Just because you have a brilliant business idea does not mean that you have a ton of cash to get it started. Thankfully, starting an e-commerce website does not have to be an expensive endeavor. If you know who to host with, then you may well be able to find very cheap e-commerce web hosting and affordable web hosting services.
So what are you looking for, exactly?
• Hosting
What you need from hosting is a low price, unlimited space and a lot of bandwidth. With poor bandwidth, you wind up with a site that is crashing and burning constantly. Unlimited space is a given, of course. A couple of gigs may look like a lot for now, but it will not once you have been running the website for a couple of months.
• Domain Registration
You can get this through your host or through another service, but in any event, it can be incredibly cheap to register a domain name these days. There was a time when people could get away with charging an arm and a leg for registration, but today it can be done for the change in your couch cushions.
• Web Design
You may take a more DIY approach to your website, but luckily, if you want to have a professional design it, the web is flooded with a generation of young web designers who are looking to make a name for themselves with smaller projects done on a budget. In other words, you can get some of the most innovative and hip designers around on your project for far less than you might expect.
• Content
Web content can be bought through content “farms”, directly from freelance writers, through your web designer and his/her writers, or you can write it yourself. It depends on what kind of content you need and how much time, money or effort you want to put into it.