Ok, this is clear to many who read this article, one way to make money online is sell things. Items to sell could be physical products for delivery (books, clothes, electronics, etc.) or digital products to download (music, movies, e-books). For the purpose you need to set up and run an online shop/store.

To do that in a traditional way you:

• set up a web site,
• use some software to build the online store,
• arrange a payment structure (electronic set up fro customers to be able to pay)
• pay for web site hosting and potentially for online store software
• populate the store with product info (descriptions, images, pricing) and maintain that,
• maintain inventory of the items offered,
• work on fulfilling the orders,
• provide customer support
• work on processing returns, work with vendors on that

Not to scare anybody who has not tried to do that already but having an online store as a business could be quite an involved business and not as automated as it may sound.

What we want to mention in this article though are ways we can set up stores, that are almost fully automatic. We still need to put some effort in setting them up but what is generally fully automated in them is:

• the owner (we) does not need to maintain any inventory - somebody else has storage and keeps the goods offered in stock ready to be shipped,
• payment infrastructure is set up and the main parties involved (bank, payment system, merchant) do not concern us much; we get a cut of the sales from the core merchant,
• order fulfillment is done by somebody else; fulfillment may be quite a complex process especially for a business with a large variety for products; it may include keeping a good score of what products are stored where, picking products for an order from storage area; packaging; preparing shipping labels; shipping; customer service with delivery tracking etc.
• the web site infrastructure is already set up, we only need to arrange the products we want to sell,
• the store is usually populated by a great variety of products and we only need to select what is offered by us and in some cases customise it,
• some advertising; since usually stores like that will become, or remain, a part of a bigger super store of the core merchant that allows us to build such an automated store there is some advertising done for us; that is, the core merchant will advertise and attract shoppers for their main store and some of the shopping trafic can potentially be guided to our mini-store and our products in it;
• customer support is done for us by somebody else
• returns processing is done by others

There are things for us still left to do but they are minimized to what I will call the more "fun" part of the business. Hey, who does not want that!?!

Here is what normally is left for us to do:

Select products from a larger general list. I consider this "fun" part of the business - look through available products fom the core merchant and create a custom selection based on our views of the market, where and how we are going to advertise and may be simply our own taste and style.

Customize the products. In many cases we will be allowed to customize the products by defining colors for parts of the product, play with designs of text nad images over the product surface, etc.

Pricing. Sometimes we are allowed to tweak the pricing of the product - reflecting on how much of a cut we get from a sale.

Specify way by which we get paid. This is usually pretty simple and I would say the funnest part. In many cases we do not need to worry about it is really fun - we get reminded by the core merchant that they have collected that much of commission they need to pay us.

Advertising. This is big! This is probably the most important part of this game. And if you like it and happen to be good at it, that will ensure you are going to be successful too. To some extend as we mentioned the core merchant may pass some shopper traffic to our store and that might be because of our quality of products or products selection but most likely they will promote our product list if it has best sellers already. So back to the main idea here - advertising on our part is important.

We can do advrtizng any possible way it can be done for an online store. And while this is nto the topic of the article - that could include:

• commercial blogging,
• news PR,
• paid advertising through tools like - Google AdWords and ad placement - Ask.com Ask Sponsored Listings - LookSmart.com LookSmart AD Network - Microsoft Ad Center - MIVA - Yahoo! Search Marketing - Yandex - etc., etc.

There is plenty of resources on online marketing on the Internet and on HubPages. So we are not going to spare much space on this here.

Well here are the options for setting up such free almost fully automated stores. These are the ones we stumbled up on. Please feel free to mention in comments of any other ones. We will make sure your comment and or blogs and HubPages are referenced in further editions of this article.

Wordans -wordans.com - Wordans is a web site that allows you to open you own free online shop for t-shirts. You design your own t-shirts. You chose from thousand of existing designs and add or create your own by selecting the t-shirt type, colors and text and graphics design. T-shirts are available for women, men, boys and girls. The online store that you can set up is very customizable, ideal for brand (web business, etc.) promotion, but also for creating your own design brand to wider range of t-shirts selection. Wordans will pay you commission both for selling your own designs and promoting the website (affiliation).

Zazzle - www.zazzle.com - Zazzle allows you create custom products, including t-shirts like Wordans but also many other ones like postage (yes, postage wiht your own images), greeting cards, mugs, calendars, gift certificates, posters, shoes, skateboards, embroidery, profile and business cards, bags, hats, stickers, ties and many others. Zazzle will pay you commission both for sellng your own designs and promoting the website (affilation). The service is completely free, again.

Amazon aStore - www.amazon.com - Amazon aStore service for Amazon affiliates allows you after you sing up as an affiliate (other benefits like affiliate commissions also present) to build a so called aStore. In an aStore you can build a selection of products available on Amazon.com - books, DVD's, CD's, anything else. Shoppers can be guided (through your advertizing efforts) to the store on Amazon like StarSign a Store or, and you can chose to build in a store in another web site you have like a blog etc.

CafePress.com - www.cafepress.com - CafePress.com is to some extend similar by business model to Zazzle for the fact that it has customizable products like t-shirts and others like posters, stickers, mugs etc. They too allow you to set up your own shops. Affiliate program is arranged through Commission Junction - www.cj.com.

Dropship arrangement can be a way for you to have an online store and not worry about product storage, inventory maintenance, order fulfilment etc. When you use the service of a dropship vendor, you advertise and try to sell products that that vendor has and when orders come in you forward the order details to them - the dropship vendor. The dropship vendors fulfills the order including shipping the product. You usually charge the customer and pay wholesale (that is after your commission subtracted) price to the dropship vendor. Still many other aspects of running an online store may remain in your area of responsibility - payment processing, customer service to some extend, returns handling etc.

There have been dropship vendors who claim they can provide you also with a platform to help you to a certain degree to build an online store. I would expect for some dropship companies to have such offering that deserves attention. In the scope of research of this article we have not been able to find examples that create the impression of a fully automated and free set up. We will mention a few web sites that we have found to offer something close to that but BE WARNED that wiht the exception of StoreB2B.com these were not researched in detail and in the case of Krautus.com we had our Internet security program warn us that the site caused a security problem - so be careful with it or avoid altogether.

www.ewis.ca - the dropship service is free but they link to an online store platform that seems to be paid but relatively cheap - www.dropshipsite.com

Kratus.com (not linked on purpose, our Internet security program had an issue with this web site).

DepotNet.com seems to offer turnkey websites that are online stores that are automatically set to forward orders to dropship vendors but the sites are offered a price and there is an annual fee to maintain it too.

StoreB2B.com state to offer fully automated dropship stores "built in 3 minutes" ready with pre-selected domain names (or choice of yours) and have a 7 day free trial but after that has a monthly fee. So, yes, this is not completely free, They state they have a large selection of hot selling items. This web site creates a good impression compared to the others we are looking at in this section and we will not be afraid to insert a link to them: StoreB2B.com.

We are guessing it is worth it for someone interested in dropship automated stores to research that area in more detail. One thing they can start fro is a Google search on dropship online store or dropship free online store.

Affiliation to existing stores is an obvious option for one to get in to earning money online by advertising and steering traffic towards stores that are already build, managed and run by somebody else. Though it is not like having your own online store similar experience can be created with some affiliation programs where in addition to links to the store's main page you would be allowed to use links to particular products of that site. So one can build a web page that talks and discusses products from the web site and make it appear as a kind of a store front and link all the product related text and images through their affiliate links to the selling web site. Again, like with dropship this is slightly different area from pure "free, fully automated web stores" so interested entrepreneurs will need to research that further. This concept is pretty classic though so there shold be plenty of resources on it. Definitely most of the popular online stores offer affiliation through links, banners etc. Also Commission Jucntion www.cj.com is a great resource and collection of tools to organize a business around affiliation.

Please feel free to comment on this article and perhaps list additional ways known to you to set up close-to-fully automated stores. We will acknowledge your input and include links to your blogs or HubPages.