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13 Sep 10 10 Things You Must Remember When Starting Your Own Ecommerce Business

Are you a stay at home person looking for a way to fill your day, but would prefer to start your own online business as opposed doing other random jobs to make extra money? Or, perhaps you’re a working hoping desperately to escape the 9-to-5 rat race and start building a business for yourself rather than someone else?

It has never been easier to pursue building your own online business, but there are some common pitfalls you want to avoid to shorten your road to success.

1. Determine your products and market.
These days nearly every form of product and service is being sold online with the ability to reach millions of potential customers all over the world. Before you start your online business, you need to decide exactly what you would like to offer to consumers. Ideally, your choice should be mainly based on your own interests so that your heart is in the business even if sales are slow in the beginning. You should also check the market to ensure that there is a demand for the products or services you intend to offer.

2. Develop your unique selling point.
The key to a business distinguishing itself apart from its competition is to have a unique selling point. Your unique selling point concentrates on the uniqueness of your business and how you will help your customers. Consider what is special about your business, as well as the needs of your customers, in order to develop a quality unique selling point.

3. Build your marketing strategy.
Prior to contacting any ecommerce hosting company or purchasing shopping cart software, it’s vital that you ask yourself how you will promote your new business. Depending on your targeted audience of potential customers, you may want to focus on advertising online more than offline. Online marketing can prove to be highly effective even with a tight budget. You should also factor in future costs for search engine optimization to ensure your site ranks high.

4. Research available shipping methods.
If you are selling an actual product then you will need to decide on which shipping methods you will use to fulfill orders. It’s important to choose shipping methods that are fast and reliable, whether you are maintaining an actual stock onsite or you have chosen to drop ship with a manufacturer or wholesaler.

5. Pick your domain name.
Selecting the domain name for your business is one of the most critical decisions that you must make when selling online. There are different ways to approach choosing a domain name. If your company name is not too lengthy, then one idea is to use it as the domain name. Another strategy is to use a phrase consisting of one or more core products you intend to sell so that when consumers search for this item your website naturally has a better opportunity of ranking at the top organically. Regardless of which method you use to select your domain name, make sure that you purchase it with a .com domain extension. It’s also useful to buy other top level domain extensions, such as .net, .org, .info, and others, to prevent anyone from trying to steal or ruin your brand.

6. Decide on an ecommerce hosting company.
Once you’ve chosen your domain name, it’s now time to pick an ecommerce website hosting company to use for hosting your online business. You’ll want to shop around and look for genuine review websites to find a reliable host that offers ecommerce hosting plans. Compare between companies to make sure you’re getting the best deal out there. You want to make sure that the company you decide on is able to handle websites that run on ecommerce platforms.

7. Select the ecommerce software for your online business.
After choosing an ecommerce hosting company, you now need to determine which software you will use to power your online business. There are a multitude of ecommerce solutions available, both free and paid, and you should research online and ask others to help decide which software is best for your store.

8. Get a professional design for your website.
Although the ecommerce software you have decided to use may work just fine out of the box, it may be necessary to have a design made for it to increase your online store’s uniqueness and personality. Based on the software you are using, you will have the option to choose from ready-made themes or hire someone for a completely custom design.

9. Locate a payment processor.
Before you can actually process any orders you will need to sign up with a payment processor. This is a company appointed by a merchant to deal with credit card transactions. Payment processors verify payments and help prevent fraudulent transactions. You will need to compare between different companies and look closely at the various fees that can be hidden at times.

10. Provide remarkable customer service.
Once your online store is up and ready to accept payments, the final point to keep in mind is to guarantee that you provide outstanding customer service. If your customers have a terrible experience shopping at your store then you should never expect them to return as they can easily shop from your competition that is only a click away. Consider whether or not you can provide a customer service telephone number, or at least an email service that responds promptly.

These are ten things that you should remember when starting your own ecommerce business so that you can be on your way towards success without any regrets.

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11 Nov 09 Finding Business Contacts

In a struggling economy, networking should be a top priority for you, especially if it hasn’t been in the past.  You need business contacts, no matter where you are on the chain.  Through business contacts, you open up the possibility that you will be able to find better work.  Your business contacts are also great to have should you ever lose your current job.  Basically, these are professional associates from different organizations that you regularly keep contact with.

But to get business contacts, first you have to find them.  A business contact can be remarkably useful down the line in your career.  These relationships are great because they are mutually beneficial.  Think about your skill set and what you could offer to help someone else.  From anything like advice, to career prospect options, what do you have to give?

How much you can commit to providing will dictate what sort of business relationship you can form.  As business contacts are a two way street, you have to have something to bring to the table.  Try using websites like LinkedIn.  They are social networking resources for professionals and can be a good start for anybody.

Make sure you have business cards with you all the time.  Whenever you’re in the appropriate scenario, like a work related conference or event, they will be very useful.  Meeting people is great at the moment, but you need a way to keep in contact beyond.  A business card is the fastest and easiest way to do just that.  Not to mention it’s the most professional route.  Professionalism always gets you bonus points.

Remember to keep your ears open all the time.  Pay attention in the break rooms, and when you’re eating lunch.  You could find a great new business contact in a different department.  Somebody you were completely unaware of, and someone you could benefit from.

From there it’s as simple as maintaining the relationship.  If you want to be able to get trusted information from them, you have to provide the same.  Don’t hesitate to inform them of news around the company.  From job openings, etc.  Let them know what’s going on around you, and the opportunities available, and they will do the same.

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15 Jul 09 Building Lasting Business Relationships

Building up lasting business relationships with clients is the best and most surefire way to strengthen your business, and ensure future growth.  Through managing and building relationships that you already have, the company gets a better reputation, and also helps you grow as you keep the old clients in addition to adding new ones.  Long lasting business relationships can be hard to manage at times, but the payoffs are well worth any of the headaches on your road to setting that foundation.

When you’re attempting to set up what could be a long term relationship between your company and a client, one of the first things to remember is to always keep a certain amount of your focus on them.  Never forget about former business associates in your quest to gain new ones, as that will make you stray away from your guaranteed business.  It’s never a good idea to give up a guaranteed client by threatening your relationship with them using a new marketing campaign to attract new clients, that doesn’t focus or apply to them.  Never forget the people that helped you in the past.

One way to end a relationship quick is to make promises you cannot keep, as that’s essentially the same as lying, and nobody wants to be lied to, especially in a business relationship.  Only make commitments to your clients that you know you or your company are capable of keeping/following through.  This way you don’t raise expectations to unrealistic levels from your clients, and you are always given goals that you can achieve, making yourself look all the better to an established clientele.

Always ask for feedback, this way you can learn what a client is expecting from you or your company.  This will also allow you to correct any inadequacies that they may see within your corporation, saving a client that may have gone elsewhere had you been left unaware and unable to fix a problem that they had.

Finally, have fun.  Clients are more likely to stay with a company enjoy the work that they are doing, as it shows a vested interest in the goals that they want you to accomplish.  Nothing shows your willingness to provide a client with their desired outcome, like your desire to do your job.

Tags: , Business Associates, , , , Commitments, , Inadequacies, Long Term Relationship, , , New Marketing, Payoffs, , , Unrealistic Levels

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