Given what the splendour of the World Wide Web was initially intended for, it’s quite disappointing to see how it turned out. Don’t get me wrong – technically the internet is a marvellous beast to say the least, but in terms of the quick, free and easy access to useful information as it was intended, I fear it has really missed the mark.

Words like FOMO – the “Fear Of Missing Out” have come to the fore as part of the hip lingo associated with the internet, characteristic of the emerging internet culture generally centred on a lot of aimless time wasting. People spend so much of their time patting themselves and each other on the back for demonstrating some otherwise admirable astuteness in creating witty memes and the likes, but all that creativity and artistry really just goes to waste on the social networking platforms.

One place in which FOMO should be hitting you hard, but probably isn’t, is that of how to get this beast of an interconnected information superhighway to pay you. You might as well try and have the time you spend online generate money for you instead of you spending it all the time either directly for your connectivity and other online shopping channels, or indirectly in the sense that you’re spending your time frivolously watching cat videos as opposed to doing something more constructive that generates money for you.

So how can you get in on the action if you don’t even know where to start?

By no means is this a guarantee that you’ll realise any sort of success at all, but if there’s anything you’re going to have FOMO about, it should be that you’re missing out on all the potential that comes with owning your own e-commerce website.

The approach

There are many different options by way of how you can approach your acquisition of your very own e-commerce website, but the one I would recommend above all others is the cheapest option which gives you the option to upgrade and add features as required. This is because there is a lot of competition and you need to give it time to see if the products you’re going to be offering actually sell. That is after all, all that matters – sales, at least according to this social commerce report.

The likes of Open Cart comes to mind as a great option to go with, but give yourself a year at least and just look at it as some kind of side project.

These days setting up an e-commerce site is as easy as a one-click installation solution from within the cPanel given to you by your web hosting service provider, so you really don’t even need all that much by way of technical skills. You’ll have to make an experiment out of the products you feature, with the easiest of these products to maintain and sell being those of a digital nature – buyers can complete the purchase and download the product (like an e-book) without the need for you to get actively involved.

If it fails, you lose about $5 per month in web hosting fees, but if it works out then you can only imagine the financial implications!