You can use the internet to transform buying your product into the fastest, easiest and most enjoyable shopping experience possible. A bold statement, perhaps, but is it as far-fetched as it seems? After all, it’s exactly what Jeff Bezos set out to do for books when he formed amazon.com, now the world’s largest bookseller.
Amazon was built in the vast American domestic market but the opportunities are just as good in this country. The global online retail market was valued at around £250bn in 2007. With about a billion people currently online it’s clear that the internet has opened up a massive consumer market.
So how do you reap the benefits of this internet spending spree? Well, before you do anything, you need to think about the implications of selling online. “We advise people to build e-business into their business plan. They should have a rough idea of how much [online business] they can handle. Internet purchasers have the idea that it’s immediate and delivery should be immediate. If you don’t deliver until a week later, you won’t get the customer coming back,” explains Lyn Burkett, UK online for business advisor in Wolverhampton.
So don’t dive in headfirst but also don’t sell yourself short. “We encourage people to do it on a step by step basis, but we also look at where the company is now and the steps to get to where they want to be. Therefore you need to make sure that the system you have in place can be expanded as you need.”
To sell on the internet, you need a website. As we will see later, enabling customers to buy and pay for goods on your website can require a lot of organisation in terms of software, service suppliers and security. If your customers are unlikely to rush onto the net to buy your products, therefore, you may not want to commit too much time and money to your website.
This doesn’t mean you should forget about e-commerce completely. You can still give your website an online shopping option by allowing visitors to do everything but hand over money on your site. In this case, you would need an online catalogue from which they would select the items to buy and submit their order on your website. Then your website would ask them to supply their credit card details separately via fax or telephone.
Since your customers are not entering credit card details onto your website, fears over credit card security are eased. It is also less complicated and therefore cheaper to set up. However, shopping on the internet has the potential to be a 24 hours a day service for quick and often impulsive buying, that will process orders automatically. If the payment has to be processed separately by both you and your customers, you are missing out on many of the inherent advantages of e-commerce.
