Home business with e-commerce:

The trend of running an internet based home business is catching up fast. And if you want your home business to grow in all possible directions, you certainly can not afford to remain untouched by the concept of e-commerce. The nature of home business has changed drastically with the advent of e-commerce. If you are a home business owner who loves to take initiative and who is driven by ambition, then you can use the internet and the ecommerce to foster growth for your business.

The times have changed and so you must change your business strategy too. Maybe you already have a website where you have displayed your products and services so that the people can e-mail you or call you to place an order. But this is a very slow process; also most internet users do not prefer this set up. Its time for you to move on to the next step and start selling online with the aid of e-commerce.

Why to choose e-commerce

If the types of products that you deal in are such that they can be easily shipped or they dont require any physical delivery then you can even think about expanding your market beyond the local market. For this you would need to set up an e-commerce based website. By adopting e-commerce you can expect a lot of repeat business without the customer having to bother about giving you a call once again. Another benefit is that you can even sell some of the lower priced products as well which you would find difficult to sell otherwise in your physical store.

The use of e-commerce is a great way to cut down on your overhead costs and thus increase the profits in your business. So if you have been worried about making extra expenditure on putting up an e-commerce based website, you should put that a worry off your mind for this cost will get compensated within a short span of time.

And you certainly cannot afford to ignore the biggest advantage that your website will get you business even when youre sleeping, because it works on a 24/7 basis.

Moving ahead further let us find out how you can set up an e-commerce based website. Spending thousands and thousands of dollars to set up an e-commerce website is a trend of the past. All that you would need is a few hundred dollars to get going. The number of choices to cut down on your expenses have increased many folds in the past few years, like now you can use a third party payment processor instead of getting your own payment processor made up. The examples of such third party payment processors are stormpay and paypal.

When making a new e-commerce based website, you can choose from hosting companies who have readymade templates with the shopping cart and other added features, that is in the package you will find almost everything that is required to begin with your website.

If you already have a website, then using it for e-commerce can be surprisingly easy. The only thing that you would probably require is getting e-commerce software which of course is not very expensive and at times you may find it free on the internet. But avoid choosing the free software as they have some errors most of the time. Your existing web hosting company may also be able to provide you with suitable software to convert to your existing website into an e-commerce website. When buying the software from outside you must check with your hosting service to find out if it will be compatible with the hosting service.

You may face some problems at first but then it is not a tough subject and can all be mastered within a short time. If you are finding it a bit too technical, try going to the help pages of some of the hosting companies and you will find that within a few hours things would seem much easier. With some hosting companies you would not even required going through the help pages because theyve set it up so wonderfully that you can just manage everything at the press of a button.

When designing an e-commerce website make sure that all your pages seem integrated, they should not look too different from each other in terms of the basic style. The same template of pages should be used throughout the website.

With the website in place, it is time now to put the information about the products and to configure the system with the details about the products like how many units of each product are available in the inventory and the size and color options if applicable.

As for the payment aspect you can choose either to receive payments through a third party payment processor or set up your own merchant account to receive the payments directly. To find out which is a better alternative, you can analyze them in the light of two main factors which are the fees charged in each case and convenience for the customer.

Before putting it on to the server do a few trial checks so as to see that there are no problems or error in the processing of an order. In fact you might want to test it by asking some friend of yours to try and place an order and monitoring through out the kind of difficulties that he faces.

The putting up of an e-commerce website can change the fate of your home based business, provided you are willing to take that extra initiative of setting it up. It involves just a bit of learning and understanding and as far as the costs are concerned, by shopping smartly you can keep your costs to a minimum.