Selling online offers a small business additional sales opportunities and cost benefits. Each year, the Internet increases overall sales and advances in the privacy and protection of payment transactions. Creating an online store, or business ecommerce store, can increase your small business’s sales as well as add convenience for your customers. Additionally, selling online has lower overhead costs compared to that of a brick-and-mortar store, which can save small businesses money if this is the only selling channel taken. Or, if selling in both retail stores and online, online sales can improve your ROI and brand knowledge. The best part, ecommerce setup is not as hard as you think.

Ecommerce Guide:

• A website to display what you're selling
• An ecommerce solution that collects payment and notifies you about a sale

How to Sell on your Website and on eBay There are a number of ways you can take advantage of Office Live Small Business to sell products online. With Office Live Small Business Store Manager you can easily create your own fully customized ecommerce business with all the features you'd expect: Product catalogs Shopping carts Credit card processing E-mail notifications Tax calculations Shipping

Store Manager is intuitive and many processes are automated, so you don't need to be a technical expert to get your online store set up and running. - And when you're done, your online store will have the same look and feel as your Office Live Small Business Web site.

Once your online store set up is complete, with just a few more clicks you can greatly extend your product exposure. That's because Store Manager works with eBay, the popular online auction site. You use the same product list you created when you set up your store to select items you want to sell on eBay. Orders from your online store and eBay are centrally managed and fulfilled from one convenient spot in the Store Manager tool. Plus you can generate real-time reports whenever you want so you can monitor revenue and related details.