Over the last 10 years the internet has changed from a (predominately) information super highway to a product selling vehicle.
• Small business websites really fall into two main types; one which gives information about you, your business and other appropriate details about how you operate and what you actually offer. The other type is a selling site (E-commerce, E-tail) where you actually sell products from.
• Each site type governs how much it will cost to build. An ‘info’ site will be a much lower cost than a ‘commercial’ site. If you are selling from your site you will need a system that allows you to take payments from customers at the point of ordering. Best way to deal with this is by having a merchant agreement with one of the credit card companies. This will allow you to process credit and debit card payments through a secure server.
• First step is to contact your bank, ask them which schemes they are party to. It will help you if your bank is part of the credit card consortium. Regardless of whether you have bank support or not, contact Visa and MasterCard direct, they will tell you about their criteria and charges. Also check out Pay Pal, they are the payment system linked to EBay.
• Top priority when you have your own website is to tell your target audience that you actually have a site. So how will people find out about your site? Well, you could rely on the search engines, include the right ‘contact’ words on your site and Google will list you even if it is on page 104!!! You can “optimize your search engine presence” by paying a monthly fee to either search engine companies or IT service providers to “boost” your presence but, will it get you on the front page?
• I’m often told that “ my website details appear on my business cards and that’s how customers will find my site.” Yes, that’s one way to get your information out but how many potential customers will actually get your business cards? I’m a busy Business Adviser; I give out maybe 30 business cards a month but it took months before I received any traffic on my site through business cards and search engines alone. It was only when I arranged a banner advert on the FashionCapital website that I started to get ‘regular traffic’ onto my site.
• My advice to all start-ups is research your customers; if you are targeting a niche market do they use the internet for information or for buying product? I still don’t see retailers buying from websites but I do see some retailers being attracted to new suppliers by the information in supplier’s sites, providing they have your site details and are interested in more suppliers.
• If you are targeting the public and expect to sell to them; a commercial (selling) website could do it for you. Remember; the costs of getting it up and running, plus the cost of the stock, plus the high cost of constantly promoting the site may prove way too expensive for your limited budget.
• If you decide that you ‘must have’ a website, do you need it right now?? Perhaps you could consider and research a website during your first year with a view to building the ‘right’ website for your business, based on your real needs in your second year of trading? What about EBay? As a starting point? Leading to your own site if you are successful?
• If you just want a couple of pages of information about you and your product, this can now be achieved at very low cost but you still have to tell your target audience about it.
• Check out all the ‘host’ sites that will promote/sell your collection or product range for an agreed price, will they give you enough sales for the money you are paying?
Remember, if you do decide to have your own website, it will need constant updating and full time promotion which must be budgeted for.
