new business venture
• Some of their friends will make a polite purchase on the site and the site-selling company will get a cut of the sale in addition to the money they made selling the site

Once the friends have seen the site, traffic virtually ceases, unless the site owner gets serious about learning how to promote a business. And when they do get serious they discover that the products they're selling are a tough sell because they're nothing more than impulse items that nobody is actually looking for.

So if you run across a too-good-to-be-true offer of a ready-made web store you can have built for you in 15 minutes, already filled with products, do yourself a favor. Run away from it.

Jeff