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Online Stores May Help A Struggling Business
By selfemployedblog | January 8, 2007
Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting with a client who owns a small boutique in a very nice neighborhood. The client’s main goal is to open up an online store to sell their unique products and eventually close up shop on their brick and mortar establishment. The rent is rather high, utilities are costly, and they would love to free up their time to do other things besides managing the shop.
I could totally understand their dilemma and also understand how successful an online store can be with some hard work and good marketing online and offline. Now a days, creating an online store is very easy and usually requires very little technical know how. All in one shopping carts are available through services such as eBay, Yahoo! store, and PayPal.
However, these types of services take a certain percentage of sales, and may eat up your profits in the long run. For a small business, I would suggest using open source software such as Zen Cart for your shopping cart and affordable, reliable web hosting. Costs would include web hosting, a merchant account, and an SSL certificate for encrypting sensitive data such as credit card information.
If you’re not tech savvy, you can always outsource the set-up to a reliable web programmer familiar with e-commerce type web sites. After your store is online, it is a matter of marketing using SEO (search engine optimization) techniques and advertising if your budget allows.
An online store can help any size business at any level of success, particularly for new up and coming businesses. These type of businesses may do better online than in a physical location where overhead costs are not worth it.
Tags: ecommerce, online store, build online store, zen cart, shopping cart
Topics: Self Employment |
January 8th, 2007 at 4:45 am
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