Find out which category of business you fall into will help you shape your plans. Broadly speaking, the internet can facilitate business in three ways: supporting an existing bricks-and-mortar business; selling physical goods and services; and finally, selling online services and information.

Any business that doesn’t have have a supporting website is missing a trick. If nothing else, a well-designed site establishes credibility with your customers and tells them how to get in touch with you. Note that qualification: the site must be well designed, or at the very least it mustn’t look as though it’s fall out of a cheap “build a site in a minute” box from PC World or been put together in PowerPoint using every available font and colour

Find out which category of business you fall into will help you shape your plans. Broadly speaking, the internet can facilitate business in three ways: supporting an existing bricks-and-mortar business; selling physical goods and services; and finally, selling online services and information.

Any business that doesn’t have have a supporting website is missing a trick. If nothing else, a well-designed site establishes credibility with your customers and tells them how to get in touch with you. Note that qualification: the site must be well designed, or at the very least it mustn’t look as though it’s fall out of a cheap “build a site in a minute” box from PC World or been put together in PowerPoint using every available font and colour

Selling Goods

Source: www.amazon.com / Top 3 Most visited side globally -2015 (alexa.com)

It’s in the selling of physical goods that the real-world benefits of using the internet as a marketing channel become so obvious. For example, if you wanted to set up your own small supermarket, there’s no way you could compete with the integrated systems – both electronic, physical and marketing – that the big players such as Tesco now employ. The cost of fitting out a store in an attractive way, adding the stock management and EPOS (electronic point of sale) systems and then employing enough staff is a huge investment that excludes almost everyone.

Compare this with setting up an online retailer. All the infrastructure – including stock management, product display and payment processing – can be purchased or rented at a low price. This makes it perfectly possible to give your visitors (almost) as effective an experience as they might have at, say, Play.com. Indeed, with services such as ebay shops and Amazon Marketplace, you can use the infrastructure of these companies to sell your products. That so few small online retailers actually create efficient sales processes is a pity, but it opens up gaps that you can exploit.

However, simply putting together a slick, efficient “sales funnel” (the process from choosing a product to paying for it) is not nearly enough to ensure success. If the product isn’t right, the best shop in the world won’t succeed: what having the right software does ensure is that you don’t lose sales you should otherwise get

2. Selling Downloads and Online Services

Source: www.spotify.com / #1 Leading paid music streaming service(2015)

The advent of the internet, and specifically broadband, has given rise to a whole range of new commercial products. The internet itself is the natural home for these, and in many ways they represent the ideal online business. Having no physical products means you don’t need to buy any stock, store it or dispose of it if it doesn’t sell. It becomes possible to keep an enormous range of products at no cost.

In fact, a whole new economy has been built around this “long tail”, in which it’s possible to make money by selling tiny quantities of thousands of different items, adding up to profitable revenue. Amazon is the most obvious case in point: it makes much of its profit from obscure books that aren’t found in high-street bookshops.

There’s also a huge market for online services. 37Signals (www.37signals.com) has made an entire business out of providing online organisational software, including its flagship Basecamp project-management service. Online accounting software FreeAgent (www.freeagentcentral.com) is, in my view the most elegant UK-developed web application. Like Basecamp, FreeAgent is one of those rare software products that has radically altered how I work: In this case it has reduced the length of time it takes to keep my accounts up to date by around 90%.

You might also use the internet to sell your own internet-related skills. For example, if you’re a copywriter, web designer or Google AdWords specialist, you’ll use a website to sell your services. This can be similar to the website of a bricks-and-mortar business, but will need to be much more sophisticated and to reflect current trends, because as well as being a brochure it’s a living, working example of your abilities. If you’re a web developer, for example, you’d better make sure your site looks good. If you’re an AdWords specialist, you’d better have an effective AdWords campaign of your own and plenty of further examples online.

3. Selling Information

Source: www.tonyrobbins.com / #1 Motivational speaker in U.S.

Enrol in almost any internet marketing guru’s training course, and one method of making money will be pushed more than any other; information products.

These really do have a lot going for them. Usually created in the form of PDFs (such as eBooks), MP3s (such as seminars) or videos (the sky’s the limit), they tend to be products that can then be sold for years with minimal change. They can be very quick to get into place, and they can be naturally slotted into Google’s search engine so that you know the people visiting your site are actually looking for the information you want to sell.

Having said that, information products have their products, The most fundamental of these is that web users increasingly expect information to be free. To charge for a product, you need to convince potential customers you can offer information that’s not freely available elsewhere and that you’re an expert in the relevant field.

If you have a specialist knowledge that you believe others will pay for, then an information business can be easy to set up and highly profitable

4. Payment Solutions

Source: www.paypal.com / World famous integrated online checkout service

If you create a software product or download, you can either integrate your shopping cart in a similar way to selling a physical product or you can use a specialist third-party application.

Digital River’s share-it, for example, offers a complete ecommerce and delivery system. You can either have share-it store your software and supply a link to the purchaser or store it on your own server. Many different shopping carts include some support for downloadable products, but systems such as share-it offer sophisticated features such as registration key generation and trial versions, so if you’re selling software there’s little reason to look elsewhere. Cost range from 4.9% to 8.9%. You’ll need your own website to publicise your product and act as a link into the share-it system.

This is also the case if you’re planning on selling information products and online services. An information product can be delivered using most standard ecommerce products, but billing for an online service can be rather more complicated.

Most online services are paid for on a rolling basis, usually monthly, so your payment system needs to take account for this. For most service providers, this has traditionally meant writing their own recurring billing software, which is hideously complicated. The system needs to handle refunds, pro-rata payments, trial periods and changes of payment details along with a whole host of less usual occurrences – and this, on its own, is one of the major barriers between a great idea for an online service and its realisation. In fact, there’s a significant danger that the subscription management system could take longer to perfect than the online service itself.