Effective methods of doing business online!
By Nowshade Kabir, Rusbiz.com
With all these dot com failures so rampant, you may question, is it
still viable to consider an online venture? The truth is: while spectacular
rise and fall of many dot com companies have
been overly publicized, sales through Internet are still increasing by
20 – 25% each year. Even economic down turn of the recent years has not
hampered this growth.
Consider this:
According to an annual study of Internet trends by marketing research
firm Ipsos, almost two third of Internet users in the United States have
by now purchased a product or service online. That's a dramatic increase
from only 36 percents of respondents in 2000. Studies show that more than
35.5 million U.S. Internet users made shopping trips to web shops during
the week ending November 3, 2002, which is roughly 14 million more than
almost the same time period in 2001.
While the hype over the new economy is maybe over, one thing is for sure
that Internet has revolutionized the way we do business and positioned
itself as one of the biggest and most
unique sales channels. Many companies, finally, started to realize that
their very existence may get jeopardized if they are slow in integrating
Internet to their business model.
But the question still remains - is there any effective method of doing
business online?
Below I have outlined some components crucial to any online venture.
While these might not be the only vital components of web based business,
understanding them correctly will
significantly improve your chance of doing online business effectively.
Business Plan
Business plans are like road maps. Imagine, you ended up in a unfamiliar
town and you have to find an address without a map! How would you feel?
Definitely, you would have been much better off with a map of the locality!
The same thing goes for business plan. Though, many successful ventures
may have been started without the benefit of a formal business plan, a
good business plan improves your chances of success and help you avoid
many mistakes.
A recent AT&T study of successful entrepreneurs shows that businesses
are more successful if they have a written business plan than the ones
which don't. With a written business plan you get a better picture of
your planned venture. So, before starting you online venture, take some
time and write down what are you planning to do.
Product or Service
If you are a brick and mortar company merely trying to expand sales of
your products or services on the Internet your task is easier! You at
least don't have to mull over what to sell. But, what an entrepreneur
who decided to start a new venture should sell on the Internet?
Actually, you can sell virtually any product or service through the Internet.
You may say, "Wait a second, you can't sell big ticket items over
the net, right?" Wrong! The car and part industries alone forecast
to generate US$ 274 billion in revenues from online trade by 2004. There
are incidents of consumers buying corporate jets online!
If you are serious about starting an online business, finding a product
or service that suits you should not be very difficult.
Knowledge base products like e-books, how-to-reports and hard to find
information and data sell quite well on the Internet. Drop-ship items
are bountiful on the Internet. Thanks to global reach of Internet finding
manufacturer for any item that you plan to import to your country or export
from your country became lot easier. If you have expertise, online services
similar to web design, travel arrangement etc. are also good sales. Internet
users are paying readily for various types of online contents. Global
online content market will add up to 50 billion US$ in 2003. You can consider
this too!
Website/ Web store
Since you customers take their decision, whether to do business with you
or not based on what they see on your site, it is critical to have a professional-looking
website with good
related content.
You can choose your website according to your need from a vast range
of choices. Starting from a completely free website you can shell out
thousands of dollars for a decent e-commerce website. The choice is yours!
There are various quality portals that allow you to have products and
services displayed on a single page web site for free. Many business to
business portals provide with this kind
of services.
However, for real time transactions you will still need e-commerce web
stores.
If you are not good at design or don't want to spend a fortune on you
web store, you should think about getting an e-commerce stores from web
enablers like Yahoo, Bigstep, etc.
For a nominal monthly fee you can have the facilities required to run
a full fledged electronic storefront and build it yourselves from easy
to use templates.
If you go for this type of services, compare and see who has most of
the features for lesser price. Some business to business portals along
with your e-business web store will furnish you with necessary features
to carry out over the Internet many important parts of buy and sale processes.
Shopping Carts
The integral part of e-commerce sites, which allows you to accept product
purchase orders for multiple products or services, is called a shopping
cart.
The term "Shopping Cart"is taken from real life shopping terminology
to help users understand the actions available to them. Like in a supermarket
a user can add products to shopping cart, remove products from the cart
or adjust the quantity of the products as per requirement before checking
out and making payments.
While looking for shopping carts for your e-commerce store, you should
consider the following aspects of a powerful and functional shopping cart:
Access to the shopping cart should be clearly visible. There should be
several entry points to the cart. Add, remove and adjust quantity of the
product features should be prominent on the cart page. The item name should
have a link to the description of the product.
There should be a way of saving items for future purchases. Shipping
and other costs should be clearly stated before the check out process
starts. Order forms should be simple and clear. All payment options should
be explained clearly. Ordering process should be done through secure server.
You know you are on a secure server when the URL of your browser
indicates "https:". The s at the end of http stands for "secure".
Merchant Account
90 percents of all online retail sales take place through credit card
transactions. According to industry statistics, the average credit card
sale is $40 versus just $9 for the average cash sale. To offer the credit
card payment option to your online clients, you need to set up a merchant
account-a bank authorized account established by your company to receive
the proceeds of credit card purchases.
Even if you already accept credit cards for your offline transactions,
that may not be enough. Although, you can take many precautions to reduce
online credit card frauds, credit card companies still consider Internet
transactions to be riskier than offline transactions. That's why finding
a right merchant account provider could be a little bit more complicated
than you might think. Things could be even trickier if your business is
located outside of the United States.
There are many middleman merchant account providers on the Internet.
Do some comparison-shopping before you sign up with any of them as conditions
that they offer vary significantly.
Although, it is definitely good to have a merchant account that does
not mean you can't sell products or services without having one! There
are numerous other payment options available on the Internet. Most popular
of them are paypal, e-gold, e-bullion, etc.
If you would like to have an effective online business, remember that
old values still count. Proper planning, uncompromising customer service,
integrity, hard work and persistence eventually will make your business
successful.
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About the author
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com.
He has Ph. D. degree in Information Technology. Dr. Kabir has over 12
years of experience in International Trade and has worked as an advisor
to several government projects.
You can contact him at ,
http://www.rusbiz.com
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