Selling online is a powerful way to use the Internet to support your business. Most of the barriers to entry are purely commercial and relate directly to how effective your business is at managing fulfilment and regulatory requirements.  Before you engage in online commerce you should consider the following points.

• Is your market global or local? There is no value in building a shop targetting customers in a geographic region without having performed some form of risk analysis.
• What benefit is it to the consumer to purchase from your business via the web ? Are you offering a unique product that they can't get elsewhere or are you offering some form of discount? Is it simply more convenient for your customers to order online ?
• An online shop operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Have you considered what resources you will need to support this visibility ? Be prepared for a deluge of orders on a Monday morning !
• If your goods are bulky or do they require special handling, have you made appropriate arrangements with freight forwarders and factored these costs into your calculations ?
• All sales within the European Union are liable to VAT (Value added tax) - keep this in mind when choosing a solution, it's essential that your shopping basket can support dynamic calculation of taxes where applicable.
• There are legal implications to selling online, be aware of consumer protection regulations that apply in the countries to which you are selling.

In our experience, it is wise to take careful steps towards building an online shop, technically there's very little to prevent you developing a highly profitable online sales outlet, however the devil (as always) is in the detail.

Breakages, fraud, deliveries that never arrive, stock control, payment issues and other risks must all be factored into how fast you develop your shop. It takes time to build up the required volume of traffic that can provide a steady stream of revenue; to this end you may not need to jump straight into online payment services as these have a small but significant cost when you are starting out.

We have assisted clients from all industry sectors in preparing for a commerce enabled web site, in many cases the business analysis resulted in clients toning down their ambitions, in some cases, companies found that they had not fully thought through the logistics of handling orders via the web.

Our commerce clients have all been very successful online and are continuously tuning their strategy to improve and enhance their commerce capabilities. Talk to us today about your requirements.