eBusiness: On-line marketing & sales

You can do this by:

• Publicising your web-site address (your domain name) as widely as possible – on your letterheads, compliment slips, brochures, vans, etc
• Achieving high positions in search engine results
• “Viral” marketing – the on-line equivalent of “word-of-mouth” and the most effective (and cheapest) form of on-line marketing
• Advertising on-line on other web-sites – many sites accept advertising, though the value of online advertising is increasingly in question.

On-line sales can be made from a “catalogue” site, where you list or display your products and invite interested purchasers to order products by conventional means: letter, telephone, fax or email. You then handle the sale in your normal way.

The next step is to add “shopping cart” software that tracks users’ purchases until they are ready to complete the transaction. This software is usually bundled with on-line credit card processing (including a merchant Internet account with a bank) as an “online shop”. Typically, such software costs from £500 for simple systems capable of displaying perhaps 10 or 20 products. More sophisticated systems, with greater capabilities and more features, cost more, though prices are falling.

Adding a shopping cart and online credit card processing gives you an “e-commerce” site.

Other eBusiness topics:

• Getting started
• Why have a web-site?
• Setting up a web-site
• On-line marketing & sales
• Security
• Legislation
• Domain names
• Other issues.