E-commerce for beginners

If you are, or want to be in the business of selling online you should know how to make the Internet work for you. e-Commerce is exciting and can be easily understood by anyone.

In the next few newsletters we will show you in simple terms how the Internet and e-Commerce work. We’ll also show you how you can get involved and avoid pitfalls as a beginner.

An old service in new clothing

E-commerce is nothing new. It’s just a 500-year-old service repackaged. Shopping cart software and e-commerce solutions simply represent the latest way to sell goods and services.

Often, when you try to understand something new — it helps to compare it to something old. Like a shop owner did at a seminar on e-Commerce software.

As I was talking about the Internet — and how to use it to sell your goods and services to customers in the comfort of their homes — he suddenly spoke out. "Hey," he said, "that’s just like 500 years ago!"

He was thinking back to the days when merchants had to pack their goods onto carts pulled by horses or donkeys and traveled to their customers to show off their offerings.

"If I understand this right," the man said, "then the Internet can be my modern day shopping cart — except I won’t have to travel anywhere and customers can buy from me at any time."

He was right, of course.

Only today’s Internet shopping cart software is much more powerful. Every day it presents tens of millions of goods and services to hundreds of millions of customers — anywhere, anytime. A shop owner can be fast asleep while his e-commerce solution is still working and allowing his customers to add goods to their shopping cart.

It helps shop owners provide better services with little effort, increases customer loyalty, helps gain new customers and best of all your online store can do all this at a very low cost!

Having an online store also helps shop owners to survive. Already some industry sectors have been heavily affected by e-commerce, and many businesses who failed to see the signs have been wiped out.

While e-commerce may be an old service in new clothing, it has been accepted so rapidly by so many consumers that a business without an online store today faces being left behind. Far behind!