Effective
methods of doing business online!
by: Nowshade Kabir
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.
About The Author
Nowshade Kabir, Ph.D., is the founder, primary developer
and present CEO, of Rusbiz.com, a global business
to business e-commerce portal with feature like storefronts,
aggregated catalog, e-marketplace, trade leads, internal
messaging system supply chain solutions, etc. With
a doctorate in Information Technology, Dr. Kabir has
worked an advisor to government projects and has over
12 years experience in International Trade. An author
of many B2B and business related articles; he publishes
a bi-weekly E-zine for online business community.
You can subscribe to his newsletter free of charge
from http://www.rusbiz.com.
nowshade@rusbiz.com
