Having a Web Site – How is it Important for a Greeting Card Business?

A web site is not only one way you can start selling greeting cards, but it is also a way that you can start your business storefront or an alternate storefront. Having a web site gives you the ability to show and start selling your greeting cards on a global scale. It also allows you to do business 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without you having to run the storefront. Instead, you can collect orders and payments online and handle shipping during your regular working hours.

If you do not have a business web site you are simply losing money. Every day more and more people are doing business online and its increasing.
Did you know?

  • 79% of people in Australia alone are spending online. That’s 79% of a 22Million population and its growing.
  • Over 2000 Australian’s are making a living on Ebay
  • According to Forrester Research in the USA, online spending was US$95.7 billion last year and that by 2012 they predict it to rise to US$229 billion.
  • Nearly 5 million new households in the US will shop online in the next 5 years.
  • There are 55 million households in the US already shopping online.
  • By 2012 there will be 97 million households in the US shopping online.

If you are serious about building and selling greeting cards then you need to have an online presence.

A Dirt Cheap Way to Build a Website Designed to Sell Your Greeting Cards!

If you have no money to spend on getting a website the cheapest way to get an online presence right now is to create a Blog.
A Blog is a weblog where people make daily entries about their day, business or products. It is just like a website you have an address that will send someone directly to your blog and find out everything they want to know about you and your business.

Smart marketers and business people are using a Blog as well as a website to increase traffic to their websites and products.
The big advantage of a Blog is that because it is easier to position your Blog high in the Blog search engines than it is to get a website highly ranked in Google.

So my point here is start with a Blog if you can’t afford a website but if you can build a website also create a Blog because using these two online strategies together will explode your organic traffic and search engine rankings.

I will admit there is a secret to how you do this and it is out of the scope of this article but I will go into detail in my “How to Build Your Online Greeting Card Business” course when its completed. I will tell you where you can go to get all the information on how to do it by email and on my blog.

To start a Blog for free right now go to blogger.com . It only takes ten minutes to build one it’s that easy. The other place is WordPress this is one of the most popular blogging platforms today and I personally build every one of my web sites with it and its free.

How Do You Start a Web Site for Selling Greeting Cards?

You have two choices:

  • Build it yourself ( I show you how in the online course I mentioned above)
  • Hire an expert Web Designer to do it for you.

If you have no idea where to start when it comes to building a web site then just pay a Web Designer to do it for you. This will get you up and running a lot faster than messing around trying to learn how to do it yourself.

Remember you are building a greeting card business here not learning to be a web site designer. The cost of building a simple web site can start from as little as $300.00. This is so insignificant compared to the cost of setting up a bricks and mortar shop front.

If You Do Want to Have a Shopping Web Site

If you do want to have a shopping web site, where customers can browse your greeting cards, add cards to a shopping cart, and then purchase the cards, then use the following high-level instructions to design your site.

Check into setting up an online storefront using a shopping web site like Pay Pal, eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo! or the more popular Cafe Press. These sites allow you to set up storefronts where the user can view your product, add product to their personal shopping cart, and then purchase the product using a credit card. These sites will provide you with web site space where you can display your product. They will also provide you with the tools necessary to set up and maintain the site.

You will need to set up a Pay Pal Business Premier or a Merchant account in order to set up the payment methods your customers can use and the online shopping feature (i.e., the shopping cart). A Business Premiere account allows a business to do online buy and sell transactions using a credit card(s) or specified bank account. A Merchant account allows a business to do remote business transactions, where the business owner can take a laptop and a card reader to scan credit cards at shows and craft fairs. It also allows a business to do buy and sell transactions using specified credit cards and/or bank accounts.

The storefront can then be set up using any of the previously mentioned online tools. Once the storefront is set up, the Pay Pal account is implemented on the storefront site by copying and pasting the Pay Pal payments module code to the storefront site. Both Pay Pal’s web site and the storefront’s web site should have instructions for copying/pasting the code.

So if selling greeting cards on the Internet is something you have been wanting to do then this is a great way to get started.