Ecommerce is booming. The economy may be weak, jobs may be down and workers unemployed, but ecommerce is doing quite well. So, what is ecommerce? Electronic commerce. For our purposes, the selling of goods and services and exchange of money over the Internet. Product sourcing is integral to this and especially important for the small, home business. If you currently use a website–whether your own or a simple blog on MySpace or Facebook–and you market anything at all, then you are doing ecommerce.

As you may already be aware, ecommerce can be amazingly profitable, and even more so if you are taking advantage of the possibilities available through automation such as ecommerce shopping cart platforms. Using automation–and this does not have to be as complex as it may sound–can help you expand your market from your local area to the entire country and even the world. Automation can reduce the time you spend on the mundane, repetitious activities of daily business maintenance and thus return time to you that you can better spend on developing your business.

Most website hosting companies offer a choice of shopping cart platforms as part of their service when you open an account. This allows you to install the cart with the push of a button. Shopping carts also allow automatic integration with a payment processor–the technology that allows you to accept secure payments. PayPal would be one example of a payment processor or gateway. I don’t want to over exaggerate the simplicity of this; setting up your own functioning ecommerce site requires thought and tweaking. But–and this is my point–it is possible for you to get started on a do-it-yourself level for only a tiny initial start up cost.

Once you do have your shopping cart online, it is important to upload your product information and test the command line of the site. That means you want to simulate the experience of a customer from time of arrival, product selection, check out, and purchase of the products. This also means that you must be confident of your inventory and product sourcing. Home business success means never running out of stock. So it is also important to “test” your suppliers to be sure they are reliable.

Finding sources of product supply is often seen to be a major obstacle to going into business on the Internet. Actually, this is less a problem than a perception characteristic of newcomers to online business. Product sourcing for home business is important whether you selling products on eBay, in a flea market, from a dorm room, or out of your kitchen. I think that after you do a little business planning, questions of where to find products will start to answer themselves. One of the biggest product sourcing secrets is that manufacturers will generally tell you who their product distributors are.

Once your site is set-up, tested, and running, the site itself should run automatically. You can expect to keep an eye on it, perform general maintenance, and make sure that the hosting company is keeping your site online. However, this should require only a minimum time requirement, and even these tasks can be automated. Once, running you can devote your time to more important business activities such as keeping in touch with your customers, advertising, branding your name, and researching new niches and products.