shopbegins

 

One of my goals in this site is to be one of the friends who provides you with the right advice and support to get your business online and make it a success. In this section, I give you a step-by-step overview of the entire process of starting an online business. Let's make your online shop begins now.. :)

Step 1: Identify a Need
Getting to know the marketplace
The Internet is a worldwide, interconnected network of computers to which people can connect either from work or home, and through which people can communicate via e-mail, receive information from the Web, and buy and sell items by using credit cards or other means.

Many people decide to start an online business with little more than a casual knowledge of the Internet. But when you decide to get serious about going online with a commercial endeavor, it pays to get to know the environment in which you plan to be working.

One of your first steps should be to find out what it means to do business online and to determine the best ways for you to fit into the exploding field of electronic commerce. For example, you need to realize that the Internet is a personal place; that customers are active, not passive, in the way they absorb information; and that the Net was established within a culture of people sharing information freely and helping one another.

Some of the best places to find out about the culture of the Internet are the newsgroups, chat rooms, and bulletin boards where individuals gather and exchange messages online. Visiting discussion forums devoted to topics that interest you personally can be especially helpful, and you’re likely to end up participating. Also visit commerce Web sites, such as eBay, Amazon.com, or other online marketplaces, and take note of ideas and approaches that you may want to use.

"Cee-ing" what's out there
The more information you have about the 3C of the online world, the more likely you are to succeed in doing business online:

• Competitors: Familiarize yourself with other online businesses that already do what you want to do. Don't let their presence intimidate you. You're going to find a different and better way to do what they already do.
• Customers: Investigate the various kinds of customers who shop online and who might visit your site.
• Culture: Explore the special language and style people use when they communicate.

As you take a look around the Internet, notice the kinds of goods and services that tend to sell in the increasingly crowded, occasionally disorganized, and sometimes-complex online world. The things that sell best in cyberspace include 4C:

• Cheap: Online items tend to be sold at a discount — at least, that's what shoppers expect.
• Customized: Anything that's hard-to-find, personalized, or unique sells well online.
• Convenient: Shoppers are looking for items that are easier to buy online than at a "real" store, such as a rare book that you can order in minutes from Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), or an electronic greeting card that you can send online in seconds (www.greeting-cards.com).
• Content-rich: Consumers go online to quickly read news stories that are available by subscription, such as newspapers and magazines, or that exist online only, such as Web logs (blogs) and electronic publications (ezines).

Figuring out how to do it better.
After you take a look at what’s already out there, the next step is to find ways to make your business stand out from the crowd. Direct your energies toward making your site unique in some way and providing things that others don’t offer. The things that set your online business apart from the rest can be as tangible as half-price sales, contests, seasonal sales, or freebies. They can also involve making your business site higher in quality than the others. Maybe you can just provide better or more personalized customer service than anyone else.

Step 2: Determine What You Have to Offer
Business is all about identifying customers’ needs and figuring out exactly what goods or services you’re going to provide to meet those needs. It’s the same both online and off. (Often, you perform this step before or at the same time that you scope out what the business needs are and figure out how you can position yourself to meet those needs, as I explain in the earlier section “Step 1: Identify a Need.”)

To determine what you have to offer, make a list of all the items you have to put up for sale, or all the services that you plan to provide to your customers. Next, you need to decide not only what goods or services you can provide online, but also where you’re going to obtain them. Are you going to create sale items yourself? Are you going to purchase them from another supplier? Jot down your ideas on paper and keep them close at hand as you develop your business plan.

The Internet is a personal, highly interactive medium. Be as specific as possible with what you plan to do online. Don’t try to do everything; the medium favors businesses that do one thing well. The more specific your business, the more personal the level of service you can provide to your customers.

Step 3: Come Up with a Cyberbusiness Plan
The process of setting goals and objectives and then designing strategies for attaining them is essential when starting a new business. What you end up with is called a business plan. A good business plan applies not only to the start-up phase, but also to a business’s day-to-day operation. It can also be instrumental in helping a small business obtain a bank loan.

Drawing up a business plan
To set specific goals for your new business, ask yourself these questions:

These questions may seem simple. But many businesspeople never take the time to answer them. And only you can answer these questions for yourself. Make sure that you have a clear idea of where you’re going so that you can commit to making your venture successful over the long haul. (See Chapter 2 for more on setting goals and envisioning your business.)

To carry your plan into your daily operations, observe these suggestions:

Consider using specialized software to help you prepare your business plan. Programs such as Business Plan Pro by Palo Alto Software (www.palo-alto.com) lead you through the process by asking you a serie  of questions as a way of identifying what you want to do.

Step 4: Assemble Your Equipment and Set Up Shop
One of the great advantages of opening a store on the Internet rather than on Main Street is money — or rather, the lack of it. Instead of having to rent a space and set up furniture and fixtures, you can buy a domain name, sign up with a hosting service, create some Web pages, and get started with an investment of only a few hundred dollars, or perhaps even less.

In addition to your virtual storefront, you also have to find a real place to do your business. You don’t necessarily have to rent a warehouse or other large space. Many online entrepreneurs use a home office or perhaps a corner in a room where computers, books, and other business-related equipment reside.

Finding a host for your Web site
Although doing business online means that you don’t have to rent space in a mall or open a real, physical store, you do have to set up a virtual space for your online business. You do so by creating a Web site and finding a company to host it. In cyberspace, your landlord is called a Web hosting service  A Web host is a company that, for a fee, makes your site available 24 hours a day by maintaining it on a special computer called a Web server.

In addition, the company that gives you access to the Internet — your Internet service provider (ISP) — may also publish your Web pages. Make sure that your host has a fast connection to the Internet and can handle the large numbers of simultaneous visits, or hits, that your Web site is sure to get eventually.

Assembling the equipment you need
Think of all the equipment you don’t need when you set up shop online: You don’t need shelving, a cash register, a parking lot, electricity, fire protection systems, a burglar alarm . . . the list goes on and on. You may need some of those for your home, but you don’t need to purchase them especially for your online business.

For doing business online, your most important piece of equipment is your computer. Other hardware, such as scanners, modems, and monitors, are essential, too. You need to make sure that your computer equipment is up to snuff because you’re going to be spending a lot of time online: answering e-mail, checking orders, revising your Web site, and marketing your product. Expect to spend anywhere between $1,000 and $6,000 for equipment, if you don’t have any to begin with. It pays to shop wisely and get the best setup you can afford up front so that you don’t have to purchase upgrades later on.

Step 5: Find People to Help You
Conducting online business does involve relatively new technologies, but they aren’t impossible to figure out. In fact, the technology is becoming more accessible all the time. Many people who start online businesses learn how to create Web pages and promote their companies by reading books, attending classes, or networking with friends and colleagues. Of course, just because you can do it all doesn’t mean that you have to. Often, you’re better off hiring help, either to advise you in areas where you aren’t as strong or simply to help you tackle the growing workload — and help your business grow at the same time.

Hiring technical experts
Spending some money up front to hire professionals who can point you in the right direction can help you maintain an effective Web presence for years to come. Many businesspeople who usually work alone (myself included) hire knowledgeable individuals to do design or programming work that they would find impossible to tackle otherwise.

Don’t be reluctant to hire professional help in order to get your business online. The Web is full of development firms that perform several related functions: providing customers with Web access, helping to create Web sites, and hosting sites on their servers. The expense for such services may be considerable at first. The programming involved in setting up databases, creating purchasing systems, and programming Web pages can run over $10,000 for particularly extensive Web sites, but they can pay off in the long term. Choose a designer carefully, and check out sites they’ve done before. Tell them your business plan, and spell out clearly what you want each page to do. Another area where you may want to find help is in networking and computer maintenance. You need to know how to do troubleshooting and find out how to keep your computers running. Find out if you have a computer expert in your neighborhood who is available on short notice. If you do find a business partner, make sure that the person’s abilities balance your own. If you’re great at sales and public relations, for example, find a writer or Web page designer to partner with.

Gathering your team members
Many entrepreneurial businesses are family affairs. For example, a husbandand-
wife team started Scaife’s Butcher Shop in England, which has a successful
Web site (www.jackscaife.co.uk). A successful eBay business, Maxwell Street
Market, is run by a husband-and-wife team as well as family members and neighbors:
The husband does the buying; the wife prepares sales descriptions; the
others help with packing and shipping. John Moen found some retired teachers
to help answer the geography questions that come into his worldatlas.com
site. The convenience of the Internet means that these geography experts
can log on to the site’s e-mail inbox from their respective homes and answer
questions quickly.

Early on, when you have plenty of time to do planning, you probably won’t
feel a pressing need to hire others to help you. Many people wait to seek help
when they have a deadline to meet or are in a financial crunch. Waiting to seek
help is okay — as long as you realize that you will need help, sooner or later.
Of course, you don’t have to hire family and friends, but you must find people
who are reliable and can make a long-term commitment to your project. Keep
these things in mind:

Step 6: Construct a Web Site
Although you can make a living buying and selling full time on eBay, a Web
site is still likely to be the focus of your online business. Fortunately, Web
sites are becoming easier to create. You don’t have to know a line of HTML in
order to create an effective Web page yourself. Chapter 5 walks you through
the specific tasks involved in organizing and designing Web pages. Also, see
Chapter 6 for tips on making your Web pages content-rich and interactive.
Make your business easy to find online. Pick a Web address (otherwise known
as a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator) that’s easy to remember. You can
purchase a short domain-name alias, such as www.company.com, to replace
a longer one like www.internetprovider.com/~username/companyname/
index.html. If the ideal dot-com (.com) name isn’t available, you can choose
one of the newer domain suffixes such as .biz. See Chapter 3 and Chapter 8
for more information on domain name aliases.

Make your site content-rich
The textual component of a Web site is what attracts visitors and keeps
them coming back on a regular basis. The more useful information and compelling
content you provide, the more visits your site will receive. By compelling
content, I’m talking about words, headings, or images that induce visitors to
interact with your site in some way. You can make your content compelling in
a number of ways:

Establishing a graphic identity
When you start up your first business on the Web, you have to do a certain
amount of convincing. You need to convince customers that you are competent
and professional. One factor that helps build trust is a graphic identity. A
site with an identity looks a certain way. Both pages are from the Graphic
Maps Web site. Notice how each has the same white background, the same
distinctive and simple logo, and similar heading styles. Using such elements
consistently from page to page creates an identity that gives your business
credibility and helps viewers find what they’re looking for.

Step 7: Set Up a System for Processing Sales
Many businesses go online and then are surprised by their own success.
They don’t have systems in place for finalizing sales, shipping out purchased
goods in a timely manner, and tracking finances and inventory.
An excellent way to plan for success is to set up ways to track your business
finances and to create a secure purchasing environment for your online customers.
That way, you can build on your success rather than be surprised by it.

Providing a means for secure transactions
Getting paid is the key to survival as well as success. When your business
exists only online, the payment process is not always straightforward. Make
your Web site a safe and easy place for customers to pay you. Provide different
payment options and build customers’ level of trust any way you can.
Although the level of trust among people who shop online is increasing steadily,
some Web surfers are still squeamish about submitting credit card numbers
online. And beginning businesspeople are understandably intimidated by the
requirements of processing credit card transactions. In the early stages, you
can simply create a form that customers have to print out and mail to you
along with a check. (The Graphic Maps site is successful without having an
online credit card system; clients phone in their orders.)
When you are able to accept credit cards, make your customers feel at ease
by explaining what measures you’re taking to ensure that their information is
secure. Such measures include signing up for an account with a Web host that
provides a secure server, a computer that uses software to encrypt data and
uses digital documents called certificates to ensure its identity.

Becoming a credit card merchant
The words electronic commerce or e-commerce bring to mind visions of online
forms and credit card data that is transmitted over the Internet. Do you have
to provide such service in order to run a successful online business? Not necessarily.
Being a credit card merchant makes life easier for your customers, to
be sure, but it also adds complications and extra costs to your operation. The traditional way to become a credit card merchant is to apply to a bank.
Small and home-based businesses can have difficulty getting their applications
approved. Alternatively, you can sign up with a company that provides
electronic “shopping cart” services and credit card payments online to small
businesses. If you do get the go-ahead from a bank to become a credit card merchant, you
have to pay it a discount rate, which is a fee (typically, 2 to 3 percent of each
transaction). You sometimes have to pay a monthly premium charge of $10 to
$25 as well. Besides that, you may need special software or hardware to accept
credit card payments.
In the early stages of your business, you may find it easier to take orders over
the phone. Remember that most of your customers probably don’t have a
second phone line for Internet access, however. They have to disconnect from
the Internet to call and place their orders. Also invite them to send you an
e-mail message that provides contact information and states what they want
to order. Then if your business takes off, you can present your sales records
to the bank and be more likely to get your merchant application approved.

Step 8: Provide Personal Service
The Internet, which runs on wires, cables, and computer chips, may not seem
like a place for the personal touch. But technology didn’t actually create the
Internet and all of its content; people did that. In fact, the Internet is a great
place to provide your clients and customers with outstanding, personal customer
service.

In many cases, customer service on the Internet is a matter of being available
and responding quickly to all inquiries. You check your e-mail regularly; you
make sure you respond within a day; you cheerfully solve problems and hand
out refunds if needed. By helping your customers, you help yourself, too.
You build loyalty as well as credibility among your clientele. For many small
businesses, the key to competing effectively with larger competitors is by
providing superior customer service.

Sharing your expertise
Your knowledge and experience are among your most valuable commodities.
So you may be surprised when I suggest that you give them away for free. Why? It’s a “try before you buy” concept. Helping people for free builds your credibility
and makes them more likely to pay for your services down the road.
When your business is online, you can easily communicate what you know
about your field and make your knowledge readily available. One way is to
set up a Web page that presents the basics about your company and your
field of interest in the form of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Another
technique is to become a virtual publisher/editor and create your own newsletter
in which you write about what’s new with your company and about topics
related to your work. See Chapter 13 for more on communicating your expertise
through FAQs, newsletters, and advanced e-mail techniques.

Making your site a go-to resource
Many ontrepreneurs (online entrepreneurs) succeed by making their Web
sites not only a place for sales and promotion but also an indispensable
resource, full of useful hyperlinks and other information, that customers
want to visit again and again. For example, the Graphic Maps Web site,
which I profile earlier in this chapter, acts as a resource for anyone who
has a question about geography. To promote the site, John Moen gives
away free maps for nonprofit organizations, operates a daily geography contest
with a $100 prize to the first person with the correct answer, and answers e-mail promptly. “I feel strongly that the secret on
the Web is to provide a solution to a problem and, for the most part, to do it
for free,” he suggests.

The site encourages music lovers and musicians to become members: They
provide information about who they are and where they live, and they create
their own username and password, so they can access special content and
perform special functions on the site such as selling their own CDs or posting
song clips online. For an online business, knowing the names and addresses
of people who visit and who don’t necessarily make purchases is a gold
mine of information. The business can use the contact information to send
members special offers and news releases; the more frequently contact is
maintained, the more likely those casual shoppers will eventually turn into
paying customers.
The concept of membership also builds a feeling of community among customers.
By turning the e-commerce site into a meeting place for members
who love Texas musicians, those members make new friends and have a
reason to visit the site on a regular basis. Community building is one way in
which commerce on the Web differs from traditional brick-and-mortar selling,
and it’s something you should consider, too.
Another way to encourage customers to congregate at your site on a regular
basis is to create a discussion area.

Becoming a super e-mailer
E-mail is, in my humble opinion, the single most important marketing tool that
you can use to boost your online business. Becoming an expert e-mail user
increases your contacts and provides you with new sources of support, too.
The two best and easiest e-mail strategies are the following:

Additionally, you can e-mail inquiries about comarketing opportunities to other
Web sites similar to your own. Ask other online business owners if they will
provide links to your site in exchange for you providing links to theirs. And
always include a signature file with your message that includes the name of
your business and a link to your business site. See Chapter 13 for more information
on using e-mail effectively to build and maintain relations with your
online customers.

Step 9: Alert the Media and Everyone Else
In order to be successful, small businesses need to get the word out to the
people who are likely to purchase what they have to offer. If this group turns
out to be only a narrow market, so much the better; the Internet is great for
connecting to niche markets that share a common interest.
The Internet provides many unique and effective ways for small businesses
to advertise, including search services, e-mail, newsgroups, electronic mailing
lists, and more.

Listing your site with Internet search engine services
How, exactly, do you get listed on the search engines such as Yahoo! and Lycos?
Frankly, it’s getting more difficult. Many of the big search services charge for
listings. But some let you contribute a listing for free, though there’s no guarantee
if or when you’ll see your site included in their databases.
You can increase the chances that search services will list your site by
including special keywords and site descriptions in the HTML commands for
your Web pages. You place these keywords after a special HTML command
(the <META> tag), making them invisible to the casual viewer of your site.

Reaching the entire Internet
Your Web site may be the cornerstone of your business, but if nobody knows
it’s out there, it can’t help you generate sales. Perhaps the most familiar form
of online advertising are banner ads, those little electronic billboards that
seem to show up on every popular Web page that you visit.
But banner advertising can be expensive and may not be the best way for a
small business to advertise online. In fact, the most effective marketing for
some businesses hasn’t been traditional banner advertising or newspaper/
magazine placements. Rather, the e-marketers who run those businesses
target electronic bulletin boards and mailing lists where people already discuss
the products being sold. You can post notices on the bulletin boards
where your potential customers congregate, notifying them that your services
are now available. (Make sure the board in question permits such solicitation
before you do so, or you’ll chase away the very customers you want.)
This sort of direct, one-to-one marketing may seem tedious, but it’s often the
best way to develop a business on the Internet. Reach out to your potential
customers and strike up an individual, personal relationship with each one.

Step 10: Review, Revise, and Improve
For any long-term endeavor, you need to establish standards by which you
can judge its success or failure. You must decide for yourself what you consider
success to be. After a period of time, take stock of where your business
is, and then take steps to do even better.
Taking stock
After 12 months online, Lucky Boyd took stock. His site was online, but he
wasn’t getting many page views. He redid the site, increased the number of
giveaways, and traffic rose. Now, he wants to make music downloads available
on his site; he’s preparing to redo all of his Web pages with the Hypertext
Preprocessor programming language (PHP).
HTML is a markup language: It identifies parts of a Web page that need to
be formatted as headings, text, images, and so on. It can be used to include
scripts, such as those written in the JavaScript language. But by creating his
pages from scratch using PHP, Lucky Boyd can make his site more dynamic
and easier to update. He can rotate random images, process forms, and
compile statistics that track his visitors by using PHP scripts, for instance.
He can design Web pages in a modular way so they can be redesigned and
revised more quickly than with HTML, too.
When all is said and done, your business may do so well that you can reinvest
in it by buying new equipment or increasing your services. You may
even be in a position to give something back to nonprofits and those in need.
The young founders of The Chocolate Farm (www.thechocolatefarm.com)
set up a scholarship fund designed to bring young people from other countries
to the United States to help them find out about free enterprise. Perhaps
you’ll have enough money left over to reward yourself, too — as if being able
to tell everyone “I own my own online business” isn’t reward enough! 

Updating your data
Getting your business online now and then updating your site regularly is
better than waiting to unveil the perfect Web site all at one time. In fact,
seeing your site improve and grow is one of the best things about going
online. Over time, you can create contests, strike up cooperative relationships
with other businesses, and add more background information about
your products and services.
Consider The Chocolate Farm, which is still owned and operated by Evan and
Elise MacMillan of Denver, Colorado. The business was started when Elise
was just 10 years old and Evan was 13. They began by selling chocolates with
a farm theme, such as candy cows; these days, they focus more on creating
custom chocolates — sweets made to order for businesses, many of which
bear the company’s logo. Evan, who manages the company’s Web site, now
updates it from his college dorm room in California. He and his sister oversee
the work of 50 full- and part-time employees.
Businesses on the Web need to evaluate and revise their practices on a regular
basis. Lucky Boyd studies reports of where visitors come from before they
reach his site, and what pages they visit on the site, so he can attract new
customers. Online business is a process of trial and error. Some promotions
work better than others. The point is that it needs to be an ongoing process
and a long-term commitment. Taking a chance and profiting from your mistakes
is better than not trying in the first place.

Comments

Add New Search

comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge
Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."