Small Business Ecommerce Web Sites
If you have a business that sells physical goods and that business does not yet have an active internet presence, consider this. In 2008, online retail trade turnover in the US measured somewhere around $230 billion, which represented some 10% of total US retail sales!
Even with the recent economic downturn, the percentage of retail trade that is transacted online is set to keep growing throughout the commercialized world as the internet becomes more sophisticated and efficient, while ‘high street’ businesses are constantly on the lookout to expand their customer base still further.
In fact, if you have a real world, ‘bricks and mortar’ business that is not represented online, there has never been a better time to get your business online. Even if you already have a web site, unless you keep abreast of the latest online business trends and thinking – and you are probably too busy running a business for that – the chances are that your site is not doing what it should do.
What if you are thinking about starting a business that supplies physical goods, but you have not yet done so?
Once again, there could be no better time to think about doing so (and therefore no better time to be reading this book) because despite the phenomenal growth of online business over the past few years, we are only scratching the e-commerce surface at the moment.
There seems little doubt that in the next few years, there is likely to be a global explosion in e-commerce as potential consumers become more accustomed to and comfortable with transacting business online. There is an awful lot to think about when you are considering taking your business online, an array of questions and alternatives that you need to address before diving in. This is a given, but it is not something that you need be too concerned about, as I am going to analyze and discuss these aspects of e-commerce as we move through this book.
Let’s start by considering why taking your business online is such a good idea, and why there has never been a better time to do so than now.
Why e-commerce works, and why now more than ever.
There are plenty of reasons why starting an e-commerce site for your business makes a great deal of sense for both you and your prospects and customers. There might never be a better time than right now.
From your own businesses point of view, if you have a way of enabling customers to transact business online through an e-commerce site, you stand to benefit from many advantages.
Firstly, being able to offer your products online instantly multiplies your market reach beyond your neighborhood or city to take in the whole of the country, or even perhaps the whole of the world. While there are some potential problems in dealing with the global marketplace – arranging delivery, accepting online payments and things of that nature – these problems are far less troublesome nowadays than they were even a couple of years ago. Online security is better than ever, so whereas accepting secure online payments for transactions conducted online might have given you cause for concern in the past, it should no longer do so because online payment systems have improved since those times. Added to this is the fact that global markets are becoming inherently more open, meaning that it is becoming more normal for people to trade across borders. Nowadays, it is not that much more difficult to buy goods from China than it is to buy goods from a town 20 km down the road.
If you are thinking of starting a new business, then cash flow is always an extremely important consideration, and once again, operating an online business has significant advantages over running a business from a high street store or an office in a tower block.
Firstly, in contrast to running a real-world business, you do not need significant amounts of start-up capital to launch an online business. There is no need to rent premises (removing a drain on your income), you do not need bank loans to fund inventory purchase (another cash drain) and staff are for the most part something that other people need to worry about (although taking on staff once your business starts to generate an income is certainly something that you will need to consider).