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Taking Your Business Online

Do you want to take your business online? If so, it’s not as difficult as you might think with all these services available to you online. To help guide you through this daunting task, here are a few steps to set up an e-commerce site.

1. Get your domain name

You domain name is what a customer types in to get to your online store. This is one of the most important decisions you will make while setting up your website. The domain name serves as your address for your website and every email account. It also helps with keyword rankings on search engines. Try to register a .com domain for your business as it is the most common extension. If you use another extension like .biz, .pro or .ws, visitors will have to remember both the first part of your domain name and the extension, which increases the chance of them typing in the wrong website address. It should be easy to remember or related to your business name. If your company is called "Jimbo Toy Cars", maybe you should get a domain name such as "jimbotoycars.com" or "toycars.com". A popular domain name register is GoDaddy.


2. Get a Website hosting service

This is where your online web store will be hosted. You can do it yourself on a computer that can be dedicated as a web server and that has a broadband internet connection, but such systems are costly and have limited capacities. Your other option: Use a web-hosting company such as IX WebHosting, Webhostingpad (best rate), 1&1 Internet or iPower Web Hosting. This saves you the trouble of buying your own server and dealing with any networking headaches. Whether you use a large or small provider, basic hosting services--as well as domain-name registration and e-mail accounts--cost from $4.95 to about $10 per month.


3. Design and Consultation

Your website is your online identity. Visitors will judge your company’s professionalism and competency by the appearance of your website. A site that appears to be designed by an amateur can hurt your credibility. It can sometimes be better to NOT have a site, than to have a poorly designed site. It’s not enough to just put your business online, you need to successfully compete online. Avoid the generic template sites and hire a professional designer who can build a good looking and effective website. If you are not web savvy, try finding someone to design your store. Although they can be expensive, freelancers can offer you their ideas and best practices.

If you'd rather not build your site yourself or have a developer design it, there are many hosted web or e-commerce solutions that can help. An alternative solution would be trying One Month Free Trial! ProStores - an eBay Company or Yahoo Merchant Solutions. ProStores and Yahoo Merchant Solutions provide hosting, storefront, shopping cart, real-time payments, easy setup and more. Both charge varying monthly fees and features, so weight out your options or going with either an all in one e-commerce solution or doing a little bit more work to customize how you set your online business up.



4. Credit Card Services

Most online transactions are done by credit card. To authorize credit card payments online, you will need an Internet Payment Gateway. Sign up for PayPal Business or Premier account. This way, you can take credit card via website or as a virtual terminal. They are one of the easier payment gateway to implement and lower fees.


5. Traffic

Now that you have your online store, you need traffic. Getting traffic is a little more difficult if your company is not well known, such as Walmart. Your best option is to get your website listed (see below) and enroll in pay per click and advertising programs. Advertise your website with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit into your new account or Google Advertising



6. Get Listed

Get listed on the major Search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

  • If you company is a local mom and pop shop, out of state customers might not be aware of your product or service offering. Make sure you site is Search Engine friendly. Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo regularly goes out to the World Wide Web to crawl for websites to become part of their directory.
  • Set up an email newsletter for you current customer. Offer them a weekly or monthly sales or ideas to keep them coming in and visiting your website. iContact is the leading email marketing service provider that is cost effective and east to use.

7. Computer Software/Hardware

You have a business now, so get the proper computer hardware and software to make it run like a well oiled machine. Make sure your computer can handle the type of work you do. For example, if your business requires heavy process software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator running at the same time with your Outlook, make sure your computer has enough juice. Check out Newegg.com, they always have good bargains.

For software, make sure you have protection. I tend to go with anti-virus software that is not “popular”. Why? Most popular brands such as Norton or McCafee is a target for hackers because most people use them because its pre-installed on your computer. Try ESET NOD32 Antivirus free for 30 days: click here, it had a user rating of 4 out of 5 stars vs. Norton/McCafee which has 3.5 rating on CNET.


8. Create an Email Campaign

According to figures from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email marketing has now overtaken direct mail in terms of volume. This isn’t surprising when you consider how much cheaper, more measurable and better targeted email can be than direct mail. We recommend trying out iContact for a free trial. Their rates are competitive and includes additional features free, such as polls and surveys.