Success on the web using a drop shipper requires the right choices, the right attitude and the knowledge to avoid being ripped off.

To open an online web store, there are several components involved and more costs than a drop shipper will let you in on. First, if they offer you a site under their domain name, in most cases, forget the search engines, anything you try to get to your site will only help the drop shipper. The best way to garner traffic to sell products is to have your own free standing website. If you cannot design your own website or if you have a website creation software package like FrontPage or DreamWeaver, you really should have friends that will be honest with you look at it and show them what you have created. If you are not accustomed to building a website, and do not have an eye for design and functionality, a web designer may be appropriate. Also, anyone telling you that PayPal* is a good solution for accepting credit cards, it may not be. They set a lot of limitations unless you get a true merchant account through them, and if that is the case, you can get the same thing through your local bank. Also, for a customer's experience, using the lower end solutions from ebay, it doesn't come off as professional or credible to bounce back and forth from your website and PayPal's website. Many potential customers look at using PayPal as low-tech and that the website is not a stable or mature company. The general thinking is that PayPal is the first rung on the ladder to trying to get an online business and they will look for that product on a better website that looks like a real company, not incorporating PayPal as their merchant solution.

Below are some fees you can expect for starting your online website.

Web designer (if needed): Depending on quality of design, custom database work, and how involved in populating products, this can range anywhere from $500 (for an inexperienced designer) to thousands of dollars.

Ready made store front to order products in an online shopping cart fashion figuring out the shipping, tax, totals and accept credit cards online with your merchant account. Free (for limited features or other online solutions that take a percentage of the sale**) to thousands. A good middle ground for canned shopping carts with satisfactory shopping cart features seems to average $300.

A secure certificate to safely accept credit cards*** through your store averages $200 a year.

Monthly hosting of your website with database connectivity and a business account averages $20 - $40 a month****

Marketing online can range from PPC (pay-per-click) campaign to an seo (search engine optimization) campaign. The average low end of a PPC campaign is $0.10 a click. If you check how many times certain phrases are searched for, the rule of thumb is to expect a 5% click-through rate. If you choose a word that is searched for 10,000 times per month, you can expect to pay $50 for 500 people to click through to your site from that one key phrase. If you choose a word that is searched for millions of times within a month, and assume you will make sales and keep up with the PPC campaign, you will find yourself in trouble very quickly.

An SEO (search engine optimization) company can also be a daunting task, since many of them will give you a one site, sometimes two, example showing certain key phrases that are ranked in the search engines from which anyone can either luck out on or the site is so targeted to those key phrases, their examples are just to sell you. Many ask for money up front or monthly fees and the guarantee for results is non-existent. The pricing for an SEO campaign can be all over the board. We would suggest one company, Top 10 or Free, and the reason is we have seen their results many times and they do not charge you until it works. With them or any other company, getting listed in the search engines isn't a flip of the switch and doesn't happen overnight and sometimes a certain genre is so competitive, it may be hard to impossible to rank. Some comapnies use methods that are not allowed by search engines and they make you get great results for a short time, but then get your site black listed to not be listed ever again in a search engine. As important as SEO work can be for a site, it could also be the end of a site. Choosing an SEO company is very important and must not be taken lightly.

*Minus their full merchant account (meaning you went through a credit check and it is connected to your business account), PayPal touts that they have a secure connection to accept credit cards and shopping cart solutions. Using their secure certificate still bounces you from your site to theirs and back (their low tech shopping cart solutions) and many transactions get rejected. if you have high ticket items, or have any kind of volume, they will reject it based on all the credit card fraud that is around. They will not give you a full access account to run a business. Make sure what they may give you will do everything you need it to, not just seeing the transaction is secure and you can accept credit cards. There is a lot more to it and people only learn after experiencing it instead of being proactive and in control of their online business.

**Percentages of sale can be scary when it isn't your product. If the drop shipper isn't including shipping and tax in what your profit will be, and you are already getting a percentage of the total price, the company taking a percentage is taking it for the full sale price, not just your profit, so be very careful.

***Many people think they can do this later when they make some sales. Any excuse that starts with I will do it after some success must learn that the success comes with doing it right, not half-heartedly and expecting the world to loosely spend their money for you to succeed. The secure certificate allows you to accept credit cards and personal information with the little lock on the browser. The problem is more than an icon that shows up. Web browsers, like Internet Explorer, will bring up an alert if you go to submit a credit card when the secure certificate isn't present, warning the customer that they are about to send their credit card over an insecure connection that can be compromised by outside people and then it asks if you want to continue. Most everyone will hit cancel.

****Hosting companies charging a few dollars fall into the farm category, especially when it comes to hosting a business or ecommerce site. Be leery of anything that is overly cheap, because they can have limited bandwidth to share with too many websites (so all sites can go very slowly at high trafficked times). Again, be careful who you choose.