Money Making Tip - How to build an e-Commerce site for under $100 in 10 days

We haven’t been very active in the Hubpages community after taking part in the original 30 Hubs in 30 days challenge in June 09. We were quite busy with a project. We had to build an e-commerce website for a client in a shoe string budget and in 10 working days, YES an e-Commerce site with shopping cart, PayPal payment system et all in 10 days!

Let me explain what we did. Before we go into the details, if you ask me, “Hey how is this a money tip?”. If you are writing online for money, you must consider having your own blog/website. It is even better if you have products to sell online .For this you will need a website with shopping cart, payment modules, and other paraphernalia associated with it.

Here is the site we built for foreign medical graduates applying for their residency.

And this is how we did it.

Info: A word of recommendation for godaddy, when you usually register and host your domain with them they give you $50-100 worth of advertisement credit with Google, Microsoft & Facebook that you can use to advertise your site. They also offer some amazing tools and support that come with your account.

Some of you are scratching your head right now and thinking, how is he going to build a website with the remaining $5?

Yes we are. Drupal is a wonderful piece of free software that comes with no bells or whistles attached and the best part are the different modules like forums, adsense, shopping cart, credit card payment, comments, spam blocker, photo modules (like flickr), blogging platforms, themes to change look and feel etc etc. All of them – FREE!- $0. godaddy will install Drupal for you on your site free of charge. Just send them a request and they will do it in an hour or less.

Info: modules are plugins for Drupal that extend, build or enhance Drupal core functionality.

Here are the links to the two sites:
godaddy.com – Domain registration and hosting provider.
drupal.org – Free e-Commerce platform.

Well we did charge the client for our services to deploy Drupal modules, but you can do it yourself. I must warn you though, Drupal and all its modules require a bit of technical knowledge. But I can guarantee you if you learn (online documentation and books) and persevere you will be able to do it. No pain No gain! Right? Look at the potential; if you learn how to work with a few modules, you can build beautiful website all by yourself. When you get a new product idea, build your own website and sell it off of there. You would have invested only $100, imagine the products you can sell and also the ad revenue you would make out of it.

If you have any questions drop a comment and we will try to answer them as much as we can. We would also love to hear feedback about the site. It is a website that helps medical graduates get into residency program.