Wednesday, December 14, 2011

New to Online Business?

Hi this is an interesting article if you are a new business starting online, or adding online business to your traditional business.


Lots of businesses are now operating on-line. They might be start ups who only trade on-line or established retailers and service providers who have been undercut on price due to the lower overheads of many on-line operations.


However, just because operating costs of an on-line business may be cheaper doesn’t guarantee success and the start up costs to obtain a properly functioning website can be high.

If you are not a "Harvey Norman” with the money to employ large law firms, IT consultants, accountants and marketers, how do you safely and effectively start your on-line presence and make a profit?




These are the things you need to consider:



Your business structure: sole trader, company or trust, this will depend upon your aims for the business;
A business plan which is fully budgeted so you can afford the full set up costs and can run your business until it makes a profit. See if you can conduct a trial first to gauge interest in your product or services by using another on-line auction or retail portal;
A marketing strategy which looks at social media as well as more conventional forms of advertising and publicity. Web marketers are increasingly saying that careful use of Twitter for example is more powerful and quicker than relying solely on attempts to generate a better ranking on popular web engines by the use of seo services;
Terms and Conditions which protect you and ensure you get paid, for example you might require payment before shipment of goods. These should also limit your liability as much as possible in the new Australian Consumer Law environment. You may also need to look at whether or not you need to register a personal property security interest under the new Personal Property Securities Register if you cannot obtain full payment up front;
A Privacy Statement and processes to ensure you comply with privacy and anti-spam laws. If you collect personal information from consumers you need to be aware of the rules regarding the use of this information and the on sale of such information to others or sending this information overseas;
A Disclaimer to protect yourself from liability particularly if your site contains links to other sites or information not produced by you;
Intellectual Property licences; if you intend to use intellectual property belonging to someone else you must have you obtained permission to do so;
A contract with your IT consultant or web designer to ensure you own and control your website and that you get what you pay for. It is quite common experience for start up businesses that the website provider cannot deliver them with a properly functioning product on time and on budget;

Make sure you obtain the business names, domain names and apply for trade mark protection of your product and/or trading name. A common problem for start up businesses is not checking to see if your product or trading name is similar to another business. This can be a very expensive mistake as you can wind up having to rename and rebrand your business or product or possibly having to defend expensive Federal Court proceedings.


Getting good advice at the beginning is a key factor to a successful on-line launch so it can indeed be a whole new ball game.

I am interested in your comments about this article. Please respond if you have something that you think our readers can benefit from.

Regards Steve Davenport

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