E-shop vs. Brick & mortar

Ok, so you've come to the internet to start your business. How does it compare to a typical storefront or 'brick and mortar' shop? Well, for starters, your overhead is drastically reduced. And using certain methods such as drop-shipping, you can run a successful retail shop without any inventory whatsoever. (I'll discuss drop-shipping in a later post). You eliminate rental costs, and utilities and store-hours, things of that nature, but you have hosting fees, web-design costs, and customer service issues... There is definitely a trade-off involved. My point is though, even though an e-commerce business may be easier than a storefront shop, your success is going to be based entirely on the effort you put into it either way. And digital does not necessarily mean easy.

There are companies that are very helpful for e-ntrepreneurs, Yahoo! offers a service for the business minded community with Yahoo! stores. They offer a wide range of services and will in fact help you design your page, get you squared away with product inventory, and shipping, and even payment options. All for around 50 USD a month. They do offer certain tools and you can see them on their website. They have excellent demos.

Another option is Storesonline. These services can start to reach high up there. I think a starter package begins around 2000 USD. They've been around for a long time, over 10 years i believe, and offer a very wide range of useful and up to date tools. One such tool is the reverse keyword search tool, which allows you to type in a particular keyword (i.e. a product you might like to sell) and it will tell you how many times that term, and any related term was entered in for the previous weeks. For instance, if you typed in baby powder, you'd see that it was searched for in the top search engines 29,423 times last month, as well the numbers for baby power, baby shower, baby bopper, etc. This is useful for finding yourself a popular niche (pronounced 'nitch' or 'neesh' from the French word to nest, if you wanna go the French/business way). This I'll discuss later.

These are just two solutions for you to get started, one low-budget, one high. Remember, this is a boulder you're pushing over. You could go the traditionalist route and just dig in, or you could get a little help from some capitalistic friends. The more the merrier I say.

Now, even though they may be a little pricey, we are talking a business here. Any costs are investments and any money you make back is basically going to be on par with the effort you put in. You will save vast amounts of money in terms of startup capital, just to get going, but you are still going to have to push over that rock. So keep that in mind. If you're looking for a get-rich quick scheme, it may happen, but it won't be easy. If you replace easy with the word possible, then you're on the right track.