Before starting your venture you must have considered that what are the products or the services which you want to offer to the people and whether people would be interested to take your offerings and pay you so that you can earn profits. After you have finalized your products or services the next main point to decide is about your domain name, since this is one thing which would give you online identity, it should have the quality to remain in the memory of the people and specially your clients.

The next step you have to take is to get your domain name registered and get your website designed professionally, while getting your website designed you should be very clear that how many products or services you are going to present before the buyers. Lesser number of products presents a website with uncovered space and too many products would present crowded look to the buyers. Always remember to use digital pictures of your products so that they can load easily.  

After you have added the pictures of your product range you should describe them along with any offer (if any) and price for the benefit of your customers and remember to regularly update this data. Further more you are also expected to keep a track of your sales and related data about your products, like weight and size for easy calculation of the shipping costs. Your website should be designed in such away that it should offer easy navigation to your buyers. You should explain clearly to your buyers that what they should look forward to get from your business. This helps to gain the confidence of the online buyer.

Since you are going to venture out in the business arena and would be handling online financial transactions regularly therefore you would require such a web host who could be able to offer you the SSL encryption services. Since you would be operating your business so you would require a non-stop performance of servers hence you should select such a web host who gives you an uptime guarantee of at least 99%. You would also require a personal CGI_BIN directory for the purpose of ecommerce where you will upload your programs since you would require these programs for payment processing and managing your shopping cart. Make sure that your web host gives you access to your web logs as you would be requiring them for many purposes. One more important aspect of your web host to be checked is the quality of customer support. If all matches your requirement you can assume for successful running of your site.

There are many shopping cart programs available in the market and web hosts also offer them as per your requirements. To accept the payments you would require some payment gateway as PayPal or 2CO etc. or to accept the payment through the credit cards you may require the help of some merchant banker who supports the internet transactions.

If you consider the above suggestions one after the other then you will definitely towards your desired goal that is success!!