Here is a short guide for you describing the process of online business opening. After reading it you will find answers to the following questions and more: How to start the analysis of the market? What is the first step that should be taken in order to start an online business? What are the components of an online shop? What are the modern and reliable services that can be used to create a webstore? http://browuse.com/

2. CONTENTS
PREFACE…………………………………………………………………3
ECOMMERCE TERMS…………………………………………………..4
ONLINE BUSINESS: WHERE TO START……………………………...5
ONLINE BUSINESS: FURTHER STEPS………………………………..7
ONLINE SHOP COMPONENTS…………………………………………9
QUESTIONS TO ANSWER BEFORE STARTING AN ONLINE
BUSINESS……………………………………………………………….11
PRACTICAL TIPS: SERVICES FOR ONLINE SHOPS………………..13
CONCLUSIONS…………………………………………………………16
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3. PREFACE
Selling and buying goods over the Internet is becoming more and more
popular among people all around the globe. People prefer this type of
shopping, because they can have better prices and access to goods they
need at any time and from any point.
It is a reasonable decision for businesses to go online, because they are at
risk of losing their clients. The process of website building has been
significantly simplified and there is no need of doing everything from
scratch, but still there are some hidden pitfalls that you should be aware of
if you want to have a prosperous online business.
Here you will find answers to the following questions which are asked by
any merchant that wants to start selling online.
• How to start the analysis of the market?
• What is the first step that should be taken in order to start an online
business?
• What are the components of an online shop?
• What are the modern and reliable services that can be used to create a
webstore?
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4. ECOMMERCE TERMS
“Look Through Basic Industry Terms”
ONLINE BUSINESS: a type of business that operates online in order to
provide customers with goods/services, e. g. an online store, a booking
company, a software provider, etc.
E-COMMERCE (Electronic Commerce): the process of buying and
selling goods/services online, transmitting the data over the Internet. It can
be realized as B2B, B2C, C2B, C2C.
ONLINE STORE: a website that supports functionality required to sell
online (goods displaying, orders accepting/confirming, payments
accepting, etc.).
E-COMMERCE SOFTWARE: a web application that is used by online
businesses in order to create websites, optimize the process of selling
goods, manage the website content, etc. (e. g. BROWUSE).
HOSTING PROVIDER: a company that provides businesses with the
disk space to host their websites/ to store data.
DOMAIN NAME: a unique name (URL) that identifies a website.
WEBSITE BUILDER: a web application that is used to create websites
without coding, all processes are executed automatically.
PAYMENT PROVIDER: a payment system which is used to accept and
process payments of customers, for instance, credit cards, PayPal
payments, electronic money, etc.
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5. ONLINE BUSINESS:
WHERE TO START
“Be Present On The Web”
Everything starts with an idea and a plan and your online business is not an
exception. First analyze the market carefully, no matter how unique you
think your idea is there might be hundreds of online retailers who are
working on projects similar to yours.
There are three aspects you need to pay special attention to: products
offered, competitors in the sector and potential clients. It will help you to
find your unique niche that will be profitable.
Today the most popular type of online business is ecommerce (selling and
buying goods over the Internet). Year by year ecommerce sales keep
growing, for instance, in 2015 they grew by approximately 15% in
comparison with the previous year. Consequently, the amount of online
shops is constantly increasing, but not all of them become successful.
Business owners do not need to do everything from scratch and
concentrate on the technical side of the issue, because there are many
ecommerce services that can provide them with the required online shop
components (further we will describe the most effective ones from our
point of view) and they just need to put them together in order to have a
functional webstore.
An effective marketing strategy should be one of the main priorities,
because it is much more difficult to attract visitors to a website and make
them buy goods at your shop.
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6. Website promotion methods can be divided into two types: paid and free
ones. It is difficult to say what will work in every specific case, because
there are a lot of factors that can influence your business development, but
it is recommended to combine both of them.
Generally the rule can be formulated in the following way: be present on
the web. Never lose an opportunity to tell people about your shop,
products and their advantages. You can use social media (pages in social
networks, groups, communities, etc.), forums, blogs, QA websites, email
marketing and more.
You need two things in order to have a prosperous online business: an
effective marketing strategy and right technical support.
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7. ONLINE BUSINESS:
FURTHER STEPS
“Find Partners And Start Selling”
Registering Your Business
When you are up with an idea what you are going to sell and what your
advantages are you have to move to a less creative, but not less important
phase called “business registration”. Any business should be registered in
accordance with the laws of the state where it is located. This task requires
a lot of time and presupposes paperwork. But you need to take care of it at
the very beginning in order not to have legal problems in future. If you are
not sure or have any questions consult a lawyer to make the right decision.
Selecting a Domain Name
A domain name is a name of your website, the URL that we see in our
browser. It should reflect the essence of your business, but at the same
time it should be unique, short and easy to remember. It can be a helpful
marketing tool, because customers will associate your business with this
name. Today it is more difficult to select a domain name than it was
before. Here are some techniques that you can utilize in order to create a
catchy domain name:
• abbreviations
• clipping
• blending
• affixes
• foreign words
• proper names
• domain generators (e. g. impossibility.org, namemesh.com, etc.).
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8. Finding a Hosting Provider
You need to find a hosting provider in order to store your data. Different
services offer different plans depending on the disk space amount,
bandwidth amount, speed support, email accounts, etc. The best option is
to select a flexible solution, because the needs of your business will grow
and you will have to handle with them.
Building an Ecommerce Website
You can either develop an online store from scratch or utilize some
ecommerce software that will do the half of the work for you. When you
just start your business the second solution seems to be reasonable,
because it allows saving time and money. Of course, you may say that the
level of flexibility is quite low, but there are services that provide clients
with source files and possibilities of their manual modification. So on the
one hand, you have all required standard functionality to start your
business and on the other hand, you can add any functionality you want at
any time.
Opening a Merchant Account
A businesses has to open a merchant account (a special type of a bank
account) to process payments through it. It might be a problem for startups
while they do not have any processing history and their processing volume
is low. The best way out is to apply for an account within a payment
processing system like PayPal. In this case businesses can accept payments
on their websites, but they do not do it directly, because users are
redirected to a payment page of their provider.
Selecting a Delivery Service
The last but not the least important task is to select a shipping company
that will deliver goods to your customers. Here your choice is going to
depend on the location of your business and customers (local or
international deliveries). It is very important to pay attention to two factors
such as pricing and delivery time.
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9. ONLINE SHOP COMPONENTS
“Communicate With Your Visitors. Keep Them Interested”
You need to understand that your online shop is a tool of communication
through which you can indirectly influence your visitors. Here you display
and advertise your products, so you have to work really hard in order to
make the purchasing process easy and convenient for your customers.
Start with a website theme which is a core of your store. It should be
responsive and user friendly, but it is needless to say that a website theme
of a toy a shop and a furniture shop should differ significantly in terms of
color schemes, elements design, backgrounds, etc.
When a website theme is selected and installed you can move to the
content of your website. It is a very important component, so do not be in
a hurry and work carefully on it. You will have to prepare product
descriptions (a description itself and a title), company information,
contacts, articles/industry news, etc. This information should be short,
precise, descriptive, catchy and creative. You need to persuade your
visitors to make a purchase. Do not forget to add keywords into your texts
and place them correctly.
The text at the ecommerce website should be supported by visual
materials: photos, pictures, sketches, videos etc. They should portray
products in their natural way for clients to have the feeling of buying real
goods. Also, their quality should be high and the loading time should be
minimal. Consider the idea of using videos while they are becoming more
and more popular and they increase the level of trust to your website.
You need to devote some time to the development of website navigation.
Users should not experience any difficulties on your website.
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10. They should have the easy access to their accounts, shopping carts, last
viewed products, contacts, etc. Create a “call-to-action”. It is some
element, for instance, a button or a banner, that tells your visitors what
they should do. The most typical example for ecommerce websites is a
“buy button”, but you can be more creative and use a banner telling about
discounts and promotions or some kind of a landing page.
There should be a direct connection between your website and pages on
social networks. And it seems to be reasonable to add the functionality
allowing people to share the information about the products they like on
their profiles. It can help to increase the amount of the organic traffic and
make your website more popular on social media.
It is great to have at your webstore some kind of a program where people
can virtually use products. For example, if you run a beauty shop you
can offer your clients to submit a photo/use a standard one and create a
makeup with the products you sell. It helps to increase the level of
interaction between you and your customers and it helps to investigate the
market – the tastes and preferences of your clients.
Nowadays an online shop has to include a great amount of external
elements in order to be successful and profitable. The most important task
is to find ways to communicate with your clients and to stay interesting for
them all the time.
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11. QUESTIONS TO ANSWER BEFORE
STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
“Start Your Analysis With 6 Simple Question”
1. What is a legal procedure of business registering in a specific
country?
• legal documents
• taxes
• company bank account
2. What is the location of your vendors and customers?
• local businesses
• international business
3. What are the advantages of products you are planning to sell?
• pricing
• handmade/unique products
• unique distribution rights
• brands
4. What basic and advanced features should your shop have?
• order status checking
• order management system
• content management system
• payments processing
• SEO tools
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12. 5. What types of payments do you want to accept at your website?
• credit cards
• PayPal payments
• e-money
6. What are the delivery options?
• delivery companies
• post
• courier
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13. PRACTICAL TIPS:
SERVICES FOR ONLINE SHOPS
“Use Reliable Services. Do Not Waste Your Time And Money”
The amount of online services and systems is enormous and you can spend
a lot of time comparing different options before you find the one that will
meet the needs of your business. Here is the list of services that you can
trust. In our opinion, they are the best choice for small, mid-size and
startup businesses.
GoDaddy is a domain name provider that is used by a great amount of
businesses operating in different countries and spheres. At the website you
can check the availability of the domain name, the taken ones will be
removed by a service. Also, system offers additional names similar to the
one being checked that you could use.
BROWUSE is an ecommerce software that combines functionality of a
hosting provider and a website builder. It is developed on the basis of
Magento, but all processes are executed automatically.
When the installation of a theme is completed products can be added to the
website through a Magento admin panel. Users are provided with the login
information via email or they can access it from the BROWUSE user
center.
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14. BROWUSE package includes:
• Magento installation;
• free website themes;
• automatic theme setup;
• custom domain name;
• internal domain;
• 10GB and more disk space;
• unlimited stores;
• unlimited emails
• online support 24/7;
• website theme switch;
• educational materials;
• 2 months trial.
PayPal is a payment processing system that is targeted at small and mid-
size businesses. The process of company account opening is very simple
and free, no subscription fee is applied. Merchants pay for every processed
transaction (a fixed amount/a per item fee and a percentage from the
process transaction). It can be integrated with your shop without any
problems. Customers are redirected to a PayPal payment page, so there are
no specific requirements to the security of the data storage that should be
observed by a merchant.
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15. In practice you need to put these three services together in order to obtain a
functional webstore. As a result you will have a platform to display your
goods. Customers will be able to place their orders and pay for products
here. Basically, in this case your website supports all required features to
sell online, but as it has already been mentioned you need to promote your
store and drive traffic to it.
The best option is to rely on systems that are flexible, because the needs of
your business are going to grow month by month, and you will have to add
a great amount of advanced features, so the ecommerce software like
BROWUSE is a perfect choice. Magento is the most versatile and feature-
rich platform on the market, so you will not have any problems with orders
and content management, and also there are many SEO tools you can
benefit from.
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16. CONCLUSIONS
Do not hesitate and open your online business. With modern ecommerce
software you can start selling today, but you need to select the right
reliable services that will take care of all technical issues instead of you.
The software should be flexible and feature rich in order to meet not only
the current needs of your business, but also the future ones.
Be creative and perceive your shop as a source of communication through
which you can influence the visitors of your website and move them to the
category of customers. The information on your website should be
interesting, useful and up-to-date.
Never lose an opportunity to tell the world about your business. For this
purpose you can use social networks, forums, blogs, QA websites, emails
and more.
Stay creative and be present on the web. Good luck!
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