Steps for starting your own online store...

1. Form a company
2. Purchase a domain name and website hosting package
3. Download and install OSCommerce open source shopping cart
4. Setup a merchant account and PayPal account to accept payments automatically online
5. Download TC Bauer Co's catalog and product image files above and load them into your store
6. Promote your store online

If you need help getting your store off the ground, please visit Eyedea Innovations at http://www.eyedeainnovations.com and ask them about their Inet Technology services.

Guide to Internet store success...

Form a company:
American Incorporation has the best prices that we know of for establishing any type of company. You can visit their website at http://ailcorp.com/. We recommend consulting an account or lawyer first to decide which route is best for your business.

Purchase a domain name and website hosting package:
VizaWeb Hosting offers great prices, service, and support for their hosting packages. You can also get your domain name for free by purchasing one of their packages. Check them out at http://www.vizaweb.com/. We simply recommend a hosting company that supports MySQL and PHP so you can get a powerful free shopping cart listed below called OSCommerce.

Download and install OSCommerce open source shopping cart:
Some hosting companies like VizaWeb Hosting allow you to install OSCommerce through a control panel quickly and easily. This is one option, but there are others:

1. Download OSCommerce from http://www.oscommerce.com and install on your server manually
2. Download a pre-loaded version of OSCommerce and install it on your server manually. OSC CRE Loaded is our favorite option and more info can be found at http://creloaded.com/.

Setup a merchant account and PayPal account to accept payments automatically online:
We definitely recommend accepting PayPal, credit cards, and echecks. You don't want to lose a sale because you don't accept your potential customers preferred method of payment. Go to PayPal.com to setup an account for free; they only charge a small amount per transaction. The OSC CRE Loaded cart supports PayPal and is easy to setup.

For credit cards and echecks we recommend FastCharge.com. They provide the payment gateway, merchant service, and OSC plug-in for the best price and decent service. Their online admin tool is pretty good for managing your money. Go to http://www.fastcharge.com for more information.

Download TC Bauer Co's catalog and product image files above and load them into your store:
Follow the directions for downloading the files, see above. If you have taken our advice and gone with the OSC CRE loaded shopping cart simply copy the images into your catalog/images/ folder and import our text file using EasyPopulate for OSCommerce. Let us know if you need any help.

Promote your store online:
There are many, many ways to promote your store and we recommend using all of the following:

1. Hire professional search engine promotion team with guaranteed top placement in major search engines
2. Upload product feed to Froogle for free
3. Upload product feed to Yahoo! Shopping (pay-per-click)
4. Use Google and Overture pay-per-click services
5. Use LinkMarket.net to exchange links with similar and popular sites. This helps PageRank which is key for Google
6. Submit your site to Yahoo! and Google's directory

The list goes on and on, but this should give you a good start and some sales!

If you need help getting your store off the ground, please visit Eyedea Innovations at http://www.eyedeainnovations.com and ask them about their Inet Technology services.

Note: TC Bauer Co is not responsible for any business decisions you decide to make. We recommend these sites based off of our opinions and research and receive no compensation if you chose to do business with these companies.