|
Let's say you have a small brick-and-mortar store in Coshocton, Ohio...and that you sell candles. You do enough business serving the local community and its environs to support yourself, and maybe a little more...because you make or stock a good product, and because you're good with people. But you've heard about people making money on the internet, and you wonder how such an opportunity would apply to you.
So let's look a bit beyond the "brochure-style" site...where you actually want your site to be a bit more active than an information-dispensing vehicle. You actually want your site to function as a sales agent.
Here are three ways that you can use a business web site to make money. Any or all of these three options might be appropriate for your particular situation:
1. The first (and most obvious) way is for you to sell your own products online. In the case of candles, they can easily be packed and shipped to customers all over the place very affordably. When it comes to selling products, there are two primary ways to do it:
The old, cumbersome way is simply to put pictures of your products online, along with a product name or code, that allows folks to see something they like...and then they call you (or email you and you call them) to collect their credit card info, which you must then manually input. This can be a real pain. But, still...for businesses who don't plan to sell much online, it might be appropriate.
The newer way to handle transaction is thru a shopping cart, or a faux cart.
- A shopping cart involves a database-driven script which can allow you to directly manage your product pictures, product names, codes and prices..but it provides slots for you to plug in all that info, and then neatly displays it on the site. Better yet, you tie in the shopping cart with your store's merchant account...and the customer enters their credit card info directly and the transaction is handled without any direct involvement from you. All you have to do is package and ship the product...and the money will appear in your bank account soon thereafter.
- A faux cart is the same idea, but somewhat less sophisticated. Paypal and 2Co.com both allow you to have something akin to a full-featured merch account, and they provide you a little code to copy and paste into your pages so that folks can process their payments as with a full shopping cart. But the management and display of products is left up to you. For smaller businesses, this may be a decent option.
|
