The actual costs of building and maintaining an e-commerce website is very reasonable. I have sites that generate six figure sales volume every year and cost less than $100 a year to maintain. However, if you are new to e-commerce, the last thing I recommend is setting up your own site.

"If you build it, they will come", only applies to Kevin Costner, dead baseball players, and Iowa cornfields. It doesn't apply to e-commerce sites and internet businesses. If you know a little HTML and can install and configure a shopping cart, you shouldn't have any problem building a website. The problem is how are you going to let the world know your site exists?

Learning to market a website and convert those visitors into sales can be a real challenge. It should be one of your goals, but isn't something most people will master right away. If you want to generate immediate income for your business, the best place to start is Ebay. There isn't another auction site that can generate more bang for your buck. It is an excellent place to start your business.

Just because you aren't going to setup an e-commerce website right away doesn't mean you shouldn't reserve your website. I highly recommend
IX Web Hosting's Top Rated $3.95/mo plan. It will give you the chance to reserve your business domain name, setup a business email, add extra pics to your ebay auctions for free, and become familiar with a web hosting interface. As your business grows, you'll already have everything in place to start your website.

Good Luck with your business,

Brent Crouch