Online Sales (E-commerce) has a huge number of benefits mainly being that you are opening your shop/ services up to the whole world, and with a well designed system can be easy to manage and maintain. One of the main downfalls is the set up cost an e-commerce system can cost a considerable amount of money, and once it is set up usually you must pay for maintenance costs in case issues arise with the system later down the line.
Another cost that people often over look is actually marketing your online store, if no one knows that your stores exist it will be redundant. Then you have to take on the cost of paying an internet marketing expert who will help your store get online visibility.
Before opening your online store why not test the market place by using companies such as Amazon or even eBay? These are great places to see if there is a demand for your products with out taking on heavy overheads. eBay the online market place is not the perfect solution for this problem, eBay is losing its good reputation due to the amount of people using E bay for the wrong reasons. This is where Amazon steps in, in my opinion Amazon is the best online store available on the Internet.
Amazon is safe secure and reliable and also has numerous offers available on a wide range of goods. Amazon has a brilliant feature, it allows you to open a dedicated shop within Amazon, where you can style the pages and sell all of your goods. Using Amazons online shop has a number of benefits mainly being that you can build your online store yourself and will benefit from a secure system.
You can then add links to your own web site straight into your Amazon shop allowing customers to buy your products. You will also receive the promotion for your goods ! The only real downfall will be that Amazon takes a small cut of your profit, but considered this against the money you could spend on an online store it is a small fee.
If your store then becomes a success then considered opening your own online store, maybe with the profits you made from Amazon. Good luck !
