Basing a business online is a giant leap for small physical businesses, especially if you have limited experience with technology. Although going online can be a big and profitable step for your company, however, basing a business online does not only mean creating a great website and domain name. Many considerations may impact the viability and success of your business. To ensure that your business meets little barriers when setting up online, here are the top features that you need to acknowledge.
1. Online Security
Although theft and other crimes are rampant in physical stores, online stores still face the issue of crime under different circumstances, such as malware, fraud, and phishing. This is a new challenge that business owners must be willing to meet when opening an online store, and which could prevent their success if not handled correctly. To combat the risk of online security, you should ensure that you install the right security software for the functions that your business uses. For instance, if you collaborate with clients online, share data via messages, or use online platforms for marketing, you should look into email security, which you can find out more about on Trend Micro’s advice pages, as well as installing general advanced anti-threat protection.
2. IT Issues
If you are deciding to go online, you will soon run into many of the challenges that online businesses face, which include issues with IT. For instance, many businesses find that their website can crash under high volumes of traffic, and you may come up against problems such as bugs. Then, businesses that go online should start to think about the aid that they can receive when these issues occur. If you do not have any members of staff in-house that are technologically adept, you should consider out-sourcing an IT company you can help to monitor and deal with any issues that arise on your website immediately. This will allow your business to continue to operate if these issues occur.
3. Shipping Costs
Unless your physical business performs orders, many online businesses will not have come across the demands of shipping their products to customers previously. When considering how to ship products, you need to consider their fragility, what type of packaging is needed, and how heavy and large the products that you are shipping are going to be. Many companies in the USA opt for tracked shipping, which allows customers to follow their parcel and feel secure in the knowledge that they will receive it. In terms of providing shipping to customers, you should consider whether you are going to offer free shipping or if you are going to use a flat rate for all of your products.
4. Customer Communication
When creating an online store, you also need to understand how you are going to communicate with the customers that you care about. Many businesses choose to do this through the development of their marketing methods, such as establishing a large social media presence where they can update customers about their latest information and ensure that customers have a platform where they can publicly communicate with your company. You can also increase customer communication by installing aspects such as live chats and chatbots into your website to ensure that you can provide and automate stellar customer service, no matter if you can man these communication platforms.
5. Marketing Your Business
Marketing your business online is much different from marketing a physical business. There are many ways that businesses choose to market their company on online platforms, and these include through creating content on a blog, developing a secure SEO strategy which can allow them to stay on the first page of web results, and creating a professional website from which to base operations and update customers on your services and products. Many online businesses also pay for PPC advertising, which allows them to pop up on banners and sidebars on your target audience’s screens.
6. Online Business Laws
However, the laws of online businesses can differ from the laws of physical businesses. Some of the most important laws to consider include the need to consider PCI compliance, which protects against fraud and other types of data theft, as well as other laws focusing on copyright, the amount of tax that you need to pay, and licenses for online businesses.
7. Tracking Growth
You should also consider methods to track growth when starting your business online. This could include studying your web analytics on your website to understand your conversion rates and the traffic to your website, downloading analysis software, or hiring companies that can track your growth and analyze your statistics online on a real-time basis. You can use the same techniques to track the growth of your marketing campaigns and cash flow.
