Electronic Commerce, or E-commerce for short, is buying and selling products or services over the internet.  If you’re thinking about starting an online business, or taking your current business online but don’t know how to get started, I’m here to help you start your E-commerce business.  Whether you already have a store and are looking to add online sales, or you’re starting from scratch, together we’re going to go step by step to create your own online business.   With a projected $204 billion in retail sales online for 2009, it’s a great time to start selling online.  It’s profitable, it’s fun, and nothing beats telling people you own your own business.

There are five major stages that we’re going to cover in detail to set up your online business.  If you’re already selling things though a physical store, known in the E-commerce world as a B&M, or Bricks and Mortar, you already have some of these areas taken care of.  The five stages are The Plan, The Setup, The Website, The Sale, and The Backend.

In The Plan, we will discuss all the pre-starting details, including what you’d like to sell and how to decide.  We also talk about coming up with a plan to get people buying from you.  In this stage you’ll decide what your company will be called, considerations you should make when deciding, and whether you should incorporate.  The last part of this stage is your actual store plan.  You’ll also decide whether you will take orders by phone as well as from online, your sales and return policies, methods of payment, whether to sell international, etc….

In the next stage, The Setup, we’ll go into the actual preparation of your new business.  We’ll discuss the many parts needed for an online business, including a domain name and hosting, whether you will stock your merchandise and how, bank and merchant accounts, product pricing, advertising and more.

The third stage is The Website.  This is internet equivalent of leasing and setting up a store.  We go over the necessary parts of the website, getting people to go to the website, the shopping cart, marketing online, and the all important conversion.

If you did the first three stages right, and your website is online and active, you’ll hopefully be spending a lot of time in the fourth stage, The Sale. This is the stage that deals with the actual selling of your merchandise and starts before the customer ever buys a thing.  This is where you need to have your business structure.  We’ll discuss customer service in pre-sales, order problems, and customer support.  We’ll talk about internet fraud, how to recognize it and how to prevent it.  We’ll also work out how to deal with payments, returns and chargebacks. 

In the fifth and final stage of setting up your E-Commerce business, we’ll cover The Backend.  This is an often overlooked aspect of any new business and probably causes the most problems if not worked out in the beginning.  In this stage we’ll discuss what needs to be done behind the scenes to make sure your business moves forward.  We’ll figure out how to pack and ship merchandise and with whom.  We’ll talk about accounting and inventory.  We’ll figure out what supplies you’ll need, and what to do with the money you make during The Sale.

Once you’ve gone through all five stages of setting up your business, you’re ready to start selling, so let’s get started!