One way of engaging in eCommerce is to open an online store. Since anything under the sun can be sold online, you only have two questions to consider: how much is it going to cost and what do you intend to sell.
If you are considering opening a virtual retail store online, you probably already know what you want to sell. You may want to open an online bookstore. In that case, you can get started for nothing. All you need to do is open affiliate accounts with one or more of the big online book distributors or, even better, some of the publishers who have affiliate programs. They make it easy for you, because you can link directly to their own databases and install widgets that automatically organize your bookshop into categories, featured books, etc.
On the other hand, if you want to start a shop from scratch, you had better be able to afford it. You will need to hire lots of expert help. You will need experts in backend technology such as PHP. Then you will need to think about the layout and design of a smoothly running website. These things can’t be handled efficiently by a single individual.
Let’s say you want to open a ‘bath and bedroom’ website. You will have hundreds of different items to organize into an easy-to-use homepage. You must make it easy for a customer to find the king quilt section, for instance. Once he finds that, he is going to have to be able to select from dozens or hundreds of quilts.
Perhaps you love women’s clothing and want to sell a particular brand of women’s clothes online. How hard can it be? How many girls shirts does that one brand sell? They may have hundreds and that is just one of perhaps dozens of product lines. From this example, you can see what you are in for when you open an online shop.
What would the budget for such an undertaking be? Start-up costs alone can run into ten thousand dollars or even much more. You need web developers, graphic designers, website designers and many more. Who is going to write all of your content? You can’t afford to hire cheap outsourced writers. Nothing says ‘amateur’ more than spelling and grammatical errors. If the homepage of your jewelry site says ‘men wedding bands‘ instead of saying ‘men’s, ‘ it makes you look bad.
Don’t let all of this get you down. If you want to open an online business, great! When all the hard work is done, you may find yourself taking a long vacation and earning money even while you are frolicking in the surf at an island resort. Just be realistic – getting there is going to cost you time, effort and money.