Setting Up an Online Business

When you only have a small amount of capital to start yourself in business on, setting up an online business can be your only option. I do with retail, online retail can be a great business opportunity if you only have a little time and a little capital. If you are a single-parent, if you need to stay home to take care of a small child or if you have a creative talent and you'd like to sell the thing that you make, an online business can be a great way to achieve what you need done.


The first question you ask yourself of course is, what it costs setting up an online business and retail for the first time.

There are three things you will need to get started. You need a great product, you'll need a spectacular website, and you will need marketing.

Of course, the product comes first. If yours is a retail-only business - where you don't make the thing that you sell - you don't need that much in capital. You only need enough to set up a drop-ship supply chain with whoever makes the things that you sell.

The next in line of course is a high-quality website. Doing business online can be spectacularly empowering. It is just once you take it online, there's nothing that the big businesses that are your competition can do to their website that you can't - it's a great way to get on an equal footing with everyone else in the competition.

Basically setting up a great retail business website should take about $5000. But that's the starting point. Depending on how many products you sell, you may need something bigger. If you only sell a handful products, something around this figure should do very well.

Most of this figure is accounted for mainly by what a web designer charges every hour. It won't really cost you much to get web hosting or to buy a good domain name.
And oh, not to forget the shopping cart. But your web designer will probably have all of this worked into the plan he shows you.

And finally, you need to get the word out. You'll need marketing. The first time you go into business for yourself, what you really really need to do, is a bit of market research. It wouldn't be a bad idea either to have it done before you actually spend a dime on your business. You can't ever take the customer for granted with limited quality, choice and pricing.