The Daily Mail reported over the weekend on research suggesting that small businesses lose millions of pounds in sales every year because they’re not trading online.
According to the study reported in the Mail, while most smaller companies had a web presence almost two thirds used it purely as a shop window rather than as an extra sales platform. That’s a startling statistic, and indicative of a huge missed opportunity. While it’s fantastic that businesses recognise the importance of having a web presence, it seems a shame that so many are missing out on their slice of that £20 billion online sales market when building an online shop can be very straightforward.
So, how easy is it to grab your slice of that pie?
Well, there are a few different routes to online trading, so no matter how confident you are or how much time you can put in to developing an eCommerce website there will be something that suits you.
If you’re a confident developer, or you’re happy to pay someone to get under the hood of your website, all you need is a web hosting account (preferably one with a database), some shopping cart software (there’s an easy-installer script for OSCommerce with accounts like the Business Hosting package), and the time to build and upload your site.
If you’d rather spend your time servicing all your new customers than tinkering with code, eShop is the ideal choice. Hosting is integrated with a flexible shop-creation system that makes it easy to set up a great-looking eCommerce site – and also includes secure payment systems and backoffice order management for efficient processing and keeping track of orders. Just spend a little time thinking about some of the practicalities (what categories do you want to divide your products into? would you prefer to take payments via PayPal or direct? do you need to display prices with or without VAT?), and then use eShop’s built-in shop creation wizard to get started.
If that still seems a bit more than you need, Instant Website Pro features a built-in shop wizard to get you trading online quickly and easily and makes a nice introduction to selling your products online.
So whatever your business, with all the solutions on offer there’s really nothing stopping anyone from building a web shop and discovering a whole new customer base online. What are you waiting for?
