When it comes to starting a small online business, e-commerce, in the sense of selling a clearly identifiable product or service of your own, is not the only option. Before we look at the options, let us first look at the typical, and dangerous, scenario you are likely to find when you start investigating online business options.
This page comes under the section E-Commerce and Small Business.
After a look at the proliferating 'business opportunities' we focus on some genuine online business options. The bogus ones generally promise that you can make a fortune without doing much in the way of work. If that was really true, we should be seeing millionaires everywhere! Genuine businesses require a clear understanding of the business and focused work over a period of time.
The Web is full of deceptive and misleading offers that promise to help you make millions without any effort on your part. Even if you are a cautious sort, your money could get blown away by some of these extremely tempting offers.
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Many of the offers do not tell you exactly what the business opportunity is. Instead, they promise to reveal the "secret" for making millions when you pay them. Only after parting with your money would you know what is involved.
You could then find that the activities involved are not to your liking. Some might even be illegal. Very often, you find it impossible to carry out the required actions in the "stipulated" manner.
Other offers might reveal the general nature of the work, but do not reveal the full story. For example, you might be offered a data entry job (after paying money to get the job) and then find that you cannot meet the stipulated target even if you work 24 hours a day. Or you might find that you have to spend considerable additional money to get the business going, only to find that you are still not getting the promised results.
Your best option when you come across any business offer is to:
If the business is simply a "scheme" such as MLM - Multi Level Marketing - you might soon find that the market would soon dry up (if it has not already dried up).
Learn to ignore the most tempting of offers if you cannot get full details. Cultivate the habit of assessing your own capabilities against the business requirements.
Let us now turn our attention to genuine online business opportunities.
As we examined in the top level article, ecommerce offers several advantages for starting and growing a small business. We also looked at what ecommerce means in the article on Definition of Ecommerce.
Look at your background to see whether you have the know-how to produce a product or render a service. If you have any, develop a plan to sell it online through an ecommerce website. Another option is to look at your hobbies.
Hobbyists require certain specific items needed to pursue their hobby. The market for these items tend to be small in a particular geographic area. The total market itself could be too small to interest big players. You could exploit these factors by selling hobby products online.
Organizing it as on line business, you can reach a wide geographic area and find many customers to achieve profitable volumes. Because the market is still too small for big players, you might also not face tough competition. As a hobbyist yourself, you would be aware of what is important for your customers, and can organize to meet their expectations better.
Two popular examples of genuine non-ecommerce businesses are:
You can also examine the possibility of developing innovative business models. We look at some well-known examples below.
When Hotmail began offering email free, few could have foreseen the business potential involved. The free email attracted millions of subscribers, and these millions constituted a huge market for everything. Advertisers paid to get their ads on the email sites.
Google offered a superb search experience, and monetized the service through clearly labeled sponsored search results. And then got millions of publishers publish their ads on their websites.
These kinds of businesses involved thinking innovatively (and even apparently foolishly) and then organizing things to make it into a high-paying business. If all you can come up with are tired old MLM or other unsound schemes, your business also will be a tired old one. On the other hand, if you can find ways to tap the potential of the Internet in ways that benefit all participants, you can create a business that grows dramatically.
Return to Section Main Page How E-Commerce Benefits Small Business
In this strategy-packed guide, top e-business consultant Scott Fox reveals the powerful but simple methods for striking it rich on the Net. Exclusive interviews with dozens of "mom and pop" entrepreneurs prove how easy it is to get started and build a million-dollar enterprise.
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