I'm gonna cut things short and simple on how i built mine.
Being someone with nearly zero knowledge on HTML Coding and gizmo tech yada-yada wala-wala and sort like that, I was pretty much the typical internet and computer user.
So when I started my online shop, I depended mostly on the wealth of the internet to which i found Weebly (www.weebly.com). It is an online site which helps you build your own blog, site, online business, basically what ever you want it to be. It comes with the free version or you could pay a minimal annual fee of less than $50/year. As compared to paying someone to build a site for you at the cost of hundreds and thousands of dollars.
The great thing about Weebly is that you can use your own domain name e.g. www.yourshopname.com to it instead of www.weebly.com/yourshopname of that sort which may make your online business look less professional.The interface is pretty much straight forward and user friendly. All you need to do is pick a template, colours, fonts etc and start adding in your content. There are also functions like adding pages and sub-pages (or what I like to call as categories and directories for visitors to navigate around the site). There is also online buttons for your customers to click on. All you need to do is to add the words "Buy Now" to it and link it to your shopping cart.
Paypal function is also included inside where you are able to add in features where your customer can pay for purchases from your site via Paypal. But please note that they lack of the shopping cart function itself so you have to source out for free shopping cart widgets and link them to your Weebly webstore. It took me quite awhile but i found mine, Mal's E-commerce (https://www.mals-e.com/). Not only do they provide a shopping cart for your site, their carts comes with transaction history capability and also user defined auto reply emails after your customer have submitted their purchase orders to you.
The professional layout, image and style pretty much depends on your creativity here. Don't fret if you don't get it quite right the first time. You can keep on improving and tweak your online store as you go on. Get a good camera and brush up on your photography skills. Humans are visual beings so good visual makes your customers stay longer on your site which can covert to sales. Check out on how other huge online stores set up their layouts.
Tagging your site with relevant words will ensure that people are able to find you when they are looking for something that you offer. So tag away!
Be sure to have a proper "Contact Us" page so your potential customers can reach out to you. I did not think this was important but I was surprised at the number of enquiries I had even right at the 1st month of going online.
I got my online store up in 2 weeks single handedly with less than a hundred bucks of capital.
So go on, give it a try!
links:
www.godaddy.com - buy your own website address / domain name
www.weebly.com - website/webstore builder
www.mals-e.com - Free Shopping Cart
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