Why business through the Internet? The answer to this
question is very simple. It is estimated that 10 million
people in Poland use the Internet. Therefore, it is an
enormous market of potential clients with almost infinite
absorptive power.
With a well-positioned website or shop, our web page on the
Internet can be visited for instance by 300 000 people a
month. Such a situation in a traditional shop is almost
impossible. Assuming pessimistically that one (person) in
300 makes a purchase at our Internet shop, it gives us a
thousand clients a month. It is enough to earn on each of
those 1000 people 10 zlotys and our monthly revenue amounts
to 10 000 zlotys. It is the opportunity of reaching a broad
range of clients that makes business through the Internet
so profitable. We also need to remember that our shop can
sell goods to people from around the world, which gives us
a market of a billion potential customers.
The most important advantages of running a business in the
Internet are:
1. no premise-related costs
2. an enormous market of potential clients
3. the opportunity of selling goods to foreign customers
4. flexible working hours when running an Internet shop
5. limiting the number of employees, which means lower
costs of the company's activity
6. low open costs
Obviously, an Internet company has it's drawbacks and
limitations. The most important of these include:
1. the long process of building customers' trust
2. heavy competition
3. limitations to selling certain types of goods and
services due to their peculiarity (you cannot for instance
sell construction services)
4. shipment-related costs.
When founding a company on the Internet, act exactly as
when founding a traditional company. All stages of setting
up a business are described in the article: "Establishing a
company". However, it is the idea for a business that is
crucial as there are hundreds or even thousands of shops on
the Internet selling everything from antiques to lingerie
and finding a market niche is very difficult. Therefore,
before we decide upon opening a new shop with car parts, it
is worth checking out our future competition. Having an
idea for a business and a source of cheap goods that we
want to sell, we begin building our Internet shop. Buying a
readymade script with a design (graphic) is obviously the
easiest solution. Prices of such shops vary from a dozen or
so to a few hundred zlotys. It is enough to browse offers
on allegro and choose the most suitable. Vendors often
offer their help in installing the software required to run
a shop so it is worth using their help if we are
inexperienced. Another issue to take into consideration
after buying a shop with graphics is a domain and a server.
If you want to run an Internet shop, a free server will
definitely not be enough. However, prices of hosting have
plummeted recently and a good server can be bought for 100
zlotys annually (we advise superhost-the banner below).
Buying a domain is also vital since our shop should have an
Internet address that is simple and easy to remember.
Nobody will enter a shop with an address:
www.sklep-motoryzacyjny24.regionalnie.net for nobody will
remember its address. Thus, we should bear in mind to give
our shop a user-friendly address with a domain .pl or .com,
for instance: twojsklep.pl. Having a server, a domain and a
script all that we need to do is software installation and
tests. As it has been already mentioned, if we are
inexperienced it is worth using the help of script authors
or the company which we bought the server from. Most
Internet shops are easy to run so the period of testing and
learning how to put goods to sale should not take longer
than a week. Let us bear in mind, however, that the script
and the look of the page as well as placing it on a server
are the easiest steps of building an Internet shop.
Promotion and advertising are far more complicated. What is
the use of a great look, clarity and functionality along
with a range of products at good prices if nobody knows
about it? For a shop to function well it must be visited by
a large number of people which means that it should be well
positioned in the search engines. If we sell lingerie and
our shop is on the 1234 result page for the word
"lingerie", nobody will browse through such a number of
pages. We usually check the first few addresses from top 30
results.
Basic methods of increasing the number of visits on our
page include:
1. Adding the page to popular search engines
2. Adding the page to thematic catalogues
3. Positioning by optimizing the page's code in order to
make it position higher in search results
4. Exchanging links with other thematically similar pages
(let's not fear the competition)
5. Buying advertisements (box, banner, link, button, etc.)
6. Adding a "tell a friend" option
7. Creating an email list of potential clients and users of
our webpage
8. Creating buttons that allow adding the page to
favourites or setting it as a home page
9. Using forums, competitions and other advertising and
marketing activities
10. Encouraging the visitors to jointly create your webpage
11. Remembering to frequently update the content of the
page (do not fear experimenting)
12. Making sure the navigation is simple and intuitive:
comprehensible and simple descriptions of a page's sections
- uniform system of references, identical on all pages -
each reference and the content clearly visible - it is best
if the page does not differ from the general convention on
the Internet
13. Constructing a system of searching and references to
similar topics
14. Testing different layouts and design of the webpage
15. Making sure the size and type of font are appropriate
16. Building a webpage friendly to blind people and people
with poor vision
17. Limiting the size of subpages to minimum
18. Increasing the speed and stability of the page
19. Making sure that the operation of the page is compliant
with company's/page's internal policy.
Positioning is an art that cannot be learned in a few days.
If we do not have sufficient abilities we should use the
services of companies specializing in positioning. Prices
of such services vary from a dozen or so to a few hundred.
We should bear in mind, however, that the effects of
positioning and thus the increased number of visitors in
our shop can sometimes be observed only after several
months. For instance, the most popular search engine -
Google - indexes pages every quarter. Therefore, our
position in Google's results would change after 3 months
from positioning. More on positioning in the section:
methods, tools and techniques. Before the positioning of
our webpage shows its effects, the main source of visits to
our shop will be generated by advertisements. Obviously,
advertisements placed on such search engines as wp.pl or
onet.pl are the most expensive. There are companies,
however, which offer advertisements on their pages at
competitive prices. A large offer of advertisements can be
found on Internet auctions such as allegro or e-bay. When
positioning our page we can reduce the costs of advertising
without losing clients as they would find us via search
engines. Building trust in our shop is also a crucial
issue. A person visiting our shop does not know whether we
are reliable, whether we send the products on time and
whether they are identical to the offered ones. That is why
we should take necessary steps in order to increase our
credibility. To do so, it is worth asking our clients to
put comments on our webpage after a transaction. A forum
about our shop can also be opened. We would answer our
clients' questions there and they would comment on our shop
and the goods it offers. New people visiting our Internet
shop would know the opinions of the clients who have
already made purchases in it and they would trust us more
easily.
To sum up, in order to set up an Internet shop you should
take the following steps:
1. Have an idea for a shop
2. Internet market analysis
3. Find a supplier
4. Buy a script, graphics, a server and a domain
5. Install and test the shop's functionality
6. Establish a company (formalities)
7. Advertise on web pages
8. Positioning the shop
9. Build credibility and the shop's image.
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This article was translated by mLingua Worldwide
Translations, Ltd. mLingua provides professional language
translations in all major Western and Asian languages,
software localization and web site translation services.
Please visit http://mlingua.pl
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