One of the first things you will need, of course, is an ecommerce host. E-commerce hosts provide businesses with the resources which enable them to sell their products or services on the web: a web server and the facilities required to manage online transactions, templates for building store fronts and online catalogs, support for secure credit card purchasing, and tools for tracking inventory.
Before choosing your ecommerce host, you will need to know exactly what you require from a web-store, both now and in the future; you will need to know which web-store applications on the market best fit these needs, so you can choose an ecommerce host who supports these applications; and you will need to estimate how much it will cost you to run your store on an ongoing basis.