Do Not Underestimate The Amount Of Time You Need To Put Into Your E-Commerce Business
One thing that you need to take into account before starting your own online business is the amount of time you can realistically devote to actually running the business. This of course very much depends on what type of e-commerce business you want to run. Is your business to be one where you actually buy, stock and sell the products or is it to be a drop ship site whereby you sell the goods on a supplier's behalf and they send the products direct to your customer, or is it to be an affiliate site whereby you your customer is taken through to the main supplier's site and you simply receive a commission on any sales that are made in that way. Whichever type of business you select it there are a number of demands on your time.
Should you wish to select the "buy and sell" model then you have to devote time to a number of tasks. Firstly you have to source the products. Then you have to purchase the stock, photograph the products and finally upload details to the website. Once your site is up and running you have to factor in time for customer support, dealing with both deliveries and returns and all the administration involved with that. If you are new to running an e-commerce, you also have to consider the time you will need to learn how to do this. Therefore there should be s period of time set aside for training.
A word of caution here. beware companies who tell you that all their training is online and all you need to do is access their training modules. In our many years experience of training people we know that people's learning processes can be very different and certainly in the initial stages, many people benefit substantially from a personal one to one training process. In light of this, it may appear the aforementioned e-commerce trading methods i.e. drop shipping and affiliate are much easier business models to use.
However here again the you need to consider the time you have to give to monitoring your suppliers. As an example, in the case of drop shipping it is important to make a regular check as to whether or not the products are still in stock at the supplier's end. There is nothing worse than having an irate and disappointed customer who blames you and not the supplier for the fact that their order cannot be fulfilled.
One of the main reasons people shop online is that they can often find a much larger selection of products on the pages of an e-commerce site. Indeed the more products you have, the better it is fro Search Engine Optimisation. But the more products you display the more time you need to devote to product management. And the final important thing to remember is that whatever type of e-commerce business you decide to run, once your business is set up, you need to devote eighty percent of your time to marketing!
Peter Robson is an accountant with over 30 years experience in the small company sector. With his business partner, Debbie Crossley he runs http://www.yournichebusiness.co.uk/ which helps people set up and run their own e-commerce businesses
Category Article Amount, business, ECommerce, Underestimate
