business on the Internet, should think seriously about their
position! If you are one of them, chances are there, that you
have to pay dearly for your indecision as you might lose
significant market share to your more proactive competitors in a
very short period of time.
Apart from the fact that e-commerce is growing at the rate of
more than 25 percent a year, the use of online features can
bring efficiency to virtually every aspect of business process,
be it supply chain management or customer support management.
But, how can you build an e-commerce business and take
advantages of all these great possibilities? After all, you are
pretty sure that anything to do with new technology is
complicated, time-consuming, and expensive.
Believe it or not, this is just a misconception that most
business owners have about the Internet technology. The truth is
– in order to run a business online and reap profits, like any
new effort, you need to do a little homework, have patience and
determination, and get going.
Take the following steps seriously and in no time you will be
able to embrace fascinating world of online business.
Take your products online
Getting your product online does not simply mean - having a nice
picture and a product narration to go with it. Effective use of
the Internet is based on standards. Standards, as you know, are
created to facilitate common use of a technology. If you ever
imported or exported a product or service, or if you registered
your product with some kind of authorities ever; you certainly
know that each product falls under certain subcategory according
to the classification system that you encountered. Internet is
the same thing. Since the emergence of Internet, several
classification systems have been developed.
If you think long term and would like to use same catalog with
multiple e-marketplaces, you should adopt one of the prevailing
classification system in the Internet. The best online catalog
classification available from my point of view is UNSPSC. For
one thing, many prominent e-marketplaces adopted this particular
system, which allows you to post your products on multiple
e-procurement systems and e-marketplaces.
How do you do this? I would suggest you to become a member of
one of the e-marketplaces, where you can aggregate your products
using some kind of simple wizards or forms. E-marketplaces based
on Commerce One's the largest B2B e-marketplace enabler, have
this facility.
Our own Rusbiz e-catalog system, which is also based on UNSPSC,
also allows you to integrate your products using a very simple
but sophisticated form. If you do not have time to do it by your
own, you can use the service of a B2B exchange. Rusbiz also
provides with similar service.
Get an online presence
What should be your next step once you have all your products
transformed into e-catalog? Naturally, you need to have an
online presence to sell the products. There are number of
options how to do this.
Become a member of an e-marketplace
This could be a large geography oriented fairly large horizontal
market or a vertical e-marketplace specific to your industry.
The membership fees are in most of the cases not so expensive.
But many of them charge some percentage on your transactions,
usually, from 1 to 3 percent. If you expect big sales volume,
you may think this might not be the best choice for you.
However, if you get new customers, thanks to your mere presence
in an e-marketplace, the percentage that you have to pay on the
transaction you should consider as customer acquiring cost.
Under any circumstances, it is good to become a member of at
least one e-marketplace as you -automatically get exposed to
thousands of new prospective customers.
Build a website
There are several ways you can construct an e-commerce site to
your need.
You can build a website in house by employing developers or you
can hire a web development company to do this for you. The
advantage is you can have a website with the look, feel and
functionality according to your given specification.
However, both of these methods could be way costly for a small
business. Average cost of building an e-commerce website runs
starting from US$ 600 plus hosting and maintenance charges for a
miniscule site with limited features to several hundred thousand
US Dollars for a powerful e-commerce website.
Another option that you have as a small business is to build an
e-commerce site from prefabricated templates. While this is
affordable and easy, you considerably lose flexibility and
customization possibilities in comparison to building a site
from scratch.
Build a web store
All these above mentioned cases do not allow you to have the
potentials and advantages that come with an e-business website
integrated with a B2B exchange. Which means, whether you are a
business to consumer company with occasional sales to businesses
or you are a pure play B2B company, a Web Store merged into an
e-marketplace is what you need.
A web store from a B2B exchange gives you the best of both
worlds. You are having a professional e-commerce site which
incorporates all the features that an e-marketplace has to
offer. And you build a site from simple and easy to edit
templates.
For a detailed information about the features that come with a
web store and benefits that you can get from them, follow this
link: Powerful E-business Store