The Internet makes it easy to sell products online. With an online store, you can reach customers nationwide and beyond, but getting started can be intimidating.

Both Yahoo and eBay offer services that will help you create your store.

Yahoo (www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce) offers several plans. The Merchant Starter Plan runs about $40 per month, with a $50 setup fee. You also pay 1.5 percent on transactions.

A wizard walks you through the process of setting up the store. You can choose your site's color scheme and style. Or, you can choose from predesigned templates.

Then, you upload your product database or product details. You get 20 gigabytes of space for your store. You also get 500GB of data transfer per month. This allows thousands of visitors a month. And you get a free domain name.

You can accept payments via credit card or PayPal. You can also specify tax rates and shipping options.

There are tools to help you manage your inventory and run reports. But for some advanced features, you'll need to upgrade to a Standard ($100) or Professional ($300) plan.

Driving traffic to your store is the difficult part, but Yahoo gives you tools to help.

Yahoo helps you submit your site to some search sites. You get a free Yahoo Local listing. There's a $50 credit for Google AdWords and credits for shopping-comparison sites.

An eBay Store is an easy way to sell items through eBay (www.pages.ebay.com/merchantsolutions/index.html). You can list items in auctions, at a fixed price or in inventory format. Inventory format lets you list multiple units of the same item.

eBay helps you market your products. Your items will appear in eBay search results. You'll also get promotional placements on eBay and e-mail marketing tools.

You still must pay insertion fees and a final value fee on all listings. The final value fee is based on the selling price of your items. The final value fee is tiered and somewhat confusing.

There are three store levels. Pricing starts at about $16 per month for a Basic store.

You can customize your store's pages. Basic stores get five pages. Featured ($50) and Anchor ($500) stores get 10 and 15 pages, respectively. Featured and Anchor stores offer advanced features for high-volume sellers.

eBay's ProStores service is much like Yahoo Merchant Services. You're responsible for driving traffic to your site. The stores are independent of eBay's auctions. However, ProStores makes it easy to list products on eBay.

ProStores has a setup Wizard. You can choose from almost 200 professionally designed templates.

There are several plans, ranging from about $7 to $250 per month. At the most basic, you get two pages and can sell 10 products. Other plans offer unlimited products and up to 20GB of storage.

Fees range from 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent. You can use PayPal to process payments. Or, you can sign up with a credit card processing agency if you're on the Business plan ($30) or above.

Contact Kim Komando at gnstech@gns.gannett.com.