Researching an ebusiness solution for your online business
Running an online business requires much of the same planning as a brick-and-mortar business. You'll need to answer some questions so you can pick the right ebusiness solution to meet your needs. You'll need to know what you're selling, who you're selling to, what makes them want to buy your services or products. You'll also need to analyze your cash flow and prioritize your needs. Decide what you can build now and what you can put off until later. The type of ebusiness solution you choose will be dependent on the answers to these kinds of questions. You'll also need to decide whether you are going to try to build the ebusiness software yourself or purchase a package from a business solution provider.
Integrating your ebusiness solution with an affiliate program
Affiliate income is the term used for an ebusiness solution that tracks sales made on other web sites. Setting up an affiliate program can be complicated, but financially rewarding. You want an ebusiness solution that makes this easy on you and your affiliates. You'll want to provide your affiliates with banners, graphics, and emails to use to promote your business. You'll also need a means for them to log-in and manage their account with you, as well as an easy means of setting up and tracking commission payments. You can pay per click, pay per lead, or pay per purchase.
How can I improve my ebusiness software sales?
Despite all the other cool stuff you may have on your web site, if your ebusiness solution makes it hard on the user to buy things, they'll leave and buy elsewhere. Make the shopping experience as easy to use as possible. Amazingly enough, when online shoppers are polled they typically list ease of use as a higher criteria than low prices when they need to use ebusiness software. Customer satisfaction goes down the more pages they have to view to make their purchase so streamline your shopping experience. First, make sure your customers can find what they want to buy. Make sure the way to your shopping cart itself is clearly labeled and easy to find. Make sure the pricing is communicated as early as possible, including sales tax and shipping information so your customers can evaluate the total cost upfront.
Selling digital media and your ebusiness solution
There are some different options you'll want in your ebusiness solution to sell digital media. Instead of shipping hard goods, you are going to be delivering files. You'll want to find ebusiness software that offers a means of making it easy for your customers to get their files but protects you from giving away your goods. Depending on how large your files are, you can either send them via email or choose an advanced ebusiness solution that creates a temporary page for your customers to go to download the files they've purchased. Pages like this are dynamically generated based upon their order and only available for a set period of time, eliminating the possibility of someone sharing the link with all their friends.
Ebusiness solution and credit card payments
Merchant accounts are what allow you to accept credit card payments. You'll also need a payment gateway to process the transaction. Sometimes an ebusiness solution will include a merchant account and/or a payment gateway with their service and other times you'll need to sign up for these separately. You may pay a charge for each transaction or a minimum fee rather than a percentage if your items are low-cost. Setting up a merchant account on your own may come with a large monthly service fee. This could be worthwhile if your income is high enough, but if you don't expect high sales in the beginning you may want to avoid signing up for a merchant account on your own and find an ebusiness solution that handles that for you.
Selling online with your ebusiness software
Picking an ebusiness solution that meets your needs requires that you spend a little bit of time defining your business goals. If you are just supplementing your income and hope to make a small amount of money online, you might choose ebusiness software that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles but meets your immediate needs and doesn't cost very much. If your plan is to grow an enterprise, you'll want to plan ahead a bit and make sure you pick an ebusiness solution provider than can grow with your business, with few limits on the number of items you can sell, lets you offer online coupons, and send automatic email to your customers. You might still outgrow your ebusiness solution provider, but there's no sense in starting with one that you outgrow in a few months.
Taking your ebusiness software beyond the shopping cart
A good ebusiness solution will address more than the initial purchase. People who have bought from you once are more likely to buy from you than people who have never bought anything from you. And, interestingly enough, the more recent their purchase the more likely they are to buy from you again. This means you want your ebusiness software to take advantage of this by sending out emails to your customers, telling them about similar items they might like to purchase from you, offering special discounts, or telling them about new items in your online store. An ebusiness solution provider that offers "auto responders" helps increase sales.