Starting to Sell Online: General Recommendations
The main trust of these recommendations is for new businesses
and they follow the same logic as advising anyone who is new
to any potentially expensive pursuit like golf, horse riding
etc.
You wouldn’t advise a new golfer to buy
the most expensive clubs, join the most expensive golf club
before he had even hit his first ball. The general advice is
to spend as little as possible at the outset until you are
convinced that you like it. Therefore:
-
Accept payment and orders using both online
and offline methods and in as many ways as possible.
-
If this is a new business then start slowly
and build you may even want to try to develop a customer base
with free products first (suitable for downloadable
information products).
-
If this is new business use the free setup
services like PayPal at the
start to help you gauge demand level before investing in a
Merchant account or bureaux service.
-
If you already have them in place then use
traditional offline methods i.e. cheque/invoice at first as
the main method of collecting payments.
-
Be very wary of tying yourself into long term
contracts.
-
Provided you haven’t tied yourself to along
term contract you can always change providers later if your
requirements change.
-
Shopping carts are only needed by a few sites.
Simple buy now buttons are sufficient for most and these are
provided by PayPal and many
other provider services.
-
Consider using an affiliate Network to sell your products. They are inexpensive to set up and expose your product to thousands of affiliate marketers.
Related Articles and resources:
Starting to Sell Online: General Recommendations
|
