Starting, Surging, Stuttering, or Stopping?

The above are about the only things a business can do. I’d like to look at Satrting and Stopping this week.

Want an elegant, professional, up-market shop on the Internet? Sounds complex, and fraught with pain and risk, doesn’t it? That was indeed the case until recently.

It doesn’t matter if you have an offline shop and want to sell those same goods through the Net, or whether you just have an idea that you want to test drive.

(Much like the idea Jeff Bezos had about selling books on the Internet, before being told to sod off by all the big booksellers back in the nineties.)

Most of us are familiar with the offline process:

• Find a good place for a store, with lots of traffic;
• Rent the premises, offering deposits and sureties;
• Shopfit the premises to be attractive and inspiring;
• Install some computers and POS (Point of Sale) equipment;
• Arrange a credit card machine;
• Hire some staff to help out;
• Get the stock delivered, unpacked and onto display;
• Install some security to prevent folk from walking off with the stock;
• Insure the stock and premises against catastrophe;
• And open the doors and hope…

The above process costs money: Lots of money. And time: Lots of time. And involves risk – stretching three or five years into the future. And if it fails, those sureties are going to eat your personal savings, home, insurance policies, car, and pet hamster.

Contrast this with the new, improved Internet approach, which you can use if you already have an offline business, or if you want to try something new:

• Register a domain (Website name like best-sa-wors.com) and reserve a webhosting account. Reserving the domain costs $15-00 (about R119) for the year. And the hosting costs are downright reasonable at $4-95/month, which is about R39/month, which is the cheapest rental you will ever face! Takes 15 minutes to do, needs no rocket science, and your new (empty) Internet shop will be yours within 24 hours. I use a US crowd called Hostgator for this, and they’re fast and effective. They’re here.
• Ask the friendly guys at Interspire to shopfit your new Internet shop. They will install some wonderful software overnight (because they’re based in Australia), set it up so folk can walk through the aisles without tripping over bits (so to speak), and it will be ready for you to start filling the shelves within 24 hours. And the cost? Well, a small shop will cost you $295-00 (R2300) but you will soon grow into the big shop at $995-00 (R7761) once the sales start to flow. They will do all the work to set it up for you for just $49-00 (R382). I have been using Interspire stuff for about 5 years, and it is better than excellent because it doesn’t need a astrophysicist to drive it. If you haven’t yet followed the Interspire link, go here.

This means that within 48 hours you will be ready to start trading. No deposits or sureties. No staff needed. No POS stuff needed. And you can arrange online credit card facilities in SA, or overseas (or both). You can even accept cheques, money orders, bank transfers, and any currency from Australian Dollars via Vietnamese Dong to Zambian Kwacha. (Or all of them if you wish.) I have deliberately excluded the infamous Zimbabwean Bollard, so called because you need 7 kilograms of them to buy 500 grams of bread if you can find either.

All of this means that you can be up and running by the end of this week, with a really professional online sales Web site, without all the risks. Now you need some stock. Or do you?

In the UK many of the online stores I frequent do not hold any stock at all. When I place my order they simply email that order to the manufacturer or distributor who then ships it to me. (Did I mention that your new online store will calculate the shipping and postage automatically?) This means that you don’t have to unpack the stock, store it, or worry about some fellow with errant morals wandering off with it.

In fact, the only real work you need to do to set up a store that the rest of the world can see is to input some information about each product – enough for me to make a decision and whip out some plastic or a cheque.

The Bible has a blessing about making money while you’re catching zzz’s. Your new Internet shop not only does that, but it also makes money while Eskom sleeps.

Since the next two weeks are not going to be great trading weeks, with the workers determined to take a break, why not invest some time into this little project?

And that is everything you need, and need to know, to set up your own shop on the Internet, selling anything you want to anybody, anywhere. It simply doesn’t get easier than that, no matter what your current day job is.