Business Marketing and Technology

Besides a website being a necessity for PR, marketing, credibility and communications, it can also bring in revenue and drive sales. If your business sells a product (or many products), or a service that can be packaged as a product, consider having a storefront on your website. This will allow you to take orders 24/7 from anywhere in the world (you can always limit sales to “domestic” or “local,” but the capability for global sales is there). Additionally, there are options to seamlessly accept orders on your own website, or inexpensively process them on a third party site.

In order to make a sale, companies used to have to sendout an expensive catalog, personally contact potential clients, or wholesale their product to a retailer if they did not have their own store.  Today, it is possible to make a sale without a per-customer cost (time or money) or applying a huge wholesale discount.  The miracle of the Internet allows, with a very prudent investment, the capability to have extremely low overhead while reaching more potential customers and not being limited by time or space.

There are a few ways to set up this very inexpensive, yet hardworking employee for your business. 

Without even having a website, you can sell your wares on eBay, Craigslist, or any other community that facilitates transactions.  Your credibility is only as good as your ad or product description, but these can be a great additon to your own full-functioning e-commerce website.

First, you need a website, even a basic one will do, but the level of professionalism should be high.  You can sign up with PayPal or Google Checkout, and create a button for each item you sell.  Not a big deal if you only have a few products, but anything over 20 can get out of hand.  Payments are processed on their website (you don’t even have to have a secure site), they deduct their processing fee (2-3%), and the rest can be deposited to you bank account.  Simple, but with very limited functionality, and product management is not optimal.

A more efficient way to make web sales is by having a shopping cart integrated into your website.  Here, your customers don’t have to leave your site to complete their purchase, and you can have much more control over the whole process.  Many integrated shopping carts will have the capability to add shipping calculators, discount coupons, related products, and many more tools to help you sell even more.  These carts will also help you manage your inventory in a database, store your photos, descriptions/details, and display each product in a similar, organized fashion. 

Talk to a qualified web designer today to get rolling on your new best employee.

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Tony Kau is co-founder of Portland web design and Internet marketing company Vanivo.  For service inquiries, you can contact him directly at tony -at- vanivo.com.

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