Section 2.04 Online business

Online business 

Today, it is easy to start a business online and perhaps even more accessible than a traditional business on the high street.  A traditional business can still have an extension of its business online, allowing activities on the internet via any device to reach a business. 

Managing an online business including buying and selling or providing an online service is more a necessity than once upon a time a novelty. 

If you have a business and it’s not online, then you are putting yourself out of business – Melvin Mayard 

Types of online businesses 

1. Ecommerce store

Ecommerce can take many forms, but in general, they involve creating your own self-hosted website that features an integrated shopping cart. Source and list products on the site, customers make purchases and payments via your website, and you ship products to them directly.

One benefit of building an ecommerce site is that you have complete control over what you include. You choose the shopping cart program and fully customise the site’s appearance, which gives customers an easy way to navigate your offerings and request assistance. You’ll also need to negotiate prices on products and physical space to store products before packing and shipping them yourself.

2. Affiliate marketing

Set up affiliate accounts with companies selling things your readers may want. They may be from a large online retailer with niche products from up-and-coming brands that offer affiliate programs. This can be another means of income as long as the affiliate is a good fit for your readers. If they don’t use your link to click and buy, you don’t get any money.

3. Auction online

Just like a traditional auction, however, it’s online. 

To manage this type of business, you use an auction website’s online interface to create listings for individual products. You can choose what items to sell on a piece-by-piece basis, which is ideal if you’re initially planning to manage your business part-time. Also, there are auctions where the public can choose which type of products they want to list to sell on the auction. 

You don’t need to build and manage your site incorporating shopping cart technology. You can use others auction sites for a fee. 

4. Dropshipping

Fast becoming common practice is Drop-shipping, a term for selling items that aren’t in your possession and having them delivered to your customer from a third-party supplier of the product, directly from a wholesaler or manufacturer. 

With a drop-shipping or fulfilment-based online business, you don’t need to keep your products physically stocked at your home, office or warehouse. You rely on a third-party provider to produce and deliver your items.

There’s usually no financial commitment before the customer orders the product. You do need to spend some time figuring out what you want to sell. Depending on the company you choose, you may only need to ship your products to the fulfilment service, and it’ll provide and manage your customer site interface. Or, you might need to run a site that handles your customer transactions before you send the orders to the shipping company, which mails them out.

This option allows you to have a much broader product range than what you might be able to stock at home. However, you’ll need to pay the drop-shipping company for its services.

5. Digital marketing

You might not be interested in selling physical products. Instead, you might consider running an online business to provide services you can deliver online. Perhaps you have a specific skill set, like graphic design, website designing, coding or copyediting. Or, maybe you have expertise in a specific area to provide online training or webinar.

Providing online services that are in high demand or creating a small agency by outsourcing work via work-at-home job posting sites. Some options include:

• Building websites and apps: If you’re computer savvy, use your skills to create websites and apps for companies.

• SEO services: For websites and blogs to draw viewers, they often need to use search engine optimisation (SEO), which improves the website in search engine rankings and can boost brand awareness.

• Social media consulting: One could provide social media services to businesses to build their social media presence. Businesses need social media for publicity, and many owners don’t have the time, interest or knowledge or skills to do it themselves. This is a growing service in demand.  

This option lets you use and improve your knowledge base. However, you’ll likely need to build a customised website from scratch that incorporates simple shopping cart software or another format for customers to deliver payment. You’ll also want to draft a contract so customers are clear on the services they’re receiving.

6. Blogging

Anyone can create a blog, and there are various ways to approach blogging for money. Here are some typical ways that bloggers earn money:

• Advertising: Companies buy ad space on the blog, which links to the company sites. You can sell ads by yourself or use advertising networks to put ads on your site that pay you every time someone clicks an ad link.

• Sponsored posts: Writing a post that’s paid for by an advertiser is another way you can blog for money. Be proactive and find sponsors for your blog. You could create a professional website and brand, find brands you want to work with and pitch a sponsored post to them to win their business long-term. At some point, you will have companies paying you to write on your own blog.

• Promote Products: You can use your blog to sell products, whether physical goods or information products such as e-books and other digital products. Automating the sales and fulfilment processes can bring in income even when you’re sleeping or on vacation, which is the ideal process.

Advantages of online business

• Cheaper, more accessible and more straightforward. 

With online business, the amount of capital required is minimal compared to traditional business.

• It can create wealth faster.

Online business creates faster wealth since it can reach a more significant number of target markets over a shorter period of time with the help of ads. 

• Increase of chances.

Learning how to use the internet effectively is one thing and then also learning how to operate an online business would significantly increase your chances of success. 

• Lower risk.

When you master the art of buying and selling goods and services online, the risk in business reduces in relation to capital requirements and losses, with lower overheads thus increasing profitability. 

Disadvantages of online business 

• Laxity. 

Those lacking self-discipline would quickly be lost in the internet virtual world. A lack of self-discipline would make one less productive and efficient. People working online need to be taught how to stay self-disciplined. 

• Distractions. 

Whether from your lack of priorities, concentration, children or your favourite TV programme, it’s quite easy to lose focus when working from home. 

• Lose track of time

The internet is a virtual digital world that is timeless irrespective of one’s ideas.  Time only exists in the actual work and feeling the need to apply it to the virtual world. In reality, it does not apply to the virtual world. It is a person’s responsibility to keep track of real-world time whilst they are inverse into the virtual world. 

• Internet dependency.

Browsing the internet unnecessarily or for every little thing before long finding yourself spending hours achieving nothing!    

Advantages of Online Work 

There are many types of online work and low-cost businesses you could quickly start with skills and confidence after doing research to ensure it fits your desires and pocket to start them.  Some of those leads may not need any funds at all only your skills for work or teaching and knowledge for sale.  Here are some examples to consider as being and operating online.

1. Freelance for any service  

2. Teach an online course

3. Publish your book or ebook 

4. Start a blog

5. Become a virtual assistant

6. Being a social media influencer

7. Launch a podcast

8. Become an affiliate marketer

9.       Launch a dropshipping store

10.     Start your own online business 

Research the ten points and gain a good understanding of each topic.  Ensure to face the reality of each of them requiring work, work is work, it’s not pressing a button and sitting back and relaxing with the expectation that lots of money will pour into your pocket, purse or bank account. Operating online is also work, hard work in many and more often being the circumstance.  

The idea of working online for only a few hours a week is only valid and natural after the tremendous pain of hard work and paying the price of time to achieve success by automating the business process. Only then would one be in a position to work less from there onwards.  

Starting any form of work, traditional or online takes enormous effort and hard work.   

Following the herd can be advantageous when they are moving in the right direction to get online – Melvin Mayard 

Business advantages of being online 

1. Growth of Ecommerce

By 2025, online store sales are expected to reach approximately 25% of global retail, compared to 15% in 2020. It is estimated that digital wallets will account for over half of the total ecommerce payments.  

Think about this potential growth and the need to operate a business online.  Research and plan what could be proper for you!

2. B2B offering B2C experiences.

A growing number of B2B services now offer B2C-like digital experiences.  By 2025 90% of B2B companies will be serving B2C to capture the market and improve their customer experiences. This includes creating a personal channel experience using data to create personalised customer relationships.

Ecommerce solutions now provide an increasing level of self-service, losing the personal touch using digital devices.  On the flip coin of this, some are seeing the opportunity to provide more user-friendly platforms for building customer relations and loyalty.

The online business is still open for massive exploration and growth; the potential to succeed is open for you.  The question is, what will you do? 

3. Reaching out

Online business is reaching out to the world, and boundaries are no longer an issue. Online platforms are opening up all the time to support business operations and act as a hub for their convenience. 

Every day the option is opening up forever more choices promising leads and customers for the online business with the threat of losing out if they are not on those platforms. Whilst the potential is still there and growth is still the trend, who would argue it’s not an advantage for any business online or to get online?  

Online advantages

• No need to travel 
• Instant Access to anything.
• Cheap depending on what you do
• Saving on cost because of less business overhead.
• Online courses, academia and none the like.  
• Online shopping.
• Store favourite items online for later.
• Connect on Social media sites.
• See pictures of others travelling you would not otherwise experience. 
• Search for virtually anything you want or need.
• Quicker for you to act on your decisions. 
• Access the whole world in the palm of our hand. 
• Online entertainments.    

Disadvantages of being online

• Requires 24-7 online security
• It can be costly depending on what you are aiming to achieve.
• Online bullying and psychological stress.
• An increasing amount of advertising.   
• Minimum of face-to-face contact and human contact.
• Online addiction. 
• Loss of reality and real-time sense. 
• Uncontrolled and uncensored images are readily available.
• Your Data is being used against you for marketing purposes. 
• False and unreliable information vs truth. 
• People’s opinions could cloud your thoughts, ideas and decisions.
• Too many various forms of entertainment. 

All of these can be common sense and easy talk for some and not for others. Feel free to explore those points in a little more detail at least with the one you feel the need to. 

Summary 

• Online is precisely that, operating online, it’s neither good nor bad, it’s what you do with your time and ability to stay on course. 
• Being online is not for everyone, you cannot breed a horse online, at least not a real one maybe a virtual one. Some businesses can only have an extension of their business presence online whilst others can be 100% virtual. 
• There are advantages and disadvantages to being online as a person and for businesses.
• E-commerce is growing online and will continue to do so. 
• There are lots of opportunities to work online.

2.04- build your online business (1)

    ACTIVITY 2.04

 From the list of the 10 online businesses mentioned above, research each one and state your top 3 preferences for future business endeavors.

a.

b. 

c.  

Please grade yourself on this section.

(Automated self-grade) 

1. excellent
2. Good
3. ok 
4. bad

Please provide your feedback on the section.