Your own online business, what you need to consider

Personally, I’m of the view that just getting on and doing things is better than spending huge amounts of time planning and organising. Yet, I understand that many people prefer to have a roadmap in front of them and a view of what they should expect and which skills they might need before starting their own Internet business.

I guess one of the most important things is to have an idea, it’s actually very important to establish whether there is a market available for your idea and one that is prepared to pay money for it, after all the whole idea of setting up your Internet business is to make some money, hopefully lots.

I got a lot of the ideas for our products and services by looking out for trends and more importantly issues. Forums are a great source of information, as there are always people posting and asking questions. If some questions are more frequent than others, it’s possible that you have identified a gap in the market.  I also found Ebay quite inspiring for software downlaods and ebooks that had resale rights

We did this with our first online business, at the time we spent a lot of time visiting forums for eBay sellers. Their major challenge was that they wanted access to new products to sell which were good quality, available in quantity and would prove to be good sellers, they also wanted suppliers who would ship direct to their customers so that they did not have to spend time posting and packing.

There seemed to be a lot of people all looking for the same thing, and as far as we could work out there did not appear to be a solution to the problem. So we decided to set up our own dropshipping business, this involved us negotiating deals with DVD suppliers and setting up a site that enabled eBay sellers to buy our DVD’s and provide the address details for their customers. We also provided other additional “value add” services such as sales tools, graphics and articles about selling on eBay.

As business started to grow, there was lots of other considerations we had not even thought about. Obviously we needed a business bank account, so we had to learn about that. We also had to hire an accountant to help us with our VAT returns and advise us about our tax liabilities.

We also had the challenge of letting people know about our new company, fortunately we had a good reputation in quite a few of the eBay forums so we were able to introduce our new online business. It was not long before we were learning about Keywords, Search Engines and why it was important to be at the top of Google, none of these things we had ever thought about before.

Probably the biggest consideration for us was scaling up. The business grew very quickly and soon had several hundred members, this meant we were processing thousands of orders a day. It was no longer viable to visit the post office with our packages three times a day, so we arranged for collections. We also had to move into dedicated premises.

It’s worth thinking about these things and having one eye on the future. As I said at the beginning of this page, I like to learn as I went along. You might prefer to spend a little time planning beforehand.