Why consider starting an Internet business?

It’s one thing to make a decision to set up a business, but now think about the benefits of doing it online. Some people have suggested that the beginning of the Internet is comparable to the dawn of the printing press. In the same way that the printing press made books affordable enough to spread to the masses, the Internet allows anybody in their bedroom to link with billions of consumers around the planet.

With the Internet there’s great need for the financial obligation of renting a shop which thereby lowers the risk. Server hosting costs replace those of the shop rent, and shop fixtures and infrastructure are replaced by an basic electronic shopping cart, with finally adverts in the local press paving the way for Google AdWords ( or the Microsoft equivalent called Bing Ads) with a global audience. As you can see the Internet doesn’t just reduce the cost of establishing your business, it also presents a great opportunity to sell and advertise to everyone everywhere. Whether you take this opportunity or not depends on the types of product or service you’re thinking of offering and your desires.

An Internet business can be open 24 hours a day and 365 days a year to offer your products or services to anyone anywhere. If you’re advertising a downloadable product like an ebook, a music file or video file then the sales side will look after itself. The vision of any hopeful Internet entrepreneur is to get up in the morning, switch on their computer and look at the automatically completed orders and their PayPal balance. The attraction of the Internet for  a business is that, once it’s up and running, it can be completely left to run itself as a competent, low-maintenance, profitable entity. Whether it lives up to that vision is another thing that we’ll now move onto.

The Internet allows you quickly and economically check the current performance of your various product lines as well as the efficiency of your different marketing strategies. Now, imagine you had an idea that there was to sell movie posters. In the past 20 years, your options would boil down to either selling them yourself via a shop on your local high street or finding a potential distributor.

Jump ahead to the modern day and within a few weeks you can quickly have a website up and running with a cheap shopping cart with the money handled by PayPal.

Due to their flexibility Internet businesses can now easily be scaled to suit your needs. For instance, they can be run along with a normal 9 to 5 job or until you want to go full-time. They also require less time than conventional businesses because so much of the work usually undertaken by people is handled by your software.

graphThe major advantage of any online business is that it’s feasible for the smallest company to compete on equal terms with international companies or competitors. Since you don’t have any physical shop, your clients won’t necessarily realize how large (or small) your business is. A well-designed, efficiently running website can, without misleading customers appear just as polished and reliable as Amazon or Apple.

There are several downsides to doing business online. The fact that you can start a business quickly simply means it’s possible rivals can do the same. Whatever sector you choose there will be companies servicing it already. Starting an Internet business means you can go from idea to working business in just a few weeks, therefore you must anticipate others will see the same opportunities and consider how to defend against it.

There are many prospects in both current and future markets to take advantage of the terrible performance of competitors – how about starting there?