How To Start Up Online Business

Whether you are running ecommerce website or adding online website based on brick-and-mortar business, Web sales are necessary. Research from Invesp show that e-commerce sales are growing around 20 percent per year and nearly 200 million online shoppers are projected to spend $260 billion in 2014.
There are numerous reasons to explain for that including comparing prices easy and searching a larger variety of items to purchase without fighting through crowded stores.


Among the most important businesses will need several critical services and pieces of software such as Web hosting service, shopping cart software and credit card processor.
First, before penetrating into these areas, it's a good choice to deeply understand what it is

Advantage of e-commerce

Selling goods and services online bring you a huge numer of benefits. Prominently,you can access much larger customer base than a brick-and-mortar location alone. With an e-commerce site, you can sell your goods and services around the global.

In addition to this, e-commerce businesses always open. While most brick-and-mortar store may work in certain time per day, e-commerce businesses run 24/7. Making sales and money at all hours of the day is great benefits, right?

Another benefits is to reduce costs.Obviously, online businesses don't have to invest money on rent, a physical location or employees. Since these businesses can bring you huge cost savings.


Inventory costs is reduced for online stores. E-commerce businesses don't have to stay fully stocked at all times. Online stores, by contrast, can keep the cost of inventory and shipping low in which products are shipped straight to consumers.

E-commerce business is easy to start and expand compared to brick-and-mortar businesses, which growth often means finding a new, larger location to house the businesses with more money.

Cons of e-commerce

E-commerce comes with some weakness, too. Online stores often find hard to interact with their customers directly. Brick-and-mortar businesses can build personal relationships with buyers.

E-commerce ventures also confront fierce competition. For every business, there are another 10 businesses on the Web sell the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of e-commerce sites are on the global meaning online businesses must work even harder to compete.

Finally, e-commerce businesses must face technical issues .  if something goes wrong with the website, the business has to shut down to be fixed. While some of these problems may be out of the business owner's hands, they still can end in the same result: lost money and lost customers.

What's needed for an e-commerce business

Here is necessary things an entrepreneur must have to open an e-commerce websites

Product to sell:
Most importantly, small business owners need something they can sell. Luckily,
 Big or small, expensive or cheap, any item can be sold online.

Domain name: Before a small business can start building an e-commerce website, it needs a domain name. This is the online address at which shoppers can find the business's website. Most online business domain names end in either ".com" or ".net". The domain name selected should match, to some extent, the business's name.

Web hosting service:These services store the data files that make up websites, and then upload those files to the Web for viewing by those who visit the site through its official domain name.

Website:
The website's design should encourage shoppers tomake purchases. It should also include links to the business' social media pages, ways to subscribe to electronic newsletters and deals, and offer places to learn about other news going on in the company.

Shopping cart software: In order to sell items from an e-commerce website to customers, you need shopping cart software. These programs allow customers select items they want to purchase and eventually buy them. In addition to assisting with transactions, many shopping cart software options include additional features for controlling inventory, setting up shipping and calculating taxes. For example, One step Checkout which is used in Magento Website provides your site to an easy and simple checkout page for customers and and attract more customers to come and use again.

Magento One step checkout has prominent features such as: User friendly checkout interface, All steps on a single page, Ajax email validation, Ajax loading script, Automatically update the Grand total on alteration of shipping method, Light box login box, Very easy to configure options in admin back end, Configurable payment method, Clabels are changable, Flexible displays for fields whether mandatory or optional and enabled or disabled, Optional checkbox for billing address to be shipping address, Configurable delivery options with different delivery cost for countries, Automatically update the Grand total on selection of delivery option, Automatically update the delivery option when shipping address is changed, Optional or already-checked box for Newsletters subscription, Checkbox for Terms and Condition agreement, Enable/ disable gift message box, Multi-stores support

Marketing: Without a carefully marketing plan, turning a profit becomes much more difficult. Various marketing options online businesses have at their disposal include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, and email and social media campaigns.
Sources: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/