Do i have to own my own products?

[commerceme]

Hello,

Im brand new to this, i have been reading a lot of posts and i was wondering if i would have to have my own products to build a Ecommerce website or can i use someone elses. It a silly question but i had to ask it. How much would one of these sites cost me if i was going to learn how to build one myself. Im pretty familier with wordpress, i have dreamweaver but i have never used it. A little push in the right direction would be greatfully apreciated.

Thank you

[roban]

Welcome to the forum commerceme.

You can use anyone's products and probably a drop shipping program would work for you. Doing this you would not have the headache of shipping. Finding a good source for your product would be your biggest headache.

Dreamweaver and Wordpress are probably not going to be your best choices although Wordpress has some decent plugins for ecommerce. I think you'd be better suited to a shopping cart solution that has all of the bells and whistles you'd need. Pay particular attention to their support forums and the willingness of its members to help the newbie.

I use CS-Cart and moderate at their forum so I know the levels of help are high and the cart has a one time fee per domain.

[amspcs]

Roban is correct, drop shipping is a legit business model. However, for payment processing purposes, you need to be very careful to arrange that when the drop shipper ships the product, it (a) is charged under YOUR name, not the name of the drop shipper (b) clearly shows YOUR name and address on the shipping label, not that of the drop shipper, and (c) very clearly provides YOUR phone and contact info should there be a problem. This is to avoid customer confusion which leads to chargebacks which result in major headaches for you.

[Alan2011]

if want to learn how to built a website , there are some code language you must to learn .
PHP Javescript HTML css+div

[BizBookSite]

“Long Tail Business Models are about selling less of more by focussing on offering a large amount of niche products, while each item sells relatively infrequently.” Aggregate sales of niche products can be as profitable as the traditional sales model, where a small amount of bestsellers account for most revenues. Long Tail business models benefit from low inventory costs and require strong platforms to make niche content available to interested buyers.

In his 2006 bestseller “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”, Chris Anderson describes a shift in the media business from selling a few “hit-items” in large volumes toward selling a very large number of niche items, each in relatively small quantities. Although Anderson’s research focuses primarily on the media industry, he demonstrates that the Long Tail concept is applicable to other branches as well. The success of the online auction site Ebay is based on a lot of auctioneers selling and buying small quantities of “non-hit” items.

[scrub]

The simplest thing for you may be to just use Amazon's affiliate network.

[chengang]

roban say good!

[Lukevdp]

You can sell someone elses products, but you want to make sure you have some sort of edge which makes it attractive to buy from you instead of your competition.

For example, you want to be either lower cost, better quality, different in some way, or have better website information. If you have an edge, it becomes easier to sell, more profitable to advertise, and easier to grow and succeed.